How Language Seems to Shape One's View of the World

> Reality is much more subtle. Language only determines what we have to pay attention to.

Yes. I've read a entertaining book on the subject ( http://www.amazon.com/Through-Language-Glass-Different-Langu... ). Especially fascinating was the Guugu Yimithirr language, which has no words for relative directions, no "left" or "right". Speakers of this language gained an amazing ability to know compass directions. If you lead them through a winding museum and then ask them to describe the Mona Lisa they would: "It's a lady, facing east." The Guugu Yimithirr forces everyone to be aware of compass directions at all times, and they get good at it.

The book draws the same conclusion: language forces us to learn, and reveal in conversation, certain concepts; but it does not limit our ability to understand foreign concepts.

The fun question then: what concepts does English force us to be aware of?

I'm a guy who likes abstract stuff, and that definition seems extraordinarily abstract to me, to the point of obfuscating the actual meaning of what we're talking about. Am I right that seems that the definition of grammar there is an almost-meta abstraction of structure?

I still can't help but believe that, in practice the 'less radical' points I mentioned, like tense, mood and case (which I think would be switches, right?) arise differently in different contexts, if at all, owing to differences in cognition in various groups, and thus reinforces that mode of cognition in someone who learns the language.

The difference in morphology between, say, Ancient Greek and Modern English is pretty drastic, so what gives? In fact, I don't think English has ever been as morphologically-complex as Ancient Greek, and yet some hypothesize that they even descended from the same Indo-European language...if both languages start out from the same point, but evolve with a completely-different grammatical structure that makes different concepts explicit or notable, why would that happen in light of a true universal grammar that is inherent to everyone?

It's one thing to say that everyone at a certain intellectual level have a capacity to understand and use certain grammatical constructs, but to claim them as inherent to all people seems sketchy...

>The theory is that the principles of universal grammar arise directly from the structure of the brain, while the parameters are set during language acquisition.

Wouldn't that prove that language inherently affects cognition, and thus proves linguistic relativism? I don't think you actually made a point in favor of linguistic relativism, but that was the theme of this whole discussion thread.

English has a subjunctive, but it's only ever visible in the 3rd person singular.

While English may not have a dual number, a case system (anymore, though it's still seen vestigially in the pronouns), or a verb conjugation expressing the future tense, the point is that English speakers are not constrained in what they are capable of expressing.

For the dual number, we simply say "two cows" or "both cows". To express the future, we have "will", "be going to", or a present (progressive) future construction like:

"We play tennis on Saturday" / "We are playing tennis on Saturday"

Whereas other languages use case to express certain semantic/grammatical relationships, English fills this void with word order and a slew of prepositions.

So at worst English speakers expend a few extra syllables on certain ideas. But there is no limitation on expression or cognition, which is the claim made by a strong version Sapir-Whorf.

English and the protolanguages preceding it certainly were morphologically complex. English, though, has gone through a couple-three near-pidginizing events along the way that have made it a much simpler, more telegraphic language than it, in most ways, should be. Some aspects of the Celtic languages that were on the ground before English hit Great Britain have worked their way into the grammar (present progressive and do-support). The evidence seems to show that much of the inflective complexity was on its way out after the Vikings made the scene (the languages, Old Norse and Old English, were close enough to allow a degree of mutual comprehension, but differences in case markings, verb endings and the always-arbitrary grammatical gender made a hard-enough task more difficult than it needed to be). And one can hardly say that the influence of Norman French on the language was slight. Remember that the purpose of language is to communicate, so the long-term linguistic homogeneity of the group largely controls how complex the language can become. "City" languages tend to be much simpler (on average) than "forest" languages because outsiders rarely have to learn that 700-speaker language.

The surface grammar — what actually comes out of the speaker's mouth — doesn't directly reflect the underlying grammar/syntax, though. The 25-syllable Cree word will tree in pretty much the same way as the 18-word English sentence it replaces. The tonal variations a native English speaker uses convey the same information as the pragmatic particles a Mandarin speaker has to include at the end of every utterance. (We literates are often prone to forgetting that these squiggly marks are to language what choreographic notation is to dance or staff notation is to music.) We might not always be aware of the mechanics of including things like evidential marking, ergativity or pragmatics, but we do it nonetheless. And we've replaced (for the moment, at least) most of our tense and case markings with entire words. The syntax is structurally the same, we just add the word "from" instead of adding the ablative case ending. And really, does anybody actually need grammatical gender? (See Twain's The Awful German language for a reductio ad absurdum.)

> Reality is much more subtle. Language only determines what we have to pay attention to.

If you put it that way, it's as obvious as a brick wall and I'm wondering why there is no way further onwards here.

Thinking about it: Language didn't develop without reason, I'm pretty sure. Language developed to communicate more precisely, since it provided an advantage to communicate more efficiently. Thus, language only expresses what it needs to express and develops from there.

In a sense, which I find rather funny, you don't have to venture into different lands to find linguistic problems. Just look around in your company. We developers have words for things and our marketing guys don't even know that these things exist, and I'm darned sure it's the other way around, too.

Similarly, the inuit have tons of words for snow, and I have like... 6. I don't even know how many forms and characteristics of snow they even distinguish there.