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/lit/ - Literature

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18175115 No.18175115 [Reply] [Original]

Yesterday i was listening to a group of linguists discussing the sapir-whorf hypothesis and how it's been debunked, and the conversation took an interesting turn where they all affirmed that all the research that has been done in the field of cognitive linguistics points to the fact that language cannot really change the way in which someone's mind works. I still find that to be hard to buy.
What does /lit/ think of this whole situation ?

>> No.18175121

>>18175115
Obvious, innit

>> No.18175162

>>18175115
I'm sure it's mostly true. Language isn't a means of interpretation, it's a means of communication, with everything that comes with it.

>> No.18175176

>>18175115
> mind isn’t Taoist sorcery
*sigh*

>> No.18175184

>>18175115
I bet reading Confucius changes the way your mind works...

>> No.18175209

The relationship between language, consciousness, and experience is a huge open field for research. Reducing it down to one hypothesis deboonking is stupid.

>> No.18175231

>>18175115
Many scientists still subscribe to a "soft" version of the hypothesis, which downplays the level of linguistic determinism. Also, >DEBOOONKED!!

>> No.18175246

>>18175115
Anyone that speaks more than one language at different levels of proficiency knows sapir whorf is at least somewhat real. I'm not sure how anyone could debunk that. It's so obviously real. The words you have access to shape your interactions with the world, and these in turn shape you as person in general.

>> No.18175287

>>18175115
It’s real. There are colors that take certain language speakers many more seconds to differentiate between, because they lack the name for the color. If your language does not differentiate between green and blue, and if I show you a bunch of different variations of green and one blue, you won’t be able to distinguish the blue.

There are also studies showing that certain languages predispose the speaker to be able to hold more information in their mind, because of the way the language is structured. I think... Czech? Croatian? I don’t remember. Eg “the green egg is on the counter” versus “green is the color on the counter of the egg”.

There are studies showing that the Chinese brain evolved concurrent with the Chinese language.

The reason they can’t come up and say this is because it means nigs are simply inferior. And it means that languages which developed recursion are superior (Latin, Sanskrit).

>> No.18175300

>>18175115
Have you talked about Pirahã people with them?

>> No.18175302

>>18175246
absolutely. a lot of my internal thinking is done in english despite it not even being my third language, and i notice a whole group of changes in that process and especially in the type of emotional response i have to things. it can't be bullshit.

>> No.18175319

>>18175287
> doesn't define knowledge
> doesn't define retention
> doesn't explain how this amounts to "superiority"
way to shoe horn your hatred of the nigs into linguistics

>> No.18175337

https://www.opencolleges.edu.au/informed/memory-tricks/native-language-affects-memory/

>> No.18175344

>language cannot really change the way in which someone's mind works

What does this even mean?
I don't know in what sense this could possibly be true.
You apparently cant even count if your language is anumeric.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2011.01209.x

>> No.18175362

>>18175300
yeah it was mentioned very briefly, but it wasn't really addressed. maybe next time.

>> No.18175381

>>18175115
>sapir-whorf hypothesis
ahh cool I didn't know the name for this, would enjoy reading a thread about it.
I still get mad sometimes that in high-school the AP psych teacher claimed words cannot have meaning outside of their intrinsic semantic definitions and when I raised my hand to object she dismissed my suggestion as foolish and absurd

>> No.18175501

>>18175302
Could you give an example?

>> No.18176137

>>18175501
sure thing. i'm more prone to neuroticism and melancholy in english than in arabic.
let's say that i just missed an important appointment today because i didn't wake up in time. my initial thought process in reaction to this event is to spin my wheels in the mud of self loathing and despair for a while, cursing myself again and again, and increasing my stress levels overall. then, if i was to have to a conversation with somebody in my native language about this issue, i'd become more easy going, switching into the lane of ''whatever, it happens'' instead of ''oh my god i'm doomed''. while my mind is still chaotic, the chaos is less threatening, if that makes sense.
this is a very silly thing to say but i also noticed that i'm ''''wiser'''' when dealing with things in arabic. calmer, more considerate, closer to the interlocutor, while i'm more self-centered in english.
i believe this is all due to my experiences with each respective tongue. the english language is tainted with the blues since in anglo cultures, and especially with modern globalist culture with one universal language, melancholy is kind of encouraged, and by proxy, there's a more media (whether it's literature, music, films, you name it) that revels in that atmosphere. and as a final point, it's a lot easier to say ''i hate myself'' than it is to say ''انا أكره نفسي''. each one has a different baggage, one tends to be heavier in certain areas than the other.
maybe there's folks here who also go through a similar ordeal with the constant shifting from one language to the next.

>> No.18176204

>>18175115
I think you should read Donald Davidson's paper "On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme." It fits with what you're saying the current research is saying. I think it's true. Natural languages may change up how you carve up stuff the world, for example it changes how you think of the "natural" predicates (that's why our "green" is different from the analogous "green" of Japan or that of certain people in Africa), but it's not going to give you new grammatical categories. Everything declarative in one natural language is fully translatable into another. Obviously there's more to language than what goes into a declarative sentence (stuff like interrogation or exclamation) but even that stuff is translatable. Languages cannot alter our minds beyond what is possible. It implies that mankind share a universal conceptual scheme. Davidson goes even further with that line, he wants to say it's actually incomprehensible to say there could be any alternative conceptual schemes.

>> No.18176266

>>18175287
>There are also studies showing that certain languages predispose the speaker to be able to hold more information in their mind, because of the way the language is structured. I think... Czech? Croatian? I don’t remember.
This maybe explains why Croats love quizzes so much.

>> No.18176291

If I don’t have the words I need to articulately express myself, did I even have a thought? Scientific autists who have never written fiction or made love to a woman once in their lives. Of course the language you speak effects the way the brain thinks. Even subsets of English do this. Legalese and Ebonics both come to mind. They both critically effect the way you express yourself. Some have ‘better’ ways to express oneself (ie different) than traditional English. It’s absurd to think that something called the “Romance languages” don’t express things differently in a totality of micro adjustments. I see friends who speak Spanish who’s personality and attitudes completely change when they swap between languages. I know nerdy blacks who can ‘go hood’ (see what I did there) at the drop of a hat. I know lawyers who are charming and personable one minute to nearly incomprehensible the next.

>> No.18176355

>>18175115
> cognitive linguistics is metaphysics
cool story

>> No.18176421

>>18176137
while languages do have flavours for obvious reasons of being roughly equivalent yet representationally often totally different, this is probably because you use the languages in a different context and have experience different things, gain different associations, etc. but of course, any language is necessarily like this because the culture (even if closely related) will be different by the isolation that a different language affords. you consume the culture of its speakers so it is different.

>> No.18176438

>>18175287
>It’s real. There are colors that take certain language speakers many more seconds to differentiate between, because they lack the name for the color. If your language does not differentiate between green and blue, and if I show you a bunch of different variations of green and one blue, you won’t be able to distinguish the blue.
total bullshit. stopped reading there because you are peddling a myth. for starters, there are no universal colours defined independently of a given language. so there is no intermediary to compare them against.

>> No.18176455

>>18176438
>for starters, there are no universal colours defined independently of a given language. so there is no intermediary to compare them against.
to add: there is no 'blue' that you defer to in relation to comparing two languages. no words to describe what is not dependent. everyone sees the same. this is a matter of communication. default, basic colours. you can't say english basic colours are evidence that another language with incompatibly defined basic colours means its speakers can't see something.

>> No.18176630

>>18176355
why wouldn't it be

>> No.18176684

>>18176438
>>18176455
Don't be so autistic about it, in Japan for example some shades that we in the west would consider green are described by the word for blue. What you would call a shade of green, a Japanese person would call a shade of blue. They both see the same thing, but interpret it very differently due to the difference in language.

>> No.18177301

>>18175115
It's an analytic proposition, i.e. depending on how you define the words "language", "determine", and "cognition", it could be either true or false.

>> No.18177325

>>18175115
Perhaps the deboonking is part of the way the scientist's brain has been affected.

>> No.18177361

>>18175300
Is there any evidence that Piraha people couldn't invent things like words for number higher than 10 if they really needed it? Defenders of Sapir-whorf tend to forget that language determination almost always go hand-in-hand with environmental determination. For instance some languages don't have words for "left and right", they use "north" and "south" instead. The people who traditionally speak it have little need for left or right because they're almost always outside and are all raised to be able to deduce where the north is. But if left and right as concept became necessary to their survival, and if they were given some time to adapt, would they come to invent word for those concepts? To prove or disprove something like Sapir-whorf you'd need to be able to answer that kind of question.

Also, Mayan has no tenses, yet the Mayan people were extremely skilled at designing calendar system and they calculated the length of the solar year with a margin of error close to a mere second.

>> No.18177676

>>18177361
If the Piraha people need to invent words for numbers higher than ten in order to be able to count doesn't that imply that language can change the way people minds work?

It's not that the Piraha people don't have words that represent amounts. They don't have the concept of amounts at all. They can't look at two piles of ten batteries each and understand that they are the same.

>> No.18177788

>>18175115
>What does /lit/ think of this whole situation ?
The fact that mathematics can be used to prove non-obvious and non-trivial statements is proof that language can effect mental processes.
Personally I doubt that there is actually a mind outside of linguistic constructs. Maybe basic sensory experiences but that's it. People want so hard to believe they have some sort of individual identity, but its all a vain effort to cope with the fact that only entire languages and civilizations have personalities and individual human flesh-bodies are just defective reflections of a grander meta-intelligence.

>> No.18177804

>>18177676
>They can't look at two piles of ten batteries each and understand that they are the same.
They aren't the same though. Language has tricked you into living in a completely imaginary world.

>> No.18177927
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18177927

languagebros...

>> No.18178368

>>18177804
I'm afraid i don't understand what you mean by that

>> No.18178397

>>18178368
Numbers are a pure mental abstraction that don't exist outside of platonic forms. One pile of batteries is quite literally not the same thing as another pile of batteries, and it's only through linguistic abstraction that you can safely forget this fact and mentally exist in a false-reality of compartmentalized simulations of pure being.

>> No.18178412

>>18177676
No, they can match batteries one-to-one just fine.

They're not good at remembering quantities because they don't have number words. Other than that they're the same as US undergraduates.

http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Mail/xmcamail.2014-12.dir/pdf2Yb7JAO0ZG.pdf

>> No.18178428

>>18176684
>What you would call a shade of green, a Japanese person would call a shade of blue
read my posts you fucking retard. i just told there are no colour words independent of language. no, a japanese would not call it blue because they don't speak english and there is no 'blue' equivalent. there's no 'blue' equivalent in most languages, even when they seem to mostly align. because these basic colours can encompass different objects that even when mostly agreeing, differ. e.g. a raven is blue.

>> No.18178435

>>18178428
kek, based

>> No.18178438

>>18177361
>Also, Mayan has no tenses, yet the Mayan people were extremely skilled at designing calendar system and they calculated the length of the solar year with a margin of error close to a mere second.
totally different matter than number words. tense or no tense is meaningless because it's not like they can't communicate time, unlike number words which do have implications in need and representation of quantity.

>> No.18178452

i speak two languages natively: Chinese and English

sapirwhorf is real. i am a different person when speaking and thinking in chinese vs English

>> No.18178471

>>18178428
blue blau bleu

>> No.18178528

>>18175115
So the marginal slither that prevents 'cannot really change' from being ' it cannot change', is not just humble scientific uncertainty, but an autistic ignorance of emotional expressions, no matter how significant in quantifiable scale, to be even enough to register as a speck of value. Yeah even in their own words you can shee this shite.

>> No.18178551
File: 366 KB, 1223x1733, wittgenstein.jpg [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
18178551

>>18175115
>sapir-whorf hypothesis
Every time I hear people talk about this they get really indignant and moralistic about it, like it's some kind of evil... Isn't anyone who has learned two languages, and read a book in one language and then it's translation, or translated a book themselves, aware of the way different words in different languages produce different thoughts, evoke different connotations? When I read a work in Middle English, with its different syntax, it creates different mental gestures and associations... veni vidi vici is not the same tangible thing as I came I saw I conquered, arete is not virtue.

>> No.18178571

>>18178551
Its obvious but saying such a thing undermines the concept of human equality and universalism, which is the causi beli of the Anglo-American empire.

If homosexuals only exist as a linguistic concept within western-european traditions, then how can you justify drone strikes on afghanistan hospitals in the name of gay rights? Suddenly empire building seems almost selfish, and once you allow things to be linguistically relativized you have to actually make an effort to understand a foreign culture, instead of picking out the quirky stuff you think is cute and dismissing the rest as primitive.

>> No.18178586

>>18178571
to be fair muslims are only persecuting homosexuals in the present way that they are because they have inherited the western concept. in old times you would need bunch of independent witnesses to confirm the act of sodomy occurred and pederasty was rife and basically accepted anyway.

>> No.18179468

>>18175246>>18175302

>The words you have access to shape your interactions with the world, and these in turn shape you as person in general.
this only applies to atheists, since those subhumans have no critical thinking

>> No.18179505

>>18178551
True

I thought these people celebrated diversity?

If everything is actually just the same then there's no difference

>> No.18179509

>>18175115
Language is in the mind. changing language changes the mind. Silly dualists.

>> No.18180799

>>18178551
yeah that's what really weirds me out with these guys. it's always treated as this insultingly idiotic thing to believe in, with a lot of scorn towards its supporters. you'd think that it's some l. ron hubbard tier theory if you were to only hear about it through them. why does it rustle their jimmies so much ? i have no clue. maybe all those years inside the academia machine made them allergic to any slight of esotericism.

>> No.18180914

>>18178428
Did you even read my post retard? My entire point was that because the same object / shade of colour is interpreted by language to be in a specific category, the entire assessment of that object / shade of colour is viewed differently, because of language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ao_(color)

>> No.18181308

>>18175287
Most Bantu languages have dozens of different noun classes. Khoisan languages have far larger consonant inventories than any others in the world.
Guess this means that whites are simply inferior.

>> No.18181321

>>18176137
Okay thanks, it does see plausible that it is about associations but I wouldn't know how to test this like this is saying>>18176421

>> No.18182211
File: 98 KB, 871x771, S-W.png [View same] [iqdb] [saucenao] [google]
18182211

>>18178551
My layman reading suggest the trouble is in the proof. It's structurally very difficult to use experiments to prove the strong-case for linguistic relativity though we commonly recognize the prevalence of the weak-case. I would wager there are some readings of S-W with pretty radical implications invoking magick and occult and that's what gets some hardline detractors in a tizzy but idk just a guess.

>> No.18182456

>>18175115
I started to believe in it stronger after I started studying Chinese. Chinks describe and perceive things very diffrently than us, and I don't mean just grammar and words.

>> No.18182887

>>18182456
what like the I-Ching?

>> No.18184104

>>18182211
good guess here

>> No.18184903

>>18182456
Like what? I also study Chinese and nothing immediately comes to mind.