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

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

#41

Post by Jongseong »

Theodores wrote: post #28
Jongseong wrote: post #17

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 you say about how language does not constrain our thoughts is borne out by American English. This was the product of Noah Webster and his educational materials including the dictionary - 'Mirriam Webster'. The rationale was to move the language away from 'aristocratic' English and to make things secular. Obviously the spellings survived - 'color' - but god somehow thrived in America (we are secular in the UK). W…

Other than in matters of spelling (which belongs to the realm of written language and is thus outside the scope of usual discussions about language and cognition), Noah Webster did not introduce any significant differences in American English in terms of grammatical categories, syntax, etc.

Any influence he might have had was in matters of diction in the sense of vocabulary and stylistic choices. If Webster's educational materials were intended to be secular, they achieved this by choosing expressions that avoid religious references, for example, not by changing the building blocks of the language to make secular thoughts easier to express. The relationship between diction and cognition may be an interesting topic in itself, but it's not what we mean when we usually discuss language and cognition, where we are concerned with the structural aspects of the language itself, e.g. its tense or pronoun system, not the stylistic choice of what we express with it.

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

#42

Post by cokernel »

jgg wrote: post #34
cokernel wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A common paradigm in the 1990s version of universal grammar (I have not kept up) is the principles and parameters framework. In this framework, the universal grammar consists of a collection of principles (such as "syntactic movement is always sensitive to hierarchical structure") that can be configured via a collection of parameters (traditionally, these were thought of as binary or ternary switches). A summary of t…

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,…

> Wouldn't that prove that language inherently affects cognition, and thus proves linguistic relativism?

No, it wouldn't. It's not the language that is affecting how the brain works here; it's the other way around. The theory of universal grammar can be viewed in part as an explicit rejection of linguistic relativity.

> I don't think you actually made a point in favor of linguistic relativism, but that was the theme of this whole discussion thread.

I was responding to your comment:

> If I've misunderstood your usage of the phrase "Universal Grammar", I apologize for my ignorance.

I had thought you might be interested in more information on what "universal grammar" is supposed to mean. I was not attempting to take a position on linguistic relativism.

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

#43

Post by jgg »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #37
jgg wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a writing system doesn't count (it's a fair point, and I understand what you're saying), then how does one counter the evidence in the article that one speaker of one language does a task better than speakers of a different language? If my language is, for example, French or (older) Welsh, and my counting system is vigesimal (base 20), why is it wrong to claim that a person who speaks French would have an easier t…

How does French qualify as using a base-20 counting system? Intuitively, I'd expect that to mean - special words for the numbers 1-19 - special words for 20, 40, 60, 80, 100, 120, ..., 380 - special words for 400, 8000, 160,000, etc. Instead, what we actually see in French is - special words for the numbers 1-16 - special words for 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, and 80 - special words for 100, 1000, 1,000,000, etc. This is a ba…

It is actually referred to as a "base 20" counting system, although I agree that it isn't a very good one. It's definitely not a "pure" base-20 system, but many numbers are expressed of a multiple of twenty + remainder.

Perhaps a better example of a feature in a language that would provide more prominent cognitive differences would be one of the languages that requires users to mark a statement based on how they know the fact (witness, second-hand account, etc.), whose names escape me. Ah well.

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

#44

Post by jgg »

cokernel wrote: post #42
jgg wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

> Wouldn't that prove that language inherently affects cognition, and thus proves linguistic relativism? No, it wouldn't. It's not the language that is affecting how the brain works here; it's the other way around. The theory of universal grammar can be viewed in part as an explicit rejection of linguistic relativity. > I don't think you actually made a point in favor of linguistic relativism, but that was the theme…

> No, it wouldn't. It's not the language that is affecting how the brain works here; it's the other way around. The theory of universal grammar can be viewed in part as an explicit rejection of linguistic relativity.

I thought you said certain parameters were set during language acquisition, which would mean that the language inherently modifies how you think.

> I had thought you might be interested in more information on what "universal grammar" is supposed to mean. I was not attempting to take a position on linguistic relativism.

I understand, thank you.

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

#45

Post by jgg »

stan_rogers wrote: post #38
jgg wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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,…

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 a…

Well, I was making the point that, at some point, Ancient Greek was more morphologically complex than any variation of English (which is true to my knowledge).

I agree that we can accomplish specific meanings without explicit grammatical structure, but the rabbit hole we were tumbling down was the simple idea that the prominence of a grammatical construct might facilitate a different kind of thinking than in a language that doesn't contain said construct.

Grammatical gender is a rarely-useful concept, I agree.

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

#46

Post by jgg »

70forty wrote: post #36
jgg wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was using the computer languages as a facetious example to illustrate a point, the idea being that a context one is immersed in colors perceptions, and I was simply stating that applied to a human language, I don't see why that wouldn't be the case. There is actually quite a lot of evidence against a universal grammar ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar#Criticisms ), and I don't understand how one coul…

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…

I definitely do not buy the strong Sapir-Whorf at all.

I do not believe someone is explicitly constrained by the language, but I do believe that the explicit existence of certain concepts can facilitate a different kind of thinking more naturally than in other languages, which is the only real point I'm trying to back up.

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

#47

Post by jgg »

unsigner wrote: post #39
jgg wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was using the computer languages as a facetious example to illustrate a point, the idea being that a context one is immersed in colors perceptions, and I was simply stating that applied to a human language, I don't see why that wouldn't be the case. There is actually quite a lot of evidence against a universal grammar ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar#Criticisms ), and I don't understand how one coul…

There are vestiges of dual case in many Slavic languages, and it's alive and well in Slovenian.

I had no idea it was actively used in Slovenian...I think even Modern Greek has "vestiges" of the dual, though.

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

#48

Post by midas007 »

sitkack wrote: post #20
midas007 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Would it be the brits or the americans heading to the HR department for the violations?

Brits. There is constant teasing and innuendo, and everything's fair game.
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