#something something sapir whorf hypothesis

[egharcourt]

Now and then I revisit Cantonese (my first language) romantic pop songs whenever I feel like it, which I just did, and whoa. The rich lyricism and descriptiveness never fail to captivate me every time. I wish I could translate it fully, but there's a lot of nuance in a single Cantonese sentence that can't be replicated in English. Maybe that's why the emotion of love has always been a visual thing to me that I can never quite put into words in writing, granted that all my works are written in English.

Nothing tugs at your heartstrings like love songs in your native tongue. I guess.

[elodieunderglass]

Hi! I was wondering if you could help me out with a word I've forgotten? I'm trying to remember the name for a concept that (I think) talks about how people better understand or process Things once they have vocabulary to describe it - I've heard it talked about in regards to the colour orange, or coercive control, etc.

long story short i've just read a paper saying ancient Greeks and Romans weren't racist bc they had no word for racism and am trying to form an argument against!

(no worries if this is unanswerable, i'm aware its a bit of a long shot but you struck me as a person who Knows Things)

That’s extremely kind and funny of you. i don’t know much but i am ok at synthesis.

I think you might be thinking of the concepts loosely called the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis”, which describes something called “linguistic determinism.” This idea has been “disproven”, as it is just too reductionist as a concept - people are clearly perfectly capable of having experiences that are tough to describe with words. There will be plenty of papers showing how this reasoning is applied.

but it is still commonly thrown around and still considered a useful teaching framework. That’s why you’ll see it referenced online as if it is fresh, new, and applicable - people learn about it every year in college. Also, elements of the framework are probably perfectly sound. It definitely seems to be the case that language shapes brains; it just doesn’t seem to be the case that humans who don’t have specific words for them can’t experience orange, or the future.

(Many things in college are taught using teaching frameworks that may not be, technically, true; the framework is intended to give a critical structure for interpreting information. Then, when we later find evidence that disproves the hypothesis, that single piece of information doesn’t destroy our expensive college education; what we paid for is the framework. This is mostly frustrating in the sciences, when fresh crops of undergraduate students crash around on social media, grappling with their first exposure to (complex concept) and how it’s DIFFERENT to what they learned BEFORE and their teachers LIED TO EVERYBODY and they’re going to save the world from POP SCIENCE by telling the TRUTH. You’ll notice that these TOTALLY NEW INFORMATION reveals map along the semester schedule. The thing here is that getting new information, or information being different from what you were previously told, does not cancel out the fact that you are getting what you pay for - an education. Learning new facts that change our relationships to hypotheses isn’t a ✨huge betrayal ✨ , but the expected process of academia. Anyway.)

You have an interesting response here, and can start by looking at the ways that Sapir-Whorf has been disproved. There will be loads of literature on that.

However, it would be interesting to look at the argument as an unpicking of the other side’s rather weird, ritualistic superstitious belief that a behavior doesn’t exist if the creatures doing it can’t describe it. It is not on the ancient Greeks and Romans to categorise and interpret their behavior for a modern educated audience. They do not have the wherewithal to do so. They are also fucking dead. We can name the behaviors we see, and describe their impacts, however the hell we like.

Sure, the ancient Greeks used “cancer” to refer to lumpy veiny tumors. We can infer that they still had blood cancer, because their medical texts describe leukaemia and their corpses have evidence of it - they just didn’t know it was cancer. But we do, so we can call it cancer. Just because Homer said “the wine-dark sea” in a flight of girlish whimsy doesn’t mean he was unable to distinguish grape juice from saltwater, which we know, because we can observe that he was an intelligent wordsmith perfectly capable of talking about wine and oceans in other contexts. We are the people who get to stand at our point of history with our words, and name things like “this person probably died of leukaemia” and “poets say things that aren’t necessarily literal” and “this behaviour was racist” and “that’s gay” and “togas kinda slay tho” despite Ancient Greeks having different concepts of cancer, wittiness, prejudice, homosexuality, and slaying than we do today.

Now just to caveat that people do get muddled about the concept of racism. Our understanding of racism from here - this point of history, with these words, probably from the West - is heavily influenced by how we see racism around us today: white supremacy and the construct of “whiteness,” European colonial expansion, transatlantic chattel slavery, orientalism, evangelism, 20th century racial science, and so on. This is the picture of racism that really dominates our current discourse, so people often mistake it for the definition of racism. (Perhaps in a linguistic-deterministic sort of way after all.) As a result, muddled-up people often say things like “I can’t be racist because I’m not a white American who throws slurs at black American people,” while being an Indian person in the UK who votes for vile anti-immigration practices, or a Polish person with a horrible attitude about the Roma. Many people genuinely hold this very kindergarten idea of racism; if your opponent does as well, they’re probably thinking something like “Ancient Greek and Roman people didn’t have a concept of white supremacy, because whiteness hadn’t been invented yet, so how could they be racist?” And that’s unsound reasoning in a separate sense.

Racism as the practice of prejudice against an ethnicity, particularly one that is a minority, is a power differential that is perfectly observable in ancient cultures. The beliefs and behaviors will be preserved in written plays, recorded slurs, beauty standards, reactions to foreign marriages, and travel writing. The impacts will be documented in political records, trade agreements, the layouts of historical districts of ancient towns.

You don’t need permission to point out behaviours and impacts. You can point them out in any words you like. You can make up entirely new words to bully the ancient romans with. You are the one at this point of history and your words are the ones that get used.

Pretending that “words” are some kind of an intellect-obscuring magical cloud in the face of actual evidence is just a piece of sophistry (derogatory) on the part of your opponent here. It’s meant to be a distraction. You can dismiss this very flimsy shield pretty quickly and get them in the soft meat of them never reading anything about the actual material topic, while they’re still looking up dictionary definitions or whatever.

[max1461]

Something that I thought would be confusing but just isn't is that Japanese uses the opposite set of direction metaphors for time as English does. So in English, words like "ahead" refer to the future, and "behind" refer to the past. In Japanese it's reversed, 前 (mae) means "in front" and "before", while 後 (ato) means "behind" and "after".

When I first heard about this I thought it would require some kind of difficult retooling of how I visualize time, but turns out it just doesn't. 前 just means "past" to me in a time context and "front" in a space context, mutatis mutandis for 後, and it's no problem. Turns out the spacial metaphor wasn't really load-bearing in my conception of time to begin with.

It's shit like this that makes me doubt the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

[ukulelekatie]

What is the sapir whorf hypothesis?

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the idea that language dictates thought. In the strongest sense of this hypothesis, if you don’t have the vocabulary for a concept, that concept doesn’t exist to you.

This is pretty controversial in the field of linguistics. Many agree with the concept of linguistic relativity, or the idea that language can influence the way people interact with the world. For example, different languages have different systems of words for sorting colors. In English, green and blue are considered two different colors, while several languages, like Zulu and Xhosa, don’t distinguish between the two and instead have a single word that encompasses both hues (sometimes referred to as “grue” by English-speaking linguists). On the other hand, English speakers consider dark blue and light blue to be different shades of the same color, while Mongolian has two separate words for them. Some languages, like Pirahã, only lexically distinguish between light colors and dark colors.

In other words, if you gave people from different places a bunch of paint chips and told them to sort them all by color, you might find some interesting differences in the results. But just because they’re categorized differently doesn’t mean the colors necessarily look different to different speakers. Most English speakers with normal vision can still tell the difference between light blue and dark blue even if we don’t have distinct terms for them, just like a speaker of a language without blue/green distinction can discriminate between the color of the sky and the color of grass.

The idea that language determines your thoughts (linguistic determinism) also leads down a very slippery slope, often with racist connotations. (Linguistics as a field has quite a long history of racist ideology, unfortunately.) The most famous example of this is Whorf’s conclusion that the Hopi Native Americans have no concept of time because the Hopi language does not have grammatical tense. In reality, there are other structures in this language that Hopi speakers utilize in order to just as effectively convey the past, present, and future as languages that do so with grammatical tense. On the flip side, English does not have a grammatical gender noun class system like Spanish or French does, but no one is trying to argue that English speakers don’t have a concept of gender!

My linguistics professors in undergrad really emphasized how flawed this hypothesis is, despite how convincing it can sound on the surface, and it has stuck with me and my classmates ever since. A few years ago, I was hanging out with some friends from college, and the only friend in the group who didn’t take at least one ling class mentioned something about reading “a really cool article about how language affects the way you think!” I can still hear the collective groan of everyone else in the room when he said that, followed by all of us scrambling to explain the issues and nuances of that claim 😂

[gayferrari]

i kind of miss charlos doing challenges in italian, it’s fun to see them communicate in something other than english. i know the sapir-whorf hypothesis has been pretty much disproven but it’s still an interesting perspective to rpf from i think. what do you think? do you think they have differences in the way they communicate in italian than when they communicate in english?

I don't really have any specific thoughts but I will say that ofc Charles's Italian is better than Carlos and you could RPFy the fuck out of them communicating in different languages in different circumstances in a way that gives one of them the upper hand. Especially if it's 2021 era charlos when Charles's English was still not up to Carlos's. I'm thinking about the way Nico Rosberg switches expression / manner / register whenever he switches languages and how at the height of the silver war he used that in his advantage with the media (and lowkey even does it today when he's on comms) and like... there's so much that could be done with languages in F1 rpf. So much

[transsexualism]

hello! long time follower here :) I just wanted to ask if you have any nice resources on translation... if everything goes well, I'm starting a degree in translation and interpretation later this year, and I wanna be a little caught up on the topic :)) no pressure tho!

hi bestie ! this will heavily depend on what your source language is seeing as successful translation depends not only on your knowledge of the language itself, but also your understanding of the two different cultures and therefore ability to find equivalence between them. i would recommend meaning across cultures by eugene nida and something on linguistic relativity aka the sapir-whorf hypothesis (looking up just now, the anthropology of language by h ottenheimer looks promising if basic but i havent actually read it so i cant vouch for it). this is the key linguistic theory that is the foundation of translation as a general field. also i found the culture code by clotaire rapaille just now in recommended reading for my cultural linguistics class, which may be insightful

im unable to rec anything on methodology or specific aspects of translation as a process, partly because as i said it will greatly vary depending on the source language and partly because im not taught in english and therefore most of the resources im familiar with arent in english either fjdjdjdj

i hope it turns out well !!! im excited for you

[terraced-dreams]

THE HAPPINESS OF NOT KNOWING HOW TO COUNT

Deep in the Amazon jungle, there is an ethnic group that is considered one of the happiest in the world.

This culture's worldview is reflected in its language: it does not have words to designate colors, numbers or the passage of time.

The Pirahãs (pirarrãs) are hunter-gatherers who live along the Maici River, in the Brazilian state of Amazonas.

Apaitsiiso (“what comes out of the head”) is what the Pirahãs call their language, the last extant of the extinct Mura language family.

Their language shapes and is shaped by their worldview: they have no way of counting.

Instead of numbers, they use comparative terms like “bigger” or “smaller.”

For them, 2 fish are “bigger” than 1 fish, just as a large fish is “bigger” than a small one.

A linguist, Daniel Everett, wanted to teach them arithmetic. But after months of effort, they couldn't understand the concept.

None of them learned to add 1 + 3.

Everett, with the help of psychologists, understood that this was simply not how the Pirahã conceived the world.

The Pirahās also lack names for colors, which does not mean that they are not able to distinguish them.

They simply do not categorize the spectrum into more subtle or specific colors, such as teal, yellow ochre, or taupe.

As with numbers, the Pirahãs conceive of colors in terms of relationships: something can be “darker” or “like blood or lips.”

Categories such as “numbers” and “colors” are not conceived in isolation from a whole. They are defined through their relationship with that whole.

The Pirahãs highly value experience and first-hand knowledge.

And that vision of life is expressed in the structure of their language, through the curious use of suffixes: those particles that are added to the end of a word to modify its meaning.

Let's take the Spanish suffix “-ento”. This creates an adjective from a noun and gives it the quality of “state” or “likeness”; as in “amarillento” (yellowish) or “polvoriento” (dusty).

Pirahã suffixes indicate what evidence a speaker has to support what they say.

Linguists call these types of suffixes “evidential.”

There are 3 pirahãs evidential suffixes, which can convey key information succinctly, for which a complete sentence in other languages.

Everett gives an example:

If a pirahã says “Your boat has a hole.”

• One type of suffix would denote rumor: “I know because they told me so.”

• Another would indicate observation: “I can see fish swimming in it.”

• And a third, deduction: “I can see your ship sinking, so it must have a hole.”

Other peculiarities of this language is that everything is spoken in the present, there is no future or past.

There are no terms that identify kinship or descent. The word for Father and Mother is the same.

The pirahãs, who do not reach a thousand individuals, are happy people: they only live in an eternal “now”. In their language there are no past or future tenses.

Many of them have no memories of their grandparents. When asked what life was like for their ancestors, they respond: “The same.”

That happiness is reflected in the fact that they are almost always laughing.

They have no religion and do not believe in any god. They don't believe in anything they can't see or feel. So they do not believe in a supreme spirit or creative deity, only in lesser spirits that can haunt them.

A curious fact is that the linguist Everett was a missionary when he made contact with the Pirahãs in the 70s.

He tried to evangelize them, but the indigenous people lost interest when they learned that Everett had never seen Jesus. These experiences led Everett to atheism.

The relationship between language, culture and thought is a topic that has fascinated linguists.

Does thought condition language or is it the other way around?

Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Whorf developed the hypothesis that language influences thinking and not the other way around.

The “Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis”, in its “hard” version, maintains that people from different cultures think differently due to differences in their languages.

Thus, Pirahã speakers perceive reality differently than speakers of Spanish, Portuguese or English.

Few linguists today support that version. The “weak” claim, linguistic relativity, enjoys greater favor. According to this, language influences perceptions, thinking and, at least potentially, behavior. But not what determines them.

Each people, each culture, gives names to circumstances in their environment that their culture tells them is important.

The Japanese have several words (“potsupotsu,” “parapara,” “shitoshito,” and “zāzā”) to describe sensations associated with different intensities of rain.

The Yagan people, indigenous to the Tierra del Fuego region of South America, have the word “mamihlapinatapei.” Its meaning implies “a wordless but meaningful look shared by two people who want to start something but are reluctant to do so.”

The importance of the study of languages, of which some 2,500 are in danger of extinction, lies in knowing the different ways of conceiving reality.

The language of a people is an expression of their worldview, a human quality.

But when does language emerge?

Many researchers believe that language is the heritage of Homo sapiens. Others, like the aforementioned Daniel Everett, think that language has emerged parallel to the development of the brain, and that it would have already appeared even in Homo erectus, perhaps 800,000 years ago.

[gothhabiba]

najia what does sapir-whorf mean please I'm nosey

The "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" (by which these people generally mean linguistic determinism, or the "strong" version of the hypothesis*) is one of those things that pop linguistics enjoyers and the general public have firmly glommed onto, despite the fact that it never achieved widespread acceptance from linguists and is now held in even worse regard than it was when it was first proposed. If people think they know two things about linguistics, they're probably the "prescriptivist / descriptivist" distinction (they also don't understand what that means) and the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis."

The "strong" hypothesis basically holds that language determines the form of one's thoughts and what one is able to think about; if a language does not have a word or grammatical category for something, a native speaker of that language does not have (and perhaps, is unable ever to have) a concept of that thing.

People love this because it does the common pop science thing of sounding pretty cool and having radical, widespread implications for how you think about something, without actually challenging any deeply held beliefs. Also it was proposed by linguists, and people I guess don't realise that not all linguists agree with each other, or that a couple people can propose an idea that is thereafter widely discredited. As you can likely imagine, this idea is mostly used to be very racist (you can look up "Hopi time controversy" for more on that).

*Linguistic relativity, or the 'weak' version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (in essence, the idea that a language structure influences how a native speaker of that language thinks), is a more diffuse idea in linguistics. Claims of this nature are not all dismissed by all linguists. The nomenclature of "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" or of "strong" or "weak" versions thereof is itself a bit confusing, since Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf never actually wrote a paper together propounding a specific claim having to do with linguistic relativity or linguistic determinism. There is no one "hypothesis" that properly bears this name--rather, a lot of claims along that spectrum are collected under that banner. Linguists do not like this very much. Because, as I said, it is confusing.

[pruning-the-minds-garden]

Hypnokink Basics: Special Techniques (pt 3) - Neurolinguistic Programming

Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP)

I don't have an example for this one and will instead link to "Kinky NLP" by sleepingirl

NLP is a bit of an odd creature, because it has such a woolly definition. In the broadest possible terms, it is a suite of techniques that use the way we talk about things to reframe the way we think about things, as a kind of in-language extension of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. It also overlaps with conditioning/brainwashing to some extent.

One common technique of NLP is called an "Incantation," though hypnokinksters might better know it as a "mantra." Repeatedly saying something that you want to be true or to make true about yourself - "obedience is pleasure," "I am a good doll," "I am my Master's perfect fucktoy" or whatever you might want as part of your kinky dynamic - can gradually, over time, make it more and more true and transform your mind. It can reprogram your brain, bit by bit. This has limits, of course, in that there are certain things that are hard-wired into your brain that are unlikely to change, but there are many more than you think that are not. Using something like this does not require a hypnotic induction to work. It might benefit from one, or from being in some other altered state (heightened arousal or the edge of orgasm, for example), but it doesn't require any of that in order to work. All it needs is motivation, and to be used with regularity over time.

A second technique which is often poached from the NLP playbook by many hypnotists, and many (pardon me I feel a bit ill) "pick-up artists" is "mirroring." This technique is, essentially, to help build rapport with someone more quickly by mirroring their body language, word choice, and so on - taking a drink whenever they take a drink, using the same words they do when describing things, etc. I bring it up because this is an example of a technique that, when used carefully, thoughtfully, and in moderation can be very helpful... but when used thoughtlessly and carelessly, can be less than useless.

For example, if you start mimicking every action of a person to whom you are speaking, leaning in altogether too close for comfort, using their exact body language, their precise word choice... that's incredibly creepy. Don't do that. The way I employ mirroring is more targeted. If I notice that a partner consistently uses a certain word to describe something in trance - they see a "scarlet" ball of light, for instance - then I make sure to use that word, not some similar word like "red" or "crimson" when I describe that same thing. However they tell me they experience trance, that is how I describe the experience back to them. If they make it clear that they want [x], [y] and [z] in trance, then that is not only what I want, that is what I am enthusiastic to provide (though that's because of my own personal proclivities as much as it is any mirroring on my part, but it does serve the purpose).

[softgrungeprophet]

i write obviously, i took a lot of language and linguistics classes in college. it's a mix of art, science, it's deeply intertwined with anthropology and culture

anyway

it's rare (but possible; there are no universals in language) that a word is brought into the world bad. a word is a tool. it can be used to describe, to free, to find community and like minds (whether going on the adhd subreddit or being like, wow i'm gay too, let's chat) and of course it can also be used cruelly or twisted, to hurt people and confine them. words old and new can be used for all kinds of purposes of varying shittiness, varying goodness, varying neutralities...

but it's the people behind the words, not the words themselves making them tools/weapons/beauty etc.

on the one hand this means there are always new ways to use words and new words to exist, for better and for worse, and on the other hand this means that the problem is rarely the word itself (though obviously slurs are a bit more complicated in that regard) (and rarely straightforward among the people they are applied to) and rarely is a cultural or social problem addressed by something as black and white as "stop making words, stop using words, stop labeling experiences"--etc etc, take your pick of argument

the thing is, with words... is that stuff like that (restriction of any and all descriptions) is never going to happen (and if it did, that would be bad, imo), that's what words are and what language is

i think the most key thing i've ever kept in mind both during and beyond my language studies (and my general passion for linguistics, even as very much a low level non-professional--a hobbyist with a BA, if you will) is that words, grammar, intonation, all of it--language is context.

that might legitimately be the only universal in language now that i think about it lol. context. it's key--KEY--to meaning, to intention, to metaphor and color and poetry and all these other things. What language are you speaking? that's context. the fact that i'm writing this in english is context. it tells you how the letters and words i'm using should be interpreted.

context is the way language joins with culture (in all interpretations of the word: community, sexuality, ethnicity, class, etc.), with humanity and so on. they're linked so closely imo. this why any language class that's even halfway decent will generally have small mini-lessons, side paragraphs, tangents, about the culture in which they're spoken. Why IS this idiom? What DOES this word's use need? (though of course at a certain point you get into etymology there and ime most classes won't go too deep into that lol. it's essentially an entire field.)

now, listen, I don't buy into the sapir whorf stuff. for the most part, i think they were full of shit. at least when the hypothesis is taken to its most strict reaches. its highest concreteness. (not that there isn't sooome aspect of truth; i don't necessarily discount the hypothesis entirely and linguistic censorship and control 100% is a real, fashy thing, it's just... what i said. people make new words and find ways to talk about things they don't have words for. i don't think the nonexistence of a single or a few words necessarily prevents the entirety of a concept from existing, personally, though i won't argue that it can't mold perception or anything like that. what is propaganda after all...)

i'm rambling.

you know, last year around 8 months ago, a year or so after i first got diagnosed with adhd (was almost 28 at the time, am now 29 (and a half), took me... 5 years to find someone who would do anything) i was looking around, because i was physically allowed to begin stimulant medications after a couple of years of some serious health issues that prevented me from being prescribed anything other than non stimulants (probably reasonable at the time but still frustrating)--i went on reddit (i know 😂 but it's not that kind of story) to see what others' experiences were like.

the recurring thing people would say most often, of course, is that everyone on the board is different, that everyone's experiences will be (have been, are) different. not just medication but holistically. ADHD may have many commonalities but nonetheless, everyone's brain is different.

the other thing was me looking at threads of people saying, "am i the only one who does this?" and "no one i've ever met irl has this thing" and then seeing dozens of people say, yes i do this too, i also have not been able to meet other people doing this, i also thought i was alone,

and so on. little struggles and strangenesses that often felt like a pressure from everyone around them (us) irl asking why can't you just do X? (if you just cared more/tried harder) and you get a bunch of people saying, you're not actually alone, we're all here and not all of us do that but here are six or twelve or twenty or two hundred people who do.

it's funny because until my mid twenties (around senior year of college i think is when i began to look into it, thanks to posts i had seen online describing various aspects of adult adhd, adhd in girls, etc (not that i necessarily go with "girl" atm)) i had no word for describing what i was.

but the thing is i could tell there was something. so without the word to actually find other people like me or to learn about ADHD in a practical way, what i ended up with was not a lack of boxing myself in or of confining myself to a label. lol. lmao. prior, without "ADHD" as a reference point, what i had for myself was instead, "lazy" and "stupid" and "broken."

i don't trust any post that declares a cure to a cultural issue being to remove a word or words. rarely if ever will that solve anything. what it almost definitely will do, however, is deprive. when you do not have a word you can share with anyone else, it is very hard to find people who are like you (bisexual, ADHD, possibly a "drop of autism" as one of my therapists said) but people, including yourself, will still notice the things that make you yourself. that's the context, so where are the words?

(you know something funny? in either 6th or 8th grade (i only remember it was not 7th because we were in a different building in 7th grade) a friend of mine, in the gym, named Sadie, asked me "are you autistic?" Because she noted that i almost never make eye contact. i told her no. now, of course, with an unquestionably autistic younger brother (and me finally w an ADHD diagnosis like... 10 years later) all of us have begun to wonder about for example me and my sister but also about others in our family. we are a strange bunch. for some of us it's definitely ADHD, though some of my uncles are dyslexic, and for others... well you know how it is lol)

anyway what the fuck was i saying (how the fuck do i get my gboard to recognize context and stop suggesting "duck" no matter how many times i delete it?)

i just think it's always key to remember that the thing about words is that it's how you use them.

("born this way" is not innately a confinement; it was made that way out of a phrase intended to mean "this is who i am and there is nothing wrong with me"--not to restrict oneself to being only one immutable thing but to say I Was Born Me. Who "me" is doesn't have to be set in stone) (that's how i feel at least)

[lonepower]

@eri-223 replied to your post “i am the dinghy. this has never happened before”:

ooh mountain in the sea is on my pile. and I enjoyed vespertine

​It's SO good, I think you'll like it! My sole complaint is that it falls prey to the... I'm not sure what to call it, except the "debut author third act pacing problem"? I feel like there's been a noticeable tendency where an author's first novel is, like, astoundingly well put together except that the pacing in the third act specifically is all over the place. (Iron Widow had this problem too, imo. it definitely didn't detract from my overall enjoyment of either work; if anything it's something to be aware of if I ever finish an original longform...)

I went into it expecting "arrival, but with octopus," and while that wasn't... entirely inaccurate, the mountain in the sea was a lot better at not making me sit there going that's not what the sapir-whorf hypothesis means, dumbass!!! for the entire second half. I'm still peeved about that. but Ray Nayler did his got damn research! A+ on the linguistics accuracy and, while I'm not a marine biologist, I'm pretty sure the literal actual international advisor to NOAA probably knows what he's talking about there too. we love to see it.

also, weird bonding between three extremely emotionally stunted people who just want to do science (give or take). I love them so much. i love evrim so MUCH DO THEY KNOW THAT I CHERISH AND ADORE THEM-

[nem0c]

Hyperion, Dan Simmons

Priest’s Tale. Actually an epistolary narrative concerning a different priest. Catholic but a Jesuit archaeologist who’s main theological precursor is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (coincidentally someone I have read recently owing the nearby bookshop’s sometimes esoteric offering in it’s religion section). Actually an atheist and a scientist. Representative of the most common epistemological position of classic sf. Has an encounter that overturns this system of knowledge, confirms his faith in a living God, and spurs his faith in the necessary mortality of both himself and his Church. Read alongside: James Blish, A Case of Conscience

Soldier’s Tale. Limited 3rd person narration. We’re following one individual but at an emotional distance. We see the economic and political conditions necessary for the re-emergence of a noble warrior caste and limited warfare, something common in military sf, and then the changes which lead to it’s fall and the return of 20th century total war and terror and all the nastiness military sf skipped over. Kassad’s love for Moneta is the courtly romantic love that removes him from his fellow man and encourages his growth both as a knight of the FORCE and later as a butcher of men. Theological question: If a man utilises orbiting x-rays to take out a heretical Shi’a prophet, but then essentially pretends to direct Allah’s anger to prompt the remaining colonists into peaceful submission, is he at fault from a Sunni perspective? Little ‘The door dilated’ reference to Heinlein. Read alongside: Robert Heinlein, Starship Troopers (and/or Space Cadet and/or The Moon is a Harsh Mistress), Gordon Dickson, Dorsai series (even though I’ve only read Soldier, Ask Not which has an unusual protagonist and narrative for the series), Harry Harrison, Bill, the Galactic Hero

The Poet’s Tale. 1st person past-tense narration. Much discussion of the craft of writing. A lot to disagree with, particularly the notion that you’re using language as a degenerated tool to try and convey with clarity a pre-linguistic experience. Whether there are non-linguistic experiences or not, we are getting at them only through language, and a writer can hardly wield language with such craft and then claim it is a transparent medium. Contrary and excellent bit about the influence of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and General Semantics on sf when an accident that reduces his speech capabilities and leaves him in drudge labour also reduces his experience of life to a tight cycle; and he only escapes through expanding his language use and the conceptual space he inhabits. The Shrike, in it’s appearance as Muse, echoing the Soldier’s courtly love. Does a prophecy create the future it predicts? Read alongside: Choose your favourite Samuel Delany, A. E. van Vogt’s Null-A series, any William Burroughs.

The Scholar’s Tale. Limited 3rd person narration. The relative normality of Sol’s life provides good background on the day-to-day existence of the Hegemony. The mysteries of the Time Tombs get some exploration here. Theological concern: You are a Jew and Israel (and the whole Earth) is long, long gone and dead. The exile is forever. The Messiah h’aint coming. You’re having dreams in which a disembodied voice commands you to repeat Abraham and sacrifice your only living child; who is herself ageing backwards owing to contact with the Shrike. You are an agnostic scholar of ethics. What do?

The Detective’s Tale. 1st person past-tense narration. Neo-noir and cyberpunk plot starting in a run-down slum sector of some heavy g industrial world. Nice nod to Asimov’s Robot Detective novels both in that this is about a cynical human detective learning to trust a robot, and in the aside about residents of such planets usually developing agoraphobia. The cybrid (a manufactured human body piloted by an AI that is actually present in the Cloud) is a recreation of Keats. Contrary to the personality crises and shoddy cartesian assumptions of some cyberpunk, he is adamant that he is not the same person as the real Keats, and clears up the detective’s assumptions about AI: While they may appear to be disembodied ghosts inhabiting another plane, temporarily possessing manufactured bodies, that plane is a very much real and material computer network. Using both noir and cyberpunk’s penchant for consipracy to uncover the political situation between the Human Hegemony, the Ousters, and the AI Core. As Keats plans to escape the AI Core to a section of space with extremely limited access to the network, he must inhabit this manufactured body. Ending on an AI Word becoming Flesh in order to cause an immaculate conception in the detective for the onset of a future human/AI Messiah. Edit: Almost forgot, but I like the part where the hacker character has aged out of his youthful subculture and taken a sensible job as a public sector data analyst, only to realise his own betrayal and throw in for one last stupid hack when given the opportunity.

We skipped over the Templar. He vanishes in an actual closed-room mystery but the investigation turns up some possible characteristics. A story told without the narrator’s presence.

The Consul’s Tale. Initially 1st person present-tense account of a love affair with two time structures running side-by-side that is revealed to concern an event occurring decades prior to another person. Followed by a confessional. Interrogation of the colonial ambitions underlying various Galactic Federations in print sf.

In all instances, a story dealing with the various ways of writing an sf text, encapsulating an age and pronouncing its death. The sense of approaching apocalypse is palpable, with the Shrike as its avatar. Extremely good stuff and I am tempted to read the sequel as it depicts that Fall of an era, but I can’t see how or why you would speculate in a positive sense beyond that negation. It seems the author didn’t, as Endymion still gives us a narrative of the downfall of a particular age and state, but it swaps out the secular Hegemony for the Catholic Church in space.

[max1461]

Forgot to add the question bit to the last ask but basically how plausible do you think something like that is to be a significant thing? Either in the sapir whorfy way of language means people conceptualise failure differently, or the reverse where because that culture conceptualises failure differently for other reasons that's why the language doesn't have a word for it?

In reference to this.

I don't really know, because the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has basically not been tested (strong Sapir-Whorf is probably unfalsifiable, but weak Sapir-Whorf might be something you could investigate empirically), but my intuition is "there's no effect". I really doubt that what loanwords a language borrows is determined with anything like this semantic granularity.

So, ok, Bengali speakers have borrowed the English word "fail" to describe failing a test. I strongly suspect this is related to like, the education system, or media or something—basically exposure to the English word in that context. And English is a prestige language, so people want to borrow English words for all kinds of shit. In Japanese, the native word for test is shiken, but you can also use the English loanword tesuto. Why? I don't think any particular reason, really. It just caught on somehow. Why did English borrow the word amateur from French? Because French culture has more hobbyists? I somewhat doubt it.

Moreover, I doubt that Bengali speakers generally know English well enough to pick up on the subtleties in the semantics of English "fail", and judge that those semantic subtleties are better suited to "failing a test" than whatever the native Bengali word it. That seems... unlikely to me.

Like, OK, I want to clarify: I'm not saying your sister's research is bunk. For any given loanword (or really, even linguistic feature), if you're lucky, you might have enough data to track its spread like a virus. You know, "when did it enter the language, with which groups did it first get popular, etc. etc.". And I'm sure there are interesting sociological observations to be made here, on the micro level. Like this is a bunch of humans interacting, so of course the spread is going to be affected by human social processes, if you're looking at it with that much granularity. I don't doubt that at all. The thing that I doubt is that usage of loanwords can tell you something deep and abiding about how people from different cultures think about things, rather than just being related to a bunch of basically incidental and contingent facts of history.

[thoughtsfromthewindowsill]

Fun fact: "gender" was a linguistics term for at least a century before we have evidence for it as a word for subgroups of people.

It comes from the same root as "genre" & originally just meant a type/sort/category. Linguistic genders are just groups of words that take the same modifiers, often based on word endings. It just so happens that an easy way to delineate male & female versions of the same thing is to use the same word with different endings, which puts the word into two genders which linguists then called "masculine" & "feminine" not because of any inherent qualities but more in the sense of "the group which includes the masculine/feminine words".

And languages can have all sorts of genders! Lots have a neuter & animate/inanimate is pretty common; there's apparently one Australian language that has something like 15 linguistic genders! Some languages have no genders!

So yeah, person whose tags got screenshoted, the word genders are completely arbitrary. It's all just a social construction of putting random mouth noises in various orders to facilitate communication (the arbitrariness of the sign is part of what makes it language!); a gender is just a group with similar characteristics!

Personally, the next time someone gets high & mighty about gender at me, I just might follow the example of the African language Luganda & say my gender is "large objects & liquids"

(also @spacelazarwolf idk if anyone's looked into it from a gender perspective - they probably have - but your musings on language & sociology might benefit from investigation of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis)

it’s so funny to me when terfs and other transphobes talk about “biological pronouns”

you realise there is nothing about a vulva that means you have to call someone who has one “she”, right? and nothing about a penis that means you have to call someone who has one “he”? like that is literally a socially constructed idea based on the perceived gender of a person with a certain set of genitals.

you cannot be actually critical of gender if you are not critical of the ideas about it that society has created, you fucking clowns 💀

[adrenalinezetaax]

Pirahã and the Case for Linguistic Relativity

Pirahã is a topic that has fascinated me since I first heard about it years ago, when I was in high school. It’s a language spoken by a hunter-gatherer tribe in the Amazon that is the last surviving member of its linguistic family. This tribe was the subject of considerable interest when it was first contacted by linguists because it seemed to provide evidence for linguistic relativity—the hypothesis that language influences one’s perception of the world.

Throughout the eighties, the linguist Daniel Everett conducted research on the languages spoken in Amazon basin. He was surprised to find that one of those languages, Pirahã, had no numbers, only terms for “few” and “many.” When he tested speakers’ ability to match two quantities, he found that they performed less accurately when he hid one of those quantities from view and asked participants to recall it. Supposedly, the absence of number vocabulary compromised their ability to count as predicted by the linguistic relativity hypothesis.

Everett also made the startling claim that recursion, the ability to embed syntactic structures—at that time held to be an innate feature of language according to the theories of Noam Chomsky, was not in fact universal, using his research of Pirahã as evidence. The ensuing debate became the point of much controversy, with Chomsky calling Everett a “charlatan.” Pirahã is an outlier in several other respects as well: it also lacks color terms and according to some linguists is among the languages with the fewest phonemes (by some counts ten total), which allows speakers to communicate by whistling or humming.

If it is true that language influences how we think, then speakers of Pirahã are not unlike the fictional inhabitants of Tlön in the famous short story by Jorge Luis Borges, which imagines a language without nouns. Instead of saying “moon,” they say “to moonate,” and so on. In Borges’s story, this makes them idealists in the tradition of philosopher George Berkeley, who holds that the existence of the material world is an illusion.

However, many arguments for linguistic relativity tend to rest on misunderstandings about how language works—for example, by failing to distinguish between synthetic languages (which combine concepts into single words) and analytic ones (which separate them). A famous example is the claim that Inuit (or “Eskimo”) languages have fifty unique words for snow. This view is often attributed to Benjamin Whorf, who lends his name to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The assumption is that having a larger vocabulary grants speakers access to a richer repertoire of concepts, when they have in fact only a few word roots for snow with many different suffixes, similar to compound words in English, because Inuit languages are synthetic. Likewise, that Pirahã might require more words than English to express the same concept should not preclude speakers from learning it.

The debate surrounding linguistic relativity recalls certain philosophical problems regarding the nature of translation. The philosopher Hilary Putnam devised a thought experiment: he postulated a language where the word gavagai could refer to either a rabbit or ���undetached rabbit parts.” Both of these are plausible descriptions of the same object, which means that precise translation is impossible. This is relevant to the linguistic relativity hypothesis because proponents often assume that a concept only exists in a language if it can be expressed in a single word—but if any word can be decomposed into arbitrarily simpler concepts, then no word expresses a concept unique to that language.

For instance, the world mamihlapinatapai in the Yaghan language is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as “the most succinct word.” It is often translated as “a look that without words is shared by two people who want to initiate something, but that neither will start.” Many claims have also been made of “untranslatable” words like saudade in Portuguese or poshlost in Russian. Is “snowflake” a combination of the concepts “snow” and “flake,” or is it a distinct, third concept? Resorting to what philosophers call “natural kinds,” the categories that exist out in the natural world, doesn't really resolve the issue, since it begs the question.

In Uncleftish Beholding by sci-fi author Poul Anderson, we see how the vocabulary for certain concepts might be derived in a language without native words for them. He attempts to explain atomic theory in “purist” English by avoiding French, Greek, and Latin loanwords.[1] This is no easy task, but it is possible. For example, he uses the word “waterstuff” for hydrogen (from the German wasserstoff) and “samestead” for “isotope.” This constraint yields rather inspired sentences: “elements are composed of particles called atoms” becomes “the firststuffs have their being as motes called unclefts.”[2]

While Anderson's essay is facetious, such purism is characteristic of linguistic revival projects around the world, and various scholars have attempted to institute similar proscriptions for other languages in earnest. In one striking example from 1969, Filipino linguist Gonsalo Del Rosario wrote Maugnaying Talasalitaang, a dictionary with proposed translations of numerous academic terms into Tagalog, which traditionally relied heavily on loanwords from Spanish and English.

Everett’s work remains contentious among linguists, and many scholars have rejected his claims. When it comes to Pirahã, I suspect the real explanation for the tribe’s innumeracy is cultural. Sustained isolation and a lack of agriculture would negate the need for counting, which is an acquired skill. If anything, Pirahã shows that culture determines language, rather than the other way around.

[1] In a similar vein, Randall Monroe, the creator of xkcd, wrote an encyclopedia using the thousand most common English words, underscoring the irony that some concepts become harder to understand.

[2] It goes without saying that modern English's dual inheritance is what gives the language its flavor: Borges, who spoke English fluently, noted how a sentence’s meaning shifts when one switches from the Germanic “ghost” to the Latinate “spirit.”

[awful-roffle]

The Sapir Whorf hypothesis has to do with whether or not language shapes our brains and how we think or if it doesn't! So like, if my memory serves, native Chinese speakers think as time being something that goes up and down, while native English speakers see it as left to right!

And then there's how we categorize color and more. It's really interesting and similar to that thing you reblogged, lol. Languages!

-Rimworld anon

SICK

i wonder how that correlates to history & how languages originally developed too