Linguistic Relativity

Linguistic relativity doesn't have a great reputation in academia

Nice. Veeky Forums posting is making a comeback

It depends on what you mean by linguistic relativity. In anthropology, the subject is usually discusses in terms of "strong Whorf" or "weak Whorf" after the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and the two represent a spectrum of how much people think language determines thought or cognition. For example, strong Whorf would argue that people are unable to understand concepts not found in their language, while weak Whorf would argue that people would just think about it slightly differently.

In the fields I've been a part of where this has been discussed (mostly jut anthropology, but also psychology a bit), strong Whorf doesn't have a good reputation, but weak Whorf is accepted pretty universally, and also has a fair amount of support in testing/ethnography.

Probably just a little bit

>german meme maps
Into trash

rolling

Could the Latin influence on English be the reason England is so much more successful than other Germanic speaking nations?

That doesn't dictate how we think, look at pride English only has pride and it's usually negative but French has two words for pride one positive one negative, making it easier to talk about positive pride.

I'd say British common law is the main reason for their success, it allows for a great degree of economic and political freedom which allowed for a market place of ideas and capitalism.

Maybe the way that we think shape our languages.

>german
maybe you should put yourself into trash

It certainly influences how we think, but fundamentally we don't think in words but in images and abstractions. Language does most of its influencing by limiting how we can frame our thoughts, not in how we actually think at base.

I was about to post pretty much exactly this. Good post.

The "timeless Hopi" myth is probably the archetypical example of the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis -- the idea that the Hopi language has no tenses, and further no words at all that refer to the concept of 'time', that when speaking in their language they never refer to time in absolute terms but always conceptualize it in terms relative to the speaker (e.g. they have no conception that it could be the 'same time' in two different villages, miles apart, with no contact with each other), and that time is referred to only as a process, never as an object. The idea, which was in vogue for a while and had its time and then was kinda latched onto by some new agey times in the 60s, is that if their language forces them to talk about time in such profoundly different times, they must EXPERIENCE time in a fundamentally different way than us Anglo-Americans. Maybe time doesn't really pass for them, maybe they're just one with it all, ya dig, brother?

THAT form of the hypothesis is pretty much universally shit on these days, and kinda regarded as an embarrassing patch in the history of anthro/linguistics. Which is why when the linguist character in that movie that just came out, Arrival, breathed "the Saphir-Whorf hypothesis ..." like it was this accepted thing in the field I literally laughed in the theater -- most real linguists would be making fake-retching noises.

Anyway, it turns out Whorf was wrong -- the Hopi language does have tenses, they do have words for time, etc. But it wouldn't matter if they didn't. They'd still experience it just like us.

The weak form still has plenty of support. The idea that language influences our thought patterns is pretty hard to dispute. Three examples that there's been actual research on:

cont'd below

This is really minor, but I think it kind of supports this type of concept. Indo-European languages use gender, and based on the type of gender associated with a noun, it's been found that characteristics of that noun will be applied based on the gender. For instances, a person who speaks a language that assigns a masculine gender to "bridge" might describe it as strong, sturdy, etc. While somebody that speaks a language where that noun is feminine, is more likely to attribute feminine aspects to it, such as pretty or beautiful.

The way we think gravitates towards the truth and people across all cultures end up doing the same thing. Where there is no objective truth you end up with superficial differences like which clothing and music is in fashion.

oh thx

pride = positive
hubris = negative

cont'd

3 examples

- Conceptualizing time (more fucking time shit again): In some languages, the past is described in terms suggesting it's in *front* of the speaker, with the future behind them, the opposite of how it is in English. It sorta makes sense, because you can see what's in front of you, and you can see your past, but not your future. Anyway, monolingual speakers in some of those languages -- I think one might've been Aymara? -- tend to gesture behind them when talking about the future. Bilingual speakers of Aymara/Spanish or Aymara/English do not do that.

- There's been a lot of research into color perception: the points on the spectrum where we divide it into separate colors are completely cultural and arbitrary and some languages have basic color words that we don't, the same way we have a red/pink distinction even though pink is just light red. In Russian there's cиный/гyлoбый, blue/light blue, and there's some research suggesting native Russian speakers can actually perceive finer shades of blue than we can, and that speakers of languages that lack a green/blue divide might be similarly affected, etc. There's been more research into this than probably any other aspect of Sapir-Whorf, not because it's so fascinating, but because it's actually testable, unlike some of the other more nebulous claims.

it has not been found. what you said is stupid.

cont'd 3/3

- And obviously speakers of different languages have to be aware of different shit when speaking -- again with Russian, have you ever noticed how Russian speakers tend to say things like "Every morning I will be eating breakfast" (instead of just "I eat breakfast")? Russian grammaticizes whether an action is completed/undertaken with a specific, immediate goal, or whether it's ongoing, a process. English mostly lacks that divide, which Russian learners often struggle with, and not only is that something they constantly have to think about it, they have a hard time getting away from it! It also wouldn't be unreasonable to speculate that languages with a complex honorific system, e.g. Japanese, might tend to be more aware of social status, although how much of that is thought influencing language vs. language influencing thought is hard to say, and that sort of thing is nigh-impossible to test scientifically.

Jesus, sorry for turning Veeky Forums into my blog.

>it has not been found.
Yes it has. That's stuff you'd hear in any intro to psch, anthropology, or linguistics class It's a classic example of this topic.

its not true, you are totally wrong,seriously.

Nice counterargument and sources, there.

You're the one who needs to provide sources, not him.

I can speak from personal experience and say that this
>That's stuff you'd hear in any intro to psch, anthropology, or linguistics class It's a classic example of this topic.
isn't true.

Nor does the fact that YOU may have heard it in your PSYCH or LING 101 course mean it's true. After all, lots of TAs and even some professors still repeat that "the eskimo language has 283,948 mabillion words for snow" myth. Unfortunately, getting a degree in something doesn't keep you from sometimes still talking out of your ass about it.

Personally I haven't heard it, which doesn't mean I'm saying it's wrong, but it does mean you need to cite somebody credible, not just stammer out "b-but everybody knows it!"

No, please continue

Well, that was pretty much it, though I could always give more examples of the weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in action -- areas where language might well influence thought patterns, but doesn't determine them -- although examples like that are pretty thick on the ground. Hell, there's probably dozens on just the Wiki page for linguistic relativity.

Was there anything else you were particularly curious or had questions about?

>All cultures end up doing the same thing
In what regard please?

Must be why hubris goeth before the fall.

And mathematical truths like the Pythagorean theorem were discovered independently in many cultures with different languages.

Yes, obviously. Language is probably the single most definitive aspect of any one human being.

Humans aren't computers, you dolt.

What a solid rebuttal. You totally convinced me otherwise.

Yet it doesn't change neither the meaning and emotion attributed to the words for it. Since humans are no truly objective being, everything will always have a different view depending on habitus, language, idelogy etc.
And no, math the way humans perceive it is not objective either as it can be written differently and solved with different ways.
A tree has a different meaning than a Baum than un arve than un arbollo. V has a different feel than 5
Word changes the

>And mathematical truths like the Pythagorean theorem were discovered independently in many cultures with different languages.
They had tables but only Greece came up with the general form.

Guy who took a few linguistics modules during undergrad here.

Regret not delving deeper into linguistics. What are some good papers on linguistic relativity and the whole Sapir-Whorf area?

>You're the one who needs to provide sources
Not necessarily true. That guy didn't even make an argument, he just said "no, not true, it's stupid." If he wanted to be convincing, he failed, and that kind of response doesn't really call for much to counter it. At least I provided some basis of an argument for rebuttal, not just saying "nuh uh" and acting like a dick when called out for being wrong. If you want sources, here:

Heine - Cultural Psychology
Ottenheimer - The Anthropology of Language
And here are two popular articles specifically talking about the bridge thing.
psychologytoday.com/blog/culture-conscious/201209/masculine-or-feminine-and-why-it-matters
psychologytoday.com/blog/culture-conscious/201209/masculine-or-feminine-and-why-it-matters

Shit, the second one didn't copy right. It's not really a big deal because they both talk about the same thing, and cite the same source (although this one goes into more detail), but here it is:
npr.org/sections/krulwich/2009/04/06/102518565/shakespeare-had-roses-all-wrong

Nobody is a hard Whorfian. It's conceptually incoherent.

just google cognitive linguistics, or psycho linguistics. You'll probably find some cool stuff by Lakoff, Johnson, Rosch.

They're all pretty interested in understanding the underlying metaphors that map our language onto the world. cool stuff.

Cheers m8, I'll give them a look

Thanks for the citations. But -- and I'm not trying to give you a hard time, honestly -- I'm afraid this is an example of why it's not good to make really general statements when you have a relatively superficial knowledge of the issue at hand. Both the articles you linked (don't know about the textbooks) cite Lera Boroditsky. I wasn't familiar with her work (which kinda surprised me, to be honest, UPenn's Language Log has written about her a lot) but I did some quick searching and it certainly looks interesting. But -- and this is important -- her work isn't the last word on the subject, and it's not conclusive.

I can GUARANTEE you that if you took a survey of anthropologists and linguists you'd find plenty who'd express ... healthy skepticism, at least (in fact, in my searching I stumbled across a handful of papers and articles roundly criticizing some of her other studies on linguistic relativity -- not the bridges one, though). They'd want to see her study repeated with different languages, they'd want to know how (if) she controlled for other cultural factors that might be at play. They'd have counterexamples -- I can think of plenty of cases where a word in a given language (Arabic comes to mind) can be semantically masculine but grammatically feminine, for example. Actually, I'm pretty certain I've read several papers that specifically listed cases where speakers' perceptions of objects didn't seem to be at all influenced by the nouns' grammatical genders, though it'd take some time to find them again.

That's not to say that you/Boroditsky are *wrong.* Not at all! Just that it's a controversial issue, not a settled one. And any fair summary will mention that. If your profs, or the textbooks you mentioned, made it sound like the bridges&keys study, or any other study, was pretty much the end of the story, then they were negligent.

>armenian, kurd and ossetian group
They used to think kurd and ossetian aren't iranian?

At this point, you're just talking about the limitation of social science in general, or really any field studying an aspect of human culture. No experiment is ever going to be totally conclusive, and only very few things about people will ever be known a definite extent. This is something that is tacitly acknowledged in anthropology, and it is the reason why there are so many theoretical models for interpretation. Hell, I'm an archaeologist (and just to get it out of the way, no I'm nowhere near an expert on any of this stuff, and no, I don't even care about it much, I was just correcting someone), and that's a field where narratives are entirely constructed; no one is ever going to know if those narratives are actually right, and they're never going to be settled. This doesn't mean that conclusions drawn in these fields are useless, it just means things are always in debate, to an extent.

And as far as I can tell, weak Wharf is pretty much accepted. Most studies I've read that bring up topic that even mildly relate to linguistic relativism have all seemed to operate under the impression (or have come to the conclusion) that it has at least some merit. But that's just been my impression. If you don't think that's the case, feel free to consider me mistaken.

Same here and it oftentimes pisses me off since I'll have the English word ready earlier than the (in my case) Dutch word. However I think it's mostly because I have become more used to using English during my academic life and my work life and I only know certain jargon in English.

So in that case I think it does OP.

>muh feels

I don't really agree that we're running up against the limitations of the social sciences, here. This is one area -- there's several in linguistics, comparative/historical linguistics being another -- where things often *are* pretty testable, and can be established with reasonable confidence, albeit not with the same kind of certainty hard sciencey types get to boast about. I just don't think Boroditsky etc has done so in this one specific instance.

I agree that the weak S-W hypothesis is on pretty firm footing (of course people will continue to quibble about the specifics for decades or centuries, just like we've been doing in this thread) and my personal opinion is that a lot of the established linguists who reject even the weak form are overreacting out of embarrassment -- how fashionable the hypothesis became, and how uncritically it was accepted, is kind of a sore subject for some people.

But all that's getting kinda boring compared to what I really want to ask about now, which is: where've you done fieldwork? Shove bum, grad student? It's obviously fine if you don't want to share any personal deets, it's just rare for me to get to talk about archaeology on here.

shovel, not shove