#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.

[tesl8n]

I'm thinking about the epistemic injustice in the etymology of zucchini.

"Zucchinis", and later "queerplatonic partners", came to be because there was a kind of relationship that aces were demonstrably having, but which there was no word for. No way to describe it, no way to analyze it, an indistinct shape that aces couldn't even figure out how to discuss without an overly long gesture. Zucchini came about as a completely random shorthand, to fill in space within a forum thread.

And epistemic injustice is a central theme of Otherside Picnic. There's so many analysis posts about the many, many ways that the Otherside represents relationships outside of normal bounds, and negotiating those relationships, and communicating within and without them. Part of Sorawo's problem at the start of the series is that she literally can't communicate with other people, that she doesn't have the words or the ideas to understand her feelings for Toriko.

Volume 8's beauty is that it represents the tipping point of that arc. They finally find the words to communicate. Sorawo figures out what she needs, she finally understands and accepts what Toriko wants, they find a way to communicate that with each other, and on the other side of that they find a word that represents that. Demonstrably, Sorawo and Toriko have a unique relationship, one that's different and goes beyond "lovers," and Nue is a word that gives that relationship form. That bridges the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis to make it into something that can have real shape, in the same way that zucchini did in the original forum post.

[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 😂

[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.

[galaxseacreature]

5 & 25 :]

End of year book-reading ask game

5. What’s a scene you read this year that sticks with you?

Lone Women by Victor LaValle is a horror adjacent/weird west novel, and my favorite chapter isn't about the main plot, it's just a perfectly executed (imho) ghost town story. Adelaide (the main character) travels with a friend to an abandoned town, where the friend is continuing her long search for her father's grave. It's unsettling when they ride into town past some old kilns and find, to their surprise, a few men sitting in the dilapidated saloon. The men follow them to the cemetery with only a few lines of repetitive dialogue "getting warm in here." Unnerved, the women flee before things can break too bad. A line in a later chapter confirms that the whole town was abandoned and mentions some men were killed when they tried to shelter in the kilns and their fire got out of control. Something about LaValle's tone and control of tension just really knocks this chapter out of the park, and I like how it doesn't really resolve and isn't immediately explicit about ghosts.

Honorable mention to A Guest in the House by Emily Carroll, which is only an honorable mention because it's mostly about how much the art rules. There's a full color 2 page spread late in the book that is like, a massive spoiler, but kicks so much ass that it compelled me to buy the book after initially reading it through the library.

25. If you had to give a TEDTalk on a book you read this year, for better or worse, which would it be?

Oh, easily The Dispossessed by Ursula K LeGuin. Somehow I hadn't gotten around to it before, but book club gave me the perfect chance. And there's so much there! I could probably do a talk just on the language use! What does the need for a conlang tell us about the vision of the revolutionaries? Trying to turn the Sapir Whorf hypothesis into a tool? The lingering non-Pravic words and ideas-what might we not be able to change about human society? The shared word for work and play (but distinct from drudgery) in Pravic!!!! Insults and how they differ on Anarres vs Urras.....

......I would have to be forcibly dragged off the stage if given a platform to talk about The Dispossessed, this is a threat :)

[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.

[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

[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.

[vergi1ius]

In linguistics, we have a concept called The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. The basics of this concept are some degree of "If you don't have a word for it, you can't conceive of it."

Now, there are several degrees of this. The conception above is the strictest example of it, which is generally not accepted among linguists. A looser definition might be something like "It's much, much harder to talk about concepts you don't have words for." (For example, people who speak a language with more color words distinguish colors more quickly/easily than those who speak words with fewer color words).

Newspeak is weaponized Sapir-Whorf. To purposely restrict vocabulary to eliminate any thoughts of rebellion.

As pointed out above, progressives have been consistently adding vocabulary to the world, to better voice the thoughts and feelings of the oppressed and non-mainstream.

One time I heard a dude online compare new and obscure LGBT terminology to newspeak. This I think is one of the biggest examples I have seen of people with their whole chest ignoring the basic themes of 1984.

In 1984 the whole point of newspeak was that it shrinks. Ideas that could once be communicated now cannot. Everything is simplified as much as possible. You cannot explain complicated ideas of freedom or equality because the words no longer exist, or they don’t mean what they once did.

More specifically, there is canonically no word for “gay” in 1984. There are only two words for the entire spectrum of sexuality. “goodsex” and “sexcrime”. If you’re gay it’s the exact same as being a pedophile. And those are is the exact same as cheating on your wife, which is the exact same daring to fuck your wife just because you feel like it. Which is no different than literally any sex act that might offend big brother.

Do you see what’s happening? In 1984 can no longer ask your wife to peg you or something because the word for pegging is the exact same word for pedophile. And you can’t come out as gay because all you can say is that you did a criminal sex act, which means you cannot make a case for your rights either.

Inventing made up words to describe obscure things that previously lacked words would literally be a perfect remedy to newspeak. This language would counter every barrier to communicating the necessary concepts. Because it’s what literally every normal non-dystopian language does.

[hungwy]

do you have a take on language preservation? as in, making efforts to teach dying languages to the younger generation of the people who speaks it. Sometimes i wonder if the only really meaningful thing to do is to record as much native knowledge and material and resources as possible for posterity and that's it. I get the idea that making a new generation of people learn what's basically a foreign langauge to them in the name of "their heritage" is a bit of a flimsy premise with the result of a bunch of people speaking a language in a way that doesn't compare to how their ancestors spoke it.

Typing this at work sorry if its not too good or forgetting stuff

IMO people are free to relate to their family or community past how they like, like learning an endangered or moribund language or reviving some form of an extinct language. The problem of whether or not that revived form is faithful to what it was like alive is a philosophical question that probably won't be sufficiently evidentially answered in the case of reviving dead languages, but authenticity isn't always a big deal for tradition, honestly. It sounds like you have more a problem with how we as humans relate ourselves to the past than with reviving languages. You seem more curious of what the metaphysical reality of history and descent is. I can't help with that.

Learning a language, even a dead one, exposes one to a worldview that may or may not be familiar to us. The perspectival bias of language comes in the meaning of words, what words exist, what metaphors exist and how you use them to describe them, etc. This is the famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis where the language you speak affects your worldview. Now imagine how useful a language might be in reconnecting someone to a heritage they want to relate to. It's not really possible to ignore "how the ancestors spoke it" and completely screw the way of speaking into a soulless shell of communication. The learning and practice of speaking is the reconnection to the history and the value of revitalization. Maybe that form will mold to the new speakers as they must navigate an environment the language isn't conformed to, but the speaker will also be restrained by the opinions and perspectives of old. Authenticity is a stance that something should be a certain way -- prescriptivism -- and we know that language is pluricentric, complex, overlapping, constantly changing, stealing from other speakers and dialects and languages.

Anyway it doesn't make logical sense as outsiders of that experience, practice, and descent to comment on whether or not that way of relating to a past is authentic or meaningful.

[gwenguistics]

it breaks my heart that so many people who dont know much about linguistics hear about the idea of Linguistic Relativity, also called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which is the idea that people who speak different languages think differently, that language actually affects how you think, and go “oh yeah that makes sense! huh, thats so interesting!” jkvsldfmvjkefnbm;lebmeblk

it’s a racist pseudoscientific theory that is deeply harmful, completely without any evidence whatsoever, and really just utterly nonsensical if you understand what its implications actually are. it doesnt just mean “well, spanish has grammatical gender and english doesnt, so spanish speakers see tables differently than english speakers because spanish speakers think of it as having a gender”. no, that’s not what this hypothesis is saying. it’s saying that there should be physical differences in the brains of people who speak different languages. there are cognitive differences between spanish speakers and english speakers. that’s completely untrue. 

you can talk about any topic in any language. no language is better than any other at any task. language isnt relative, it’s like a constant or whatever. people often cite languages without separate words for blue and green, calling them by the same word, such as japanese (which is only partially true by the way, its more complicated than that), and they say “ah, see? japanese speakers perceive color differently than english speakers, since english calls those colors by different words”. but that’s bullshit and any bilingual japanese-english speaker will tell you that lmao. all that proves is that colors are grouped into words differently. but japanese speakers and english speakers perceive the same wavelengths of light. it’s just a matter of which they give names to. you’d just call them different shades of one color, or say “sky-bluegreen” or “leaf-bluegreen” in order to convey the same meaning as saying “blue” or “green” in english. it’s not that complicated. that’s a difference in vocabulary, not in cognition. 

it just really bums me out how widespread this idea is, because it can have really harmful effects. if you believe this theory, then you can easily be sold the idea that speakers of a certain language (usually one that is primarily spoken by people of color) are less intelligent than speakers of another language (usually one that is primarily spoken by white people). like, saying “did you know that this language has no word for time? they cant even conceive of time...” when in reality that’s just a misunderstanding of how that language actually talks about time, with no one singular word that corresponds neatly to the english word “time”, but rather with many ways to discuss the whole range of concepts that english speakers all group together under one word, “time”. that doesnt make them less capable of discussing time, and crucially, that “specificity” wouldnt make them more capable of discussing time either. it’s just a vocabulary difference, not a cognition difference.

people hear about the theory without knowing much about linguistics and they think its cool or something, thinking that knowing french will cause you to see the world differently, idk. but isnt the idea that any concept can be expressed in any language way fucking cooler? the idea that our capacities to learn, to think complexly, and to express ideas in the form of language are all universal and also infinite... isnt that more amazing? 

[rarecamo404]

New Noise

All I want is to hear something new. To break from the terror of reiteration by fabricating an unknown future, whole cloth. I can always hear the ghosts calling, those specters of lament screaming from the past. Please give me something to drown this out. Bless the pure, who, so innocent, lack the skull-rattling echo of regret. When you love music, when you love new music especially, in conjunction with a life of bad luck and worse decisions, you don't get to have a favorite record anymore. You drop the needle and there is no future–it harmonizes with that apartment, that fight, those cops, that OD, the loss that no apology can ever reclaim, a sonic mooring to what has already been. Even having done the best to excise evil from my life, music, particularly, anchors the heart to regret. The first and last thing you need to take from therapy: "Do the next right thing." This presumes a future. A future demands belief. Do you believe? This is not an intellectual question, but a biological one, a metabolic thrust. The power of life, the elan vital, commands the belief of bottom line existence. As someone recently said, we live after action. That is to say, consciousness flutters between action and our interpretation of that action. There is no instant understanding. Language is not a reflection of reality but a part of that reality. There is a pre-lingual moment, the affect, that, in the form of something new, fires an unknown pattern of synapse. New noise, truly unheard noise, commandeers this affect. And at the edge of experience, new affect releases me from the prison of yesterday. Have you succumbed to the rigor of another’s hate? Can you explain the function of pariasim in a restorative way? At the perimeter exists the requirement of expansion–simply for the sake of survival, psychic or otherwise. That is the future you will never know, until it has already passed. The power of a new sound, the audacity of noise, is the power of blasting through the parameters of what has been. In the forward to Jacques Attali’s Noise, Fredric Jameson writes: “It is because the music of a given period is able to express new kinds of content that this last [formal innovation] begins to emerge–a position which, translated back into linguistics, would yield a peculiar version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.” Jameson was commenting on Max Weber’s appraisal of Western polyphony. And I suggest such analysis can function within something more personal. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis refers to a local reality, in which we can only describe, understand, and interface with the world according to the limits of our language. Sound, affect, and belief give reason to dispute this. When we encounter the audacity of new noise, we are forced–without language–to confront a local reality that, after action, corresponds to no known future. A sense of salvation rides the waves of every sound.