To what extent is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis correct?

To what extent is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis correct?
How well-regarded is it in linguistics/philosphy?
Surely there is some merit to it as some languages have gender-nouns, such a way of speaking must affect how one perceives the world, right?

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psychologytoday.com/blog/culture-conscious/201209/masculine-or-feminine-and-why-it-matters
pdfs.semanticscholar.org/240b/33a21fd14879882c0713d474f413c1284275.pdf
twitter.com/SFWRedditImages

it's pretty much been btfo since the mid 20th century when it was discovered that all language is underlyingly the same

Some sauce please.

>Surely there is some merit to it as some languages have gender-nouns, such a way of speaking must affect how one perceives the world, right?

Why would it? Gendered nouns are purely grammatical and serve no other function.

language does not influence on how people think

Since nobody here is providing any references or sources whatsoever, I'll be casting my lot with "the SW hypothesis is obviously right to some extent".

>" A 1969 study by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay demonstrated the existence of universal semantic constraints in the field of colour terminology which were widely seen to discredit the existence of linguistic relativity in this domain, although this conclusion has been disputed by relativist researchers."

>How well-regarded is it in linguistics
People usually distinguish between "strong" and "weak" versions of the hypothesis. The strong version (language determines how people think) isn't taken seriously at all, but the weak version (language influence how people conceive certain concepts) is pretty much universally accepted, and lots of studies have backed it up.

Grammatical gender is a really good example, as it's been studied to death and is always the go-to example when talking about this.

psychologytoday.com/blog/culture-conscious/201209/masculine-or-feminine-and-why-it-matters

>believing chumpsky's pseudoscientific lies

Surely it does if a language, for example, lacks tenses. Then there is not a comparable perception of time as one that does would have.

tell us more dr broscience

That's some seriously flawed study, and his conclusion is pure ideology.

>"Hehe, you thought you live in a post-sexist world! But look, some germans called a key sturdy and hard, which totally means that sexism still exists!"

Whilst languages will share intrinsic conditions, there are obviously differences between them
word order, sentence structure, gender use, tense use etc will all effect how thought is constructed.
The mere fact that in some languages you'll hear what colour something is before what kind of thing it is, sets out different priorities when you take in information and think about subjects/objects. The order information is in surely matters in how you think about things.
Difference in tense use has a massive impact on worldview and the way you conduct yourself, as it affects perception of time.

Then go onto untranslateable words/phrases, ever seen those minute long feels webms that are based on a word from Portugese, Japanese etc? If there is no way to closely translate a word/phrase/feeling, then language surely has an effect on how one thinks.

There's the classic debate over how the Hopi perceive time. And more recently, there's this:

pdfs.semanticscholar.org/240b/33a21fd14879882c0713d474f413c1284275.pdf

It's a summary of a book on a popscience website, of course it kind of sucks. I was only using it to prove a very basic point (different gendered grammar results in people describing things differently) and because it took me two seconds to find. Go out and pick up any linguistic anthropology textbook if you want more examples of this stuff; most of them are literally filled with case studies and are presented about as objectively as social science can be.

>he thinks broscience is an insult

culture and language are so closely tied that people will assume that the language is impacting the way people think when in reality it's just a product of culture. Croats, Boznians and Serbs share a language but have pretty significant cultural differences

It really isn`t. We can think abstract concepts without naming them. Weaker version is more probable. Linguistic determinism retarded.

the weak sapir-wharf hypothesis is very real and scientifcally demonstrable

There's just no way to do justice to half a century of heated debate in a Veeky Forums post, but in brief:

The strong version of the hypothesis was in vogue for a decade or so. Then more research was done in the 60s and 70s, people found out that the Hopi are in fact able to refer to time and certainly experience it the way we do, and most of the other classic examples of the strong version are similarly flawed. Everyone collectively blushed and the initial frenzy over the hypothesis came to be regarded as a bit of a blight on the field. Whorf's reputation was damaged, and taking him seriously was a good way to get laughed out of academia (which wasn't fair - linguistic relativity wasn't his only contribution to the field).

That state of affairs lasted for a couple decades.

cont'd below - sorry for writing so fucking much, I'm trying to be concise but I'm tired as shit and it's making all my bad writing habits come out

Eventually the embarrassment wore off and although basically nobody defends the strong version of the hypothesis anymore, the weak version has come to be taken seriously again. To give a few examples, there have been studies on:

- How color terminology may influence color perception. There's evidence suggesting that when a language has more than one basic color term for what others would call one color, it's easier for speakers to distinguish between those colors. Russian has two basic terms for blue, cиний / гoлyбый, dark blue and pale blue, similar to how English has red and pink (which is really just light red), and there's studies claiming that Russians have an easier time differentiating between shades of blue than English speakers do.

- How languages may influence how people conceptualize time. Not how people PERCEIVE time, mind, but how people understand time with a spatial metaphor, how they "visualize" it. In English, we refer to the future as though it's in front of us. In some languages, the future is behind you (because after all, you can see the past, you can't see the future). Monolingual speakers of those languages have been observed gesturing towards their backs when they talk about the future, their fronts when they talk about the past; when they learn other languages, they tend to stop doing that.

- Relative spatial awareness: there's several languages (famously, a couple Australian ones) that lack ways to denote 'left' and 'right' - maybe. Nobody can quite agree on that, but anyway, speakers use absolute directional terms like east, west, north much more frequently than we do, which obviously means they need to be more aware of the cardinal directions than we do. I'm sitting in my apartment and if you asked me which way north was I'd have to muddle about it for like a minute at least.

And then there's the Pirahã language, which is such a shitmess that I'm not even going to try to summarize it, you just have to go read about it.

So yeah - the weak version of the hypothesis is taken seriously, although any honest summary will note that all the research I've mentioned (and there's more), although interesting, is preliminary. As always "more research is needed." And there are still some people who think Whorf's name is a swearword and both versions of the hypothesis are a bunch of shit.

Regardless of what they actually think about linguistic relativity, I guarantee you every linguist rolled their eyes or maybe laughed their fucking heads off at the scene in Arrival where what's-her-face breathed out "The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis ..." in that dramatic tone of voice. Linguistics isn't even really my field and I still literally cringed at that scene.

Again sorry to shit up the board with three massive posts, little sleep + went hiking today = cannot write to save my life.

also before anyone points it out, yes, I did misspell гoлyбoй

i will never EVER believe anything that a postmodern feminist says.

>untranslateable
just because you can't find a single word that matches 1 to 1 doesn't make it untranslateable, you monolingual retard. All of those "untranslateable" words still refer to concepts that can be described in other languages, even if it takes a couple words more.

> you monolingual retard
Fuck off you ingrate
>words still refer to concepts that can be described in other languages, even if it takes a couple words more.
there are some concepts that aren't able to be 100% translated still

It's very difficult to measure its validity in any sort of scientific way, outside of a few very specific cases. If you're dealing with someone from a dramatically different linguistic group, you really aren't going to be able to ask him complex philosophical questions without moving him far enough away from his original position regarding language and thought that his answers won't reflect the mindset he had before meeting you.

The only exception to this is with numeracy, because it's so fundamental that you can observe a person's relationship to numbers and quantity without necessarily being able to talk to them. And in this case, there is a very observable effect of language. Among the natives in South America, there are some tribes that have no numbers in their language, and as a consequence have no concept of specific quantity beyond a single item. They have a word for a single item, a word for a few items, and a word fro lots of an item. These words are used entirely contextually, with the quantities they are used to describe reflecting the relative abundance and size of the item being discussed.

>The only exception to this is with numeracy
I've heard one of the factors as to why asian countries, especially the Chinese, are good at adding, is it because of the way they add is more intuitive and encoded in their language/writing system?

To believe that language has no effect on how people think is the most retarded sentence ever. How can you think of beating an enemy if you cant conceptualize war language. Hell, law, business, various ideologies all have their own language that informs the people how to act and think about the world around them.

>there are some concepts that aren't able to be 100% translated still

Name one. Go on. Name ONE single word or concept that is untranslatable.

No, it's because they use the abacus.

>How can you think of beating an enemy if you cant conceptualize war language.

Which language is unable to conceptualize war language, you fucking retard?

This. Language is the expression of abstract thoughts and ideas which influence the world and the people around it.

What are you even asking retard?

It does a lot. Gender neutral thinking is impossible in a language where even chairs and cars are gendered.

>pdfs.semanticscholar.org/240b/33a21fd14879882c0713d474f413c1284275.pdf

I've only read the first few pages of this, but I think it is taking the metaphor of time a bit to literally. From the second page they say this
>s. In Aymara, the basic word for FRONT
(nayra, “eye/front/sight”) is also a basic expression meaning PAST, and the basic word for
BACK (qhipa, “back/behind”) is a basic expression for FUTURE meaning.

The key point being that front also means sight. It seems to me as though they are viewing the past as in front of them because it is something they can see. The future is behind them in the sense that it is something you can't see approaching you.