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Language Shapes Thoughts?


Miranda

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Here is an article that was excerpted from Guy Deutscher's newest book, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages. He talks about the common conception that language shapes our thoughts. I encourage all of you to read the article (or the book!) and exchange some thoughts.

:autumnleaves:

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I love this topic. I didn't read the entire article yet but this is a very interesting thing to study.

 

Here is another excerpt, from a book I read last year.

 

http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/boroditsky09/boroditsky09_index.html

 

"An important question at this point is: Are these differences caused by language per se or by some other aspect of culture? Of course, the lives of English, Mandarin, Greek, Spanish, and Kuuk Thaayorre speakers differ in a myriad of ways. How do we know that it is language itself that creates these differences in thought and not some other aspect of their respective cultures?"

 

From "From WHAT'S NEXT? Dispatches on the Future of Science, Edited By Max Brockman.

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I think the relation between the two things is somewhat reciprocal.

 

There's not much use in a language having a word for a concept that none of its speakers are talking about, but the lack of a word makes it harder not only to communicate the concept but even to think about it. We need a kind of a tag for it, in order "to know what we're thinking about", and most people need it to be a word because we tend to think the same way we would communicate the thought to others. Therefore when a new concept arises it is given some tag, a word for it. Similar considerations go for grammatical structures; e. g. "I had gone" is a different concept from "I was going" and if one's only language lacks the distinction it may be less easy to distinguish the two things in one's own thinking.

 

Even if one can conceive each thing and is aware of the difference between them, some kind of tag is necessary to keep track of them and sort ideas out. Changes in a society's way of thinking go hand in hand with changes in its language.

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For any given object, there are often different word/sounds in different languages. The image of the object in the mind is the same for all, regardless of culture/language. But the word/sound association can vary widely. For example, I can place an apple on the table. Regardless of language barrier we all see the same thing. The word for apple is purely arbitrary, with a dozen languages calling the same internal image different sounds. Where the word comes in handy is for conveying meaning to others who are not there, but this is limited to those who know your language. If we could read minds, we could skip language and convey universal imagery directly.

 

The misconception of language shaping thoughts is because most people learn from reading and studying. Therefore the words came first to them, then the meaning. But if one is learning from the physical world without reading or listening to others, through observation and intuition, the words will come second. As an example, someone who is learning to express their feelings, may not be able to put them into words. This does not mean that they can not experience what they are feeling. They just don't have the words to convey the experience. Once they find the words, it does not alter the original experience but makes it easier to transfer to others. Someone who has not had that experience, may now be able to induce/empathize this experience because of language. To them the words helped shape their thoughts.

 

A similar subjective cause and effect often occurs in science. Often the answer comes before the solution. One has a gut feeling that such and such is true. To publish, you first need to go to the lab to develop/prove the solution. When you publish, you develop and present your arguments in a logical way from solution to answer, even though the process never happened that way. Those who read the paper, see the logical arguments even though the actual process of discovery originally put effect before the cause.

 

I generate a lot of ideas for better or worse. The ideas often start with a general mood or gut feeling but without any initial form. I then have to translate the feeling into words, with my writing/thinking generating feedback feelings, if I am doing it right. I like to randomly move around topics where I have not given myself time to think about what I will write. The words come out without thinking, until I start to edit and read what came out. Then language is used to smooth out the rough edges. Sometimes I use language to censor myself, since the outflow of words may not make sense or may be too provocative. The ideas sometimes become cross contaminated with others feelings. Other times I don't censor if the final feedback gut feeling is strong, which can get me into trouble, since the subjectivity of words, can push buttons.

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Here is an article that was excerpted from Guy Deutscher's newest book, Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages. He talks about the common conception that language shapes our thoughts. I encourage all of you to read the article (or the book!) and exchange some thoughts.

:autumnleaves:

hi miranda: :wave2: good to hear from you. i read the entire article and found several things interesting.:read: having studied german as a child and spanish a bit in highschool, i found the memorizing of the gender articles frustrating. :rant: it never occured to me to assign gender characteristics to things & i don't recall any instructors making that connection. :sherlock: tant pis pour la romance. take that frenchies! :rotfl:

 

some other bits - though a false start maybe - that caught my interest were the references to native american languages. what came first to my mind was that native americans never developed the wheel even though it was a prominent figure in their iconography and world-view in relation to cycles. i don't know now after finishing the article if the relation applies inasmuch as the author showed the errors in whorf's idea that the language disallowed understanding of "things" for which one had no words. :confused: did native americans & other wheel-less cultures not develop wheels concomitant with wheeled cultures because of limits/restrictions in their languages? :shrug: did language play a role in wheel development for those cultures that made them? if not languages, then what?

 

curiouser & curiouser. :turtle:

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Worf’s hypothesis – the general version I knew being “some ideas are not expressible in some languages” – was to me a given from the time I was first acquainted with it in my teens, even as I later learned that it was decreasingly credited by linguists of various kinds, as Deutcher’s article describes. As I work mainly in the very limited languages of computer programs and numeric systems, it remains a useful and obvious concept, even if it’s less broadly applied to natural languages than it was half a century ago.

 

Applied to natural language, the concept, yet more generalized, is less clear, but more dramatic: perhaps there are some concepts that we are simply not equipped to imagine, less because of limits in our languages’ lexicons and grammar (as per Worf’s ca. 1940 original work), than because of a lack of our primary metaphors (per 1990s “embodied realism” philosophy and cognitive science).

 

Where linguistic models of knowledge like those discussed in this thread’s linked articles ask “does our language shape the way we think?”, embodied realism more generally asks and affirms “do our bodies shape the way we think?”.

 

Perhaps we humans are having such a hard time reconciling quantum physics with gravitation because we’re not metaphorically equipped – and by extension, lack key biological senses upon which to base these missing metaphors – to conceive of a successful theory? Maybe intelligent inside-out turning tentacled aliens dwelling in the atmosphere of a gas giant planet somewhere had no problem with this theoretical challenge? Generalizations of Worf’s hypothesis can spark endless speculation along these lines.

 

Counter to this idea, though, I’m reminded of another school of cognitive science, represented by works such as Hofstadter’s I Am a Strange Loop. According to this view, the neurological quality that allows us to have a concept of self – an “I” – involve an ability to extend our metaphorical systems in an as yet not known to be limited manner – to imagine, even if by torturously difficult, formal symbolic means, any physically or semantically real concept.

 

Returning to the more specific topics discussed in the linked articles, I pretty much agree with the writers: language influences and predisposes our thinking, but doesn’t ultimately constrain them. If my language lacks a true future tense, for example, I can still concoct a sentence in it distinguishing past from future events. If my language requires that I include the gender of the subject of a sentence, I’m still able to explicitly or implicitly indicate that the gender of the subject isn’t important to the statement I’m making – or “fool” the language by using slightly incorrect grammar, such as when I refer to a neuter single third person in an English sentence such as “they closed the door”.

 

The most interesting information I found in the two articles was in their discussion of languages that lack of words for relative direction – left/right/forward/behind – such the northern Australian Guugu Yimithirr and Kuuk Thaayorre languages. Stories of speaker’s of these languages being truly unable to use relative direction, however, seem implausible to me. I simply can’t believe that, were it necessary and convenient, speakers of these languages couldn’t adopt language efficiently using left, right, forward, and backward. I wonder if this is actually a myth, like the common one about Eskimos having many words for snow?

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Language itself is constantly created. If language comes first, how could you create new language? For example, when someone first discovered DNA, there was not yet a word for DNA, since there was nothing yet in language for this exact thing, since it never existed before. Someone coins the phrase/association sort of like putting a flag on the mountain. After that the visual association has an attached word/sound so others can use that sound association to help them visualize the visual discovery.

 

Michael Jackson coined the term "Bad", to mean "cool", which means sort of tough but worthy of emulation. When the coined phrase first appeared, the sound/word bad meant evil or lawless, which created confusion with respect to what the new "bad" was suppose to mean. One had to watch the video to visualize the intent of the new word, so the word could create a new association. After the process was complete now it helps to shape further thinking.

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An interesting application of language is lying and conning. This is where language is used to alter rational reality. Without language this is harder to do. The used car salesman who can't speak would have a very difficult time telling you about the lifetime warranty. Part of the trick is to use language to induce a positive internal feeling or intuition. It is not so much the words, but figuring out the correct words that can trigger the feelings which makes people want to believe what is not true.

 

The bad boys use this technique to charm women. The skilled Don Juan will figure out what the woman wants to hear. What she wants to hear will induce internal feelings which will make her more open and receptive. This is often unique to each woman but there are often trends. If she wants to hear money, he will include a reference to money to trigger the feeling. If she wants to hear marriage he will make sure he includes that reference, etc. Just saying let us have sex will not work, even though this is an efficient use of language to transfer what he is thinking. The real trigger are not the words but the internal feelings that sum up hopes and dreams.

 

Politicians also make use of this technique. They use rhetoric for the internal emotional induction. "It would be nice if all people held hands in peace and love." Internal language is too slow and cumbersome to visualize thousands of smiling people holding hands on a warm sunny day with birds singing and wild animals walking among the people. We may only have a few seconds to get the intuitive feeling, before the speech changes gears and says "it would also be nice if everyone has all the food they need to eat", etc. Internal language is too slow, but since a picture is worth a thousand words, visualization will use mental imagery to move blocks of data very quickly for the feelings. The mind might picture Thanksgiving Dinner for the feeling induction, so one can be on the same emotional wavelength as the rest of the crowd. Another may visualize a huge buffet near the people holding hands if that is their trigger. Next, the politician may talk about justice and security, etc.

 

In the case of the used car salesman, the correct trigger will induce the feeling, which will often have block data association, such as looking cool, never having to change the oil, while being able to leave the car for the kids when they go to college.

 

With creative writing, the author may have writers block. His/her words are blank and her/her feelings are in a bunch. Within those feelings are the block associations, which gradually begin to materialize into imagery, which are then put into words. A good author touches the collective human spirit, since the induction often comes from the collective aspects of human nature. He/she may also make it more appropriate to the times, by including block data from his own temporal experiences. Once the process begins, sometimes the words just flow, with special language patterns appearing with might become the memorable and coined phrases du jour.

 

Another similar effect is prestige of position. If someone is an expert they carry subjective weight. Even if one can not understand their logic and arguments, their prestige may induce the feelings. One may then memorize the words. The rock star who becomes the spokesman for a cause may not really be too knowledgable, but through prestige their words mean more. The trigger is preverbal.

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  • 1 month later...

I have been on holidays from Hypography for a bit But i NEED to share this mind blowing program with you.

It is probably the best Science radio I have heard, It certainly spoke to me

http://www.radiolab.org/2010/aug/09/

or

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/scienceshow/stories/2011/3101374.htm

 

If you like that you might also find this of interest about Aboriginal Australians and the unique bond/relationship/symbiosis they have with the Land

http://www.abc.net.au/rn/latenightlive/stories/2011/3091942.

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  • 3 years later...

This makes me think about Noam Chomsky's theory regarding language, which is that language is biologically created in the human mind so it is genetically transmitted. He goes on to say that all humans share the same linguistic makeup, regardless of cultural or social backgrounds.

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Perhaps as a child it hears sounds and as it grows the teachers and family introduce it to language. The object the infant is listening to or seeing is a object without a definition, until it learns pictures of the object have names. The the picture and the object become a name. It grows from there? Paul

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