

Does Your Language Shape How You Think? - GiraffeNecktie
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?_r=1

======
quant18
I get quite suspicious when a linguist claims that there's some language where
you can't possibly give directions by reference to your body orientation.
What's more likely is that giving directions that way is stigmatised very
strongly, so that the linguist never hears anyone do it, and if he
accidentally did it himself, it would confuse his interlocutor.

To give an analogy: if a linguist from Mars gathered a corpus of business
English conversation, he'd notice that men refer to something 36 inches off
the ground as "desk height" rather than "penis height", and call a sphere an
inch or so in diameter "ping pong ball size" rather than "testicle size".
Similarly a small discus is "penny sized" (adjusting for your local currency)
rather than "anus sized", a small stone is "fist-sized" rather than "ballsack-
sized", etc. Is this because in English it's linguistically impossible to make
comparisons to your genital or excretory organs? No, it's because it's
socially unacceptable at work; someone may complain to HR and get you fired if
you make that comparison.

Similarly, the reason the egocentric direction system is so dominant in
Western (and Chinese, Japanese, etc.) culture is because of habit and custom
--- urban civilians don't usually see sunrise or sunset from inside the office
buildings and malls in which they're most likely to give these kinds of
directions, so they never get instinctively oriented and the habit of giving
directions by compass points never takes off. It has nothing to do with
linguistics.

And in the right situation, giving east-west-north-south style directions
actually can take hold (which is helpful when you've got two sets of elevators
and telling someone to "turn left" after getting off will send them walking in
a fairly random direction). At certain times in my life, all my colleagues
knew their north from their south. Were we all members of a sensitive
indigenous tribe with a deep connection to nature due to our special mother
tongue? No, we were stock traders; we knew which way was east in the building
because our asses were in our seats before dawn and we watched the sun rise
through the same window every day and set through the opposite one. Put us in
a different building (e.g. due to switching jobs) and we'd be confused for a
few days, just like the Bali kid who tried to get dance lessons from a teacher
in another village.

~~~
felxh
Your reasoning doesn't work if the language in question really doesn't have a
word for 'left' or 'right'. Whether this is the case because they never though
of it or because it was strongly stigmatized in the past and as a result these
words came out of use and eventually were forgotten, the result is the same:
Present day speakers truly have no possible way to say 'left' or 'right'
without making up new words or describing it in some way.

~~~
ithkuil
I was always intrigued by the fact that some languages (especially ancient
ones) appear to miss the word for "yes" and "no".

I've heard that gaelic and latin for example don't have a real word for "yes",
but instead the answer repeated the affirmative form of the verb or similar.

Many argue that latin did indeed have the word for yes, namely "ita", but all
the dictionaries I looked at translate it as "so; thus; indeed; ..."

Other languages like japanese rely much on repetition of the verb but do have
words for yes and no (hai to iie).

I wonder if it really makes a difference to think in a language which doesn't
have a word for yes and no (for whatever reasons is not present in the
language, historical stigma etc).

I see how it can change your way to discuss with people: "don't be tricky!
answer simply, ehm uhm" but I feel this doesn't count as a major mind shaping
issue.

Don't get me wrong, I was intrigued as anyone with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
but I'm aware that sometimes some intriguing memes get more resonance than
they deserve.

~~~
RyanMcGreal
>I've heard that gaelic and latin for example don't have a real word for
"yes", but instead the answer repeated the affirmative form of the verb or
similar.

Then they have a way to express affirmation.

~~~
ithkuil
Yes, the fact that you don't have a specific word for a concept doesn't mean
that you don't have a concept

The trick is probably that some concepts are activated when our language
center parses more than one word; we don't think about them as separate words.
There are plenty of examples in the vocabularies of various languages, one of
my favorites is the word 'alarm':

I asked a lot of people in the Italy if they recognize what the word "allarme"
comes from. Surprisingly only few recognized the exhortation "all'armi!" (to
the weapons!) (<http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=alarm>). Sometimes
this effect creates a new word, but sometimes a concept remains indirectly
expressed, while the speaker unconsciously extracts the high level meaning of
it.

However, I noticed that most of the amateur discussions about linguistics
scratch only the surface because mostly only nouns are touched.

For example when I was younger and still living in Croatia. A relative of mine
was Macedonian and told me that they have a verb mood that is used when you
state something which you are sure that is true, vs only being told that is
true.

I'm not really sure what is that, after a bit of research I think it's
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inferential_mood>.

"The inferential mood (abbreviated infer or infr) is used to report a
nonwitnessed event without confirming it"

Does this shape the way you think?

After all, even English speakers are able to express the fact that they didn't
witness an event; I guess they do, didn't check :-)

~~~
RyanMcGreal
Interesting etymology of alarm - reminds me of the English "Mayday!" from the
French "M'Aider!" (Help me!)

------
RiderOfGiraffes
There's been a lot written recently about language and its interaction with
thinking processes. Here are a few related references here on HN:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1595991>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1576971>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1556443>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1551052>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1543871>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1505365>

~~~
shawndumas
And <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1583995> too

~~~
RiderOfGiraffes
Thank you - I missed that one (obviously).

------
georgecmu
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a hundred years old.

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity>

 _Among Whorf's well known examples of linguistic relativity are examples of
instances where an indigenous language has several terms for a concept that is
only described with one word in English and other European languages (Whorf
used the acronym SAE "Standard Average European" to allude to the rather
similar grammatical structures of the well-studied European languages in
contrast to the greater diversity of the less-studied languages). One of
Whorf's examples of this was the supposedly many words for 'snow' in the Inuit
language, which has later been shown to be a misrepresentation[13] but also
for example how the Hopi language describes water with two different words for
drinking water in a container versus a natural body of water. These examples
of polysemy served the double purpose of showing that indigenous languages
sometimes made more fine grained semantic distinctions than European languages
and that direct translation between two languages, even of seemingly basic
concepts like snow or water, is not always possible.

Another example in which Whorf attempted to show that language use affects
behavior came from his experience in his day job as a chemical engineer
working for an insurance company as a fire inspector[13]. On inspecting a
chemical plant he once observed that the plant had two storage rooms for
gasoline barrels, one for the full barrels and one for the empty ones. He
further noticed that while no employees smoked cigarettes in the room for full
barrels no-one minded smoking in the room with empty barrels, although this
was potentially much more dangerous due to the highly flammable vapors that
still existed in the barrels. He concluded that the use of the word 'empty' in
connection to the barrels had led the workers to unconsciously regarding them
as harmless, although consciously they were probably aware of the risk of
explosion from the vapors. This example was later criticized by Lenneberg[14]
as not actually demonstrating the causality between the use of the word empty
and the action of smoking, but instead being an example of circular reasoning.
Steven Pinker in The Language Instinct ridiculed this example, claiming that
this was a failing of human sight rather than language.

Whorf's most elaborate argument for the existence of linguistic relativity
regarded what he believed to be a fundamental difference in the understanding
of time as a conceptual category among the Hopi.[15] He argued that in
contrast to English and other SAE languages, the Hopi language does not treat
the flow of time as a sequence of distinct, countable instances, like "three
days" or "five years" but rather as a single process and consequentially it
does not have nouns referring to units of time. He proposed that this view of
time was fundamental in all aspects of Hopi culture and explained certain Hopi
behavioral patterns._

~~~
ithkuil
interesting critiques:

<http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Students/njp0001.html>
<http://www.enformy.com/dma-Chap7.htm>

and probably tons of other references

nice book: The language instinct by Steven Pinker

------
RiderOfGiraffes
Single Page:

[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all)

------
timwiseman
This was one of the main topics of Orwell's 1984 as well as some of his
essays.

If you restrict a language, you make it harder to think about certain topics.
Making it impossible is _far_ too strong a statement. Even very rudamentary
languages can express virtually any concept. But it can certainly make it
harder to think about those concepts, especially highly nuanced ones, with
precise words fitted for it.

Mathematical history provides a good example of this. There is nothing you can
express with Hindu-Arabic numerals that you cannot express with Roman
numerals. Yet, the Hindu-Arabic numerals we vastly easier to work with and
think about, and their importation into Europe facilitated mathematical
development there.

~~~
Someone
Your argument is flawed, but the example is fine. Roman numerals are
restricted in comparison with Arabic ones. AFAIK, there is no way to write
"zero" or negative numbers in Roman numerals. Zero, in particular, was a major
innovation.

~~~
ithkuil
Roman numerals are now dead, nobody would be taken seriously if he extended
the roman numeral system in order to prove that the roman numerals could have
a zero (or negatives). Right?

But when cultural systems were alive, they routinely changed, adapted,
imported concepts. Sometimes they were replaced, but not simply because they
lacked something that could be added

One could simply add "N" as nulla and invent something for negative numbers or
spell it as a full word.

The key point in the arabic/hindi zero is not the 'zero' value of the symbol,
but the positional feature of the numbering system. The zero just turns out to
be useful to express a lot of numbers in a positional system.

Zero by himself is probably less useful and as a concept can be expressed as a
full word "nulla" if needed.

Indeed I just found out that medieval extension of the roman numeral system
included 'nulla': <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Zero>

If only Romans had to calculate complicated feast dates like Easter, perhaps
they'd found the need to include a zero as the medieval computists did.

(honestly I have no idea of either the Ancient Rome festivities nor exactly
what they used the numbers for, just guessing)

------
lee
I think it does, and this even extends to programming languages!

I've noticed that C++ developers think differently than Lisp developers, and
same with Java and Python developers.

Languages have subtle biases that totally effect the way you look at things.

~~~
nck4222
I don't think that's the complete picture with programming languages. People
already bring biases with them when they start using a programming language.
They're more likely to become an expert in a language that agrees with the way
they already think.

So just because c++ developers think alike, it's not necessarily because the
language influenced them to think that way.

That doesn't really happen with spoken languages. You're born and have to
learn the one (or maybe two) languages your parents speak. So the language
influences you at a much earlier age.

------
fauigerzigerk
Consider:

"Regardless of visibility conditions, regardless of whether they are in thick
forest or on an open plain, whether outside or indoors or even in caves,
whether stationary or moving, they have a spot-on sense of direction. "

and:

"It was impossible to teach the boy anything, because he simply did not
understand any of the instructions. When told to take “three steps east” or
“bend southwest,” he didn’t know what to do. The boy would not have had the
least trouble with these directions in his own village"

and then:

"This habit of constant awareness to the geographic direction is inculcated
almost from infancy: studies have shown that children in such societies start
using geographic directions as early as age 2 and fully master the system by 7
or 8"

That makes me a little skeptical but it's still an interesting article.

------
maw
The bit about specifying the gender of one's neighbor sounds like the work of
somebody who knows just enough to be really wrong.

My French and German are weak, but Spanish has vecino/vecina, and you can
equivocate easily enough by saying that you spent the evening with "una
persona que vive cerca", and I'd be very surprised if you can't do similar in
French or German. ("Une personne qu'habite ne pas loin" in French?)

~~~
mahmud
Arabic: jaari(m)/jaarati(f)

Somali: ninka dariskeenaa (m)/naagta dariskeenaa(f). Literally, "the man who
is our neighbor", "the woman who is our neighbor".

The somali is complicated because "neighbor" is never a singular person,
always plural. The concept of a person living alone is unheard of, and people
are usually suspicious of bachelors.

~~~
maw
But in Arabic and Somali is it possible to talk about people who live nearby
while obscuring whether they're male or female?

~~~
mahmud
Yes, Arabic (juwaar/jiraan) and Somali (daris/jaar/jiraan)

None of those words carry gender because they're plural.

In the singular, Arabic uses the male "jaar" word for both genders. While the
same word is plural in northern Somali, since, as mentioned, it has no
singular word. Arabic also has the dual (jaaraan/jaarataan) our two neighbors
(m/f)

------
siglesias
So apparently the Guugu Yimithirr have a pitch-pefect conception of
cardinality at all times, because they describe space in north-south-east-
west, which probably depends somehow on a periodic synchronization with the
position of the sun.

Would be curious to see how they'd thrive in Alaska.

------
aggelosmp
What about development languages?

~~~
siglesias
a fascinating thought: worth looking into.

------
instakill
Not sure if the article mentions the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis but I completely
agree with it and as a polyglot can attest to this theory.

------
shawndumas
so what happens if one of your most used languages is a programming language?

------
c00p3r
Cursing is a good example. Some low level subcultures are using high amount of
sex/genital related cursing and word substitutes. (Russian underclass is the
most famous example) while other cultures (say, Indian) aren't.

Of course, language usage shapes what you thing and by which chains of
associations your mind wanders along.

If you're able to switch your mind's language for at least several minutes
(naming and calling things on your second language) you will have a different
projection of the same reality and your behavior will also be changed.

