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Considering that there is so much evidence against linguistic relativity, I do not understand why these types of stories keep appearing on HN.
Once someone feels they've mastered the hard sciences, the squishy sciences often become new, seductive mistresses.
Considering that there is so much evidence against linguistic relativity, I do not understand why these types of stories keep appearing on HN.
What? What about the studies that show that reading Arabic literally uses different parts of your brain than when reading other languages, or even the evidence presented in the article? Even intuitively, it would make sense that different languages/cultures might distinguish or understand different concepts differently...since this is HN, imagine asking a trial of 100 people who have programmed in nothing but COBOL t…
I'm not a linguist, but have recently started to become familiar with parts of it. I don't think you can reasonably make the comparison between engineered computer languages and our innate language abilities. There's ample evidence for a universal grammar, and that languages are not engineered so much as match patterns we're wired to recognize and be able to manipulate. I can stretch your analogy only as far as recognizing the different grammatical constructs that different languages employ (eg English is subject-verb-object and native English speakers first have trouble understanding and reproducing object-subject-verb constructions but eventually get it).
Human languages have nothing truly comparable to the situation you describe. Just because computer languages are called "languages" doesn't mean that it can actually map to a human language.
Considering that there is so much evidence against linguistic relativity, I do not understand why these types of stories keep appearing on HN.
If you have studied linguistics much at all, you know that the strongest form of the hypothesis that language governs human perception has been "debunked". And it is appropriate to say debunked rather than disproved because of the way that the public latches on to the idea again and again without being presented with any convincing evidence, just little anecdotes and lazy science journalism.
I don't think the poster above is responsible for searching the Internet for everyone else to validate his claim, which is fairly easy to do. Here is a starting point:
http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/wcs/
One can also look in to the the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.
Again, further research in to this type of thing is justifiable but the evidence so far has been pretty convincing that linguistic relativity only exists in a fairly shallow sense, if at all. We don't live in Samuel Delany's Babel-17 universe. Objective reality, biology and even cultural influences will likely be seen to trump linguistic relativism again and again as factors that govern our perception of time, space, color and quantity.
Considering that there is so much evidence against linguistic relativity, I do not understand why these types of stories keep appearing on HN.
What? What about the studies that show that reading Arabic literally uses different parts of your brain than when reading other languages, or even the evidence presented in the article? Even intuitively, it would make sense that different languages/cultures might distinguish or understand different concepts differently...since this is HN, imagine asking a trial of 100 people who have programmed in nothing but COBOL t…
It may very well be that speakers of a language with feature A can perform some task better than speakers of a language without feature A. However, it does not meant that the speakers have different cognitive capabilities (e.g. you can provide sufficient task training), which is the ultimate argument of people supporting linguistic relativity.
I cannot comment on the political motivations to deny linguistic relativism. I am just a linguist.
Considering that there is so much evidence against linguistic relativity, I do not understand why these types of stories keep appearing on HN.
I agree that the public obsession with this idea is strange. There is probably still room for debate and further research but public credulity for this idea far outreaches any possible reality. If you have studied linguistics much at all, you know that the strongest form of the hypothesis that language governs human perception has been "debunked". And it is appropriate to say debunked rather than disproved because of…
But once you move away from the deterministic end of the spectrum, it is clear that there is some relationship after all between language and thought. The key point to understand is, as the linguist Roman Jakobson put it, that “languages differ essentially in what they _must_ convey and not in what they _may_ convey.”
An oft-repeated trope is that if a language does not have a word for some concept, then its speaker cannot understand this concept. This is plainly rubbish. Language does not constrain thought in that way. People can understand concepts without having the words to express them, and if need be, can always find new ways to express them in words, coining new terms if necessary.
Reality is much more subtle. Language only determines what we have to pay attention to. Take a look at the example of the distinction between cups and glasses in English as opposed to that between "chashka" and "stakan" in Russian. Suppose a Russian-English bilingual was presented with four objects—a cup-"chashka", a glass-"chashka", a cup-"stakan", and a glass-"stakan"—and instructed to group them into pairs of similar objects. What would the response be? Would it depend on the language that the instruction was given in? These are the sorts of interesting questions that we can ask about language and cognition. Speakers of different languages are capable of performing all the same cognitive tasks, but different languages may privilege different pathways to the solution.
http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Sapir%E... This was the left's justification for Political Correctness. It's entirely dubious science with a clear agenda behind it: make thoughtcrime illegal.
It may be dubious science, but it's important from an 'Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten' perspective. Many of my friends have the "fuck em if they can't take a joke" outlook on political correctness, so I get it. On the other hand, it is more difficult to mix with strangers and new social groups when you aren't used to being polite a lot of the time.
Proponents of linguistic relativity (or "Whorfianism") have come up with some fantastically absurd claims over the years about how thoughts are constrained by language. And in the popular imagination, these claims would inevitably entangle with stereotypes about speakers of different languages. So I don't blame people for dismissing any discussion about the relationship between language and cognition as fringe theory…
What is possible and what is easy or normal are often far apart.
What about compile time macros or run time macros? Users of languages that do not have those features often have a hard time grasping them. Yet they are totally possible in most languages we use today (eval,Janino,etc).
EDIT: Apparently linguistic relativity says, if there isn't a word for it then I can't understand it (to horribly paraphrase). Is that a somewhat correct interpretation? Yes, you said that.
I guess my conjecture is that while I don't agree with LR if that is the definition, the semantics of the language definitely change what is easily expressed (no shit), the aborigine girls are constantly aware of their position vector, most people are not. The way they use language has shaped their thinking.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It may be dubious science, but it's important from an 'Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten' perspective. Many of my friends have the "fuck em if they can't take a joke" outlook on political correctness, so I get it. On the other hand, it is more difficult to mix with strangers and new social groups when you aren't used to being polite a lot of the time.
Most British corporate shops, and startups also, transplanted to the US would have everyone headed to HR for sexual harassment training and hurt feelings lawsuits.