4 ms·

Considering that there is so much evidence against linguistic relativity, I do not understand why these types of stories keep appearing on HN.

DanBC 13y ago
Do you know enough to be able to write a great rebuttal article? Or to link to a great rebuttal article written by an expert? I'd like to read that.
quomopete 13y ago
care to share some of that evidence with the rest of us?
jgg 13y ago
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 their whole life to explain monads or continuations intuitively, and how they'd use them in practice, compared to a trial of 100 who understood Scheme and Haskell. I think the results would be pretty obvious. Why would structures and concepts in human language be any different? I really don't understand the political posturing behind denying linguistic relativism (not that you're necessarily doing that, of course). src: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-11181457 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-11181457
- buss 13y ago
  > 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 their whole life to explain monads or continuations intuitively, and how they'd use them in practice, compared to a trial of 100 who understood Scheme and Haskell. I think the results would be pretty obvious. Why would structures and concepts in human language be any different? 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.
  - jgg 13y ago
    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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar#Criticisms), and I don't understand how one could even begin to say that everyone necessarily develops the same grammatical concepts at any useful degree of practicality. The idea of a subjunctive tense only exists implicitly in English, yet is prevalent in many Romance languages (and others). In Ancient Greek, the concept of singular and plural were joined distinctly by the concept of pair, which exists currently in no language that I can think of (and certainly isn't popular if it exists). In English, nouns are not explicitly marked to indicate role in the sentence (left up to ordering and ultimately subjective, implicit interpretation), which is easily taken care of in other languages like German, Russian and Hungarian with a case system. Hell, English doesn't even have a stand-alone future tense (i.e., a verb conjugation) ...how exactly can we make any argument for a universal grammar, when there exists so many grammatical concepts in other languages that aren't actually possible in any explicit sense even in English? If I've misunderstood your usage of the phrase "Universal Grammar", I apologize for my ignorance.
    - cokernel 13y ago
      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 this framework is available at http://web.uconn.edu/snyder/papers/CELS.pdf http://web.uconn.edu/snyder/papers/CELS.pdf . 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. From the perspective of an adherent of the principles and parameters variety of universal grammar, the examples of cross-linguistic variation you mention are not all that radical. A much stronger challenge to universal grammar is the existence of the Pirahã language, which (it has been argued) cannot express recursion, which would otherwise be a linguistic universal.
- ethanpoole 13y ago
  Reading and language are not the same thing, e.g. you can speak a language without being literate. You might therefore expect different writing systems to use different capabilities. Of course, "different parts of your brain" does not mean different capabilities. They could be the same capabilities instantiated differently in the brain. 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.
  - jgg 13y ago
    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 time with the basic idea of base 20 math, or just counting in terms of 20's, than a native English speaker, assuming no extra training on the part of either? Why is it wrong to assume that a language with a case system would yield native speakers who were better at explicitly identifying the subject and object of a sentence than speakers of languages that don't have a case system? I just have a hard time grasping how people conditioned to think a certain way via their (or, a) language couldn't have a better understanding of some concepts than others. >I cannot comment on the political motivations to deny linguistic relativism. I am just a linguist. Sorry if you felt that I was pigeonholing you, thanks for your input.
    - thaumasiotes 13y ago
      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 base-10 system (with the odd quirk), as far as I can see.
ethanpoole 13y ago
Mark Baker's _The Atoms of Language_ and Steven Pinker's _The Language Instinct_ talk about the evidence against linguistic relativism. There is also a debate between Mark Baker (I believe) and some psychologist published online, but I couldn't find the link. I don't know of any other popular literature on the topic.
midas007 13y ago
It's falls somewhere around psycholinguistics or cognitive sciences if you squint hard enough while looking at it, so then it becomes interesting. Once someone feels they've mastered the hard sciences, the squishy sciences often become new, seductive mistresses.
sinkasapa 13y ago
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 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/ 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.
- ethanpoole 13y ago
  The only reason that I didn't provide links in my original post is because I have had this discussion over and over. I get tired of having it.
Ologn 13y ago
I agree. The article is titled "How Language Seems To Shape One's View Of The World" whereas the scientific consensus for the past half century has been the opposite, and very little evidence has come to light over the past half century to change this. The beginning of the article is given to the ideas of a heterodox associate professor at UCSD. Further down in the article John McWhorter affirms the orthodox view (his speciality is slightly tangential to the question). There is a mountain of evidence supporting the orthodox view, and the Boroditsky's, the Daniel Everett's etc. have not come up with much conflicting evidence or compelling alternative hypotheses. Is there any prominent scientist in this or a related field who subscribes to these Sapir-Whorf type theories? The hey day of this idea was before World War II, and the alternative theories may get play on NPR and the like, but not within the scientific community. Until, as I said, compelling evidence to the contrary is seen.
auganov 13y ago
But the article and the whole hype is not purely about the science of linguistics. While I do think that randomly quoting some not-so relevant research is a bit discomforting it's still a super interesting topic. Almost anyone that has knows at least 2 languages very well will notice interesting differences in using them. Just as in that Nabokov anecdote. It's not necessarily a statement about some inherent properties of a language. It's something many individuals consistently experience. That using different languages yields different results even though their goal might be the same. I myself experience that almost everyday. It raises interesting questions. I don't know anything about linguistics, much less about what linguistic relativity means. But I would love to find explanations for this phenomenon. And I guess that's where they popularity comes from?

DanBC 13y ago

Do you know enough to be able to write a great rebuttal article? Or to link to a great rebuttal article written by an expert? I'd like to read that.

quomopete 13y ago

care to share some of that evidence with the rest of us?

jgg 13y ago

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 their whole life to explain monads or continuations intuitively, and how they'd use them in practice, compared to a trial of 100 who understood Scheme and Haskell. I think the results would be pretty obvious. Why would structures and concepts in human language be any different? I really don't understand the political posturing behind denying linguistic relativism (not that you're necessarily doing that, of course). src: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-11181457 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-11181457

buss 13y ago
> 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 their whole life to explain monads or continuations intuitively, and how they'd use them in practice, compared to a trial of 100 who understood Scheme and Haskell. I think the results would be pretty obvious. Why would structures and concepts in human language be any different? 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.
- jgg 13y ago
  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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar#Criticisms), and I don't understand how one could even begin to say that everyone necessarily develops the same grammatical concepts at any useful degree of practicality. The idea of a subjunctive tense only exists implicitly in English, yet is prevalent in many Romance languages (and others). In Ancient Greek, the concept of singular and plural were joined distinctly by the concept of pair, which exists currently in no language that I can think of (and certainly isn't popular if it exists). In English, nouns are not explicitly marked to indicate role in the sentence (left up to ordering and ultimately subjective, implicit interpretation), which is easily taken care of in other languages like German, Russian and Hungarian with a case system. Hell, English doesn't even have a stand-alone future tense (i.e., a verb conjugation) ...how exactly can we make any argument for a universal grammar, when there exists so many grammatical concepts in other languages that aren't actually possible in any explicit sense even in English? If I've misunderstood your usage of the phrase "Universal Grammar", I apologize for my ignorance.
  - cokernel 13y ago
    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 this framework is available at http://web.uconn.edu/snyder/papers/CELS.pdf http://web.uconn.edu/snyder/papers/CELS.pdf . 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. From the perspective of an adherent of the principles and parameters variety of universal grammar, the examples of cross-linguistic variation you mention are not all that radical. A much stronger challenge to universal grammar is the existence of the Pirahã language, which (it has been argued) cannot express recursion, which would otherwise be a linguistic universal.
ethanpoole 13y ago
Reading and language are not the same thing, e.g. you can speak a language without being literate. You might therefore expect different writing systems to use different capabilities. Of course, "different parts of your brain" does not mean different capabilities. They could be the same capabilities instantiated differently in the brain. 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.
- jgg 13y ago
  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 time with the basic idea of base 20 math, or just counting in terms of 20's, than a native English speaker, assuming no extra training on the part of either? Why is it wrong to assume that a language with a case system would yield native speakers who were better at explicitly identifying the subject and object of a sentence than speakers of languages that don't have a case system? I just have a hard time grasping how people conditioned to think a certain way via their (or, a) language couldn't have a better understanding of some concepts than others. >I cannot comment on the political motivations to deny linguistic relativism. I am just a linguist. Sorry if you felt that I was pigeonholing you, thanks for your input.
  - thaumasiotes 13y ago
    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 base-10 system (with the odd quirk), as far as I can see.

ethanpoole 13y ago

Mark Baker's _The Atoms of Language_ and Steven Pinker's _The Language Instinct_ talk about the evidence against linguistic relativism. There is also a debate between Mark Baker (I believe) and some psychologist published online, but I couldn't find the link. I don't know of any other popular literature on the topic.

midas007 13y ago

It's falls somewhere around psycholinguistics or cognitive sciences if you squint hard enough while looking at it, so then it becomes interesting. Once someone feels they've mastered the hard sciences, the squishy sciences often become new, seductive mistresses.

sinkasapa 13y ago

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 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/ 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.

ethanpoole 13y ago
The only reason that I didn't provide links in my original post is because I have had this discussion over and over. I get tired of having it.

Ologn 13y ago

I agree. The article is titled "How Language Seems To Shape One's View Of The World" whereas the scientific consensus for the past half century has been the opposite, and very little evidence has come to light over the past half century to change this. The beginning of the article is given to the ideas of a heterodox associate professor at UCSD. Further down in the article John McWhorter affirms the orthodox view (his speciality is slightly tangential to the question). There is a mountain of evidence supporting the orthodox view, and the Boroditsky's, the Daniel Everett's etc. have not come up with much conflicting evidence or compelling alternative hypotheses. Is there any prominent scientist in this or a related field who subscribes to these Sapir-Whorf type theories? The hey day of this idea was before World War II, and the alternative theories may get play on NPR and the like, but not within the scientific community. Until, as I said, compelling evidence to the contrary is seen.

auganov 13y ago

But the article and the whole hype is not purely about the science of linguistics. While I do think that randomly quoting some not-so relevant research is a bit discomforting it's still a super interesting topic. Almost anyone that has knows at least 2 languages very well will notice interesting differences in using them. Just as in that Nabokov anecdote. It's not necessarily a statement about some inherent properties of a language. It's something many individuals consistently experience. That using different languages yields different results even though their goal might be the same. I myself experience that almost everyday. It raises interesting questions. I don't know anything about linguistics, much less about what linguistic relativity means. But I would love to find explanations for this phenomenon. And I guess that's where they popularity comes from?