I hope all this recent talk of language and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis spurs interest in lojban. Perhaps it can be further tuned to reduce color/gender bias.
The Power of Language
21–30 of 51 posts
Re: The Power of Language
#22This www.radiolab.org/2010/aug/09/transcript/ is a fascinating hour long podcast all about language and words. They show how thought and language _are_ linked. For example, imagine a rectangular room with entirely white walls and an item placed in one corner. Your chances are 50-50 of finding it.
Then colour one of the side walls blue. You can then use that as a reference to always choose the correct corner to go to. However, if your language goes to "the white wall" or "the blue wall" you can't do it. Not until you can say/think "left of the blue wall" can you do it.
Anyway, podcast explains it far better than I can, well worth a listen. (Radiolab in general is excellent)
Re: The Power of Language
#23The relationship between language and thought is unclear. To be polarising, psychologists believe that language influences thought/culture and linguists believe that thought/culture influences language. There are evidence to support both conclusions, but most of the debate in popular media focuses on examples that are severely misinterpreted. For example, if Language A does not distinguish green and blue, it does not…
If you casually asked a native Chinese speaker "are leaves and the sky the same color?" would they answer differently than if you asked a native English speaker? If so (i.e. if Chinese speakers tend to say Yes while English speakers tend to say No), then I would argue that there's something more going on than simple hue labels, since the labels themselves aren't being asked for or provided.
The problem with that test is that the notion of "same" is too fuzzy. If you asked me "are leaves and traffic lights the same color?", I might answer yes. After all, they're both green. On the other hand, I might say no, since one is dark green and the other is bright green. To test if something is going on mentally, it'd be better to take my personal opinions out of the equation. For instance, show a traffic light colored square on a leaf colored background, followed by a sky colored circle on a leaf colored background.
Re: The Power of Language
#24"For example, infants don't have spacial awareness, or understand how objects can be relative to each other, until they learn the words for describing relativity." Where's the citation on this?
Quick googling and I didn't find the article but I have read it. Maybe someone can find the magic keywords.
The crux of the study was that children who don't know the words left and right don't appear to have an innate ability to understand the relative positions of objects related to other objects. Children with the language for left and right can remember relative positioning but children without those words do not.
Re: The Power of Language
#25Here's an episode of radiolab, where they talk about language as it relates to color, and how kids don't really ask why the sky is blue, because they don't think it's blue in the first place. http://www.radiolab.org/2012/may/21/
Re: The Power of Language
#26I just realized that visible light spectrum, as it is taught in physics classes, is different depending on the language. Of course it is just a gradient and we distinguish 7 colors from it so we could remember the pattern, but those 7 colors differ. In my language, Lithuanian, we have names for light blue and dark blue (just like in Russian, as mentioned by Alex). These two colors sit between green and violet in our simplified 7color spectrum. They do not directly link to blue and indigo in the English spectrum.
Re: The Power of Language
#27Some people have a really clear narrative in their mind. I don't. Rather everything is probabilistic and will only be final once I formulate it.
Language is a reduction of reality and I realized a long time ago that I would rather keep my options open than let myself be let into narratives with premises that might be deeply flawed.
It has it's advantages and dis-advantages of course.
Re: The Power of Language
#28The relationship between language and thought is unclear. To be polarising, psychologists believe that language influences thought/culture and linguists believe that thought/culture influences language. There are evidence to support both conclusions, but most of the debate in popular media focuses on examples that are severely misinterpreted. For example, if Language A does not distinguish green and blue, it does not…
Exactly. Just as I used to hear people say "Eskimos" have (some double digit number) of words to describe different "snow". Which makes sense if you realize they live in snow. On the other hand, for many purposes, English, as well as other languages, have ways to describe that snow --they just don't have one word nouns fot that. It's not as though we'd be dumfounded finding a way to describe this snow. Now, since it'…
The Inuit snow thing is actually a common misconception and like you mention it comes from a difference in our understanding of what a 'word' is. The Inuit language typically uses suffixes to modify nouns. Also, the Inuit language can use one 'word' for what otherwise would be a phrase in English.
Wiki has more on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow
Re: The Power of Language
#29Obligatory Wikipedia article with everything you ever wanted to know about blue and green: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinguishing_blue_from_green_...
For the remark about word genders, all I could find today was http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html... which doesn't include sources.
I'm sure I've seen a different article about it, though, because I've heard of a variation on the experiment where the subjects were people who had learned a non-English language as children, but then moved to America and had spoken English for 10+ years. Even though the entire questionnaire was given in English, people associated a physical object with attributes of its gender in the first language they learned as children.
Re: The Power of Language
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
Exactly. Just as I used to hear people say "Eskimos" have (some double digit number) of words to describe different "snow". Which makes sense if you realize they live in snow. On the other hand, for many purposes, English, as well as other languages, have ways to describe that snow --they just don't have one word nouns fot that. It's not as though we'd be dumfounded finding a way to describe this snow. Now, since it'…
The Inuit snow thing is actually a common misconception and like you mention it comes from a difference in our understanding of what a 'word' is. The Inuit language typically uses suffixes to modify nouns. Also, the Inuit language can use one 'word' for what otherwise would be a phrase in English. Wiki has more on it: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow
Reading Chaucer is a good exercise for looking at how words are used, in "The Canterbury Tales" the word Horse is rarely (if ever, I'm not sure) used, instead very specific words are used to describe the type of horse in question Palfrey, Charger, etc.
In the modern world, we are the same with motorized vehicles, I drive what my wife likes to call a junker, beater, jalopy, hoopty car,
We make the distinctions that are important to us, that doesn't meant that we aren't capable of making finer distinctions if we need to
It's like huffman encoding...