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- hackernews@derp.foo
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Here’s my (rather proto-scientific, I admit - take it with a grain of salt) take of linguistic relativity / Sapir-Whorf:
There are two types of thought: verbal and non-verbal. Non-verbal thinking is messy, not fully reliable and quite costly, but we use it quite a bit in our everyday. That part of the thought shouldn’t be affected directly by the languages that you speak, and it’s potentially in large part biological. (And perhaps not too different from what chimps think.)
On the other hand, verbal thought is far more structured, and relies on the languages that you speak. This means that they will influence how you think in some situations, making some concepts and ideas slightly easier to reach depending on the language.
If my hypothesis is correct, then strong Sapir-Whorf (language dictates thought) is false, but weak Sapir-Whorf (language influences thought) is likely true.
This seems intuitively correct to me. I like it because it extends in a more general way which includes mathematics and pretty much any learned skill. I was certainly not able to think about statistical problems effectively before I learned the language of statistics, for example. I mean, you certainly could, but the effort required would be incomparably large.
People continue learning for their entire lives. They learn what they practice. They practice with the tools they have available. They choose what to practice based at least in part on those tools. The tools inform the questions they ask as well as the answers they reach. Like the old saying goes, when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.
It seems to me like denying the “weak” Sapir-Whorf hypothesis basically means denying the influence of culture and circumstance on development, which is…uh…a bit outdated, to say the least.
That was a long and rewarding read. With at least one mind-boggling fact dropped near the end: the Gurindji language of Australia does not use left-and-right for orientation even when referring to parts of their own bodies, but west-and-east instead.
As it turns out, the Gurindji people have a heightened sense of orientation, able to even detect the Earth’s magnetic field and use it as birds do.The implication here is that the structure of language, how concepts are defined, has a real and direct effect on our physical perception of the world around us.
As it turns out, the Gurindji people have a heightened sense of orientation, able to even detect the Earth’s magnetic field and use it as birds do.
I’ve found a bit more info about it in this page, for anyone interested. Apparently humans do have some poorly used geomagnetic sensory system, and due to their language’s directional system the Gurindji speakers are actually training this system.
Another piece of evidence might come from colour mapping: I predict that speakers are more likely to confuse two hues if they’re labelled by the same primary colour word in their language, even if their visual accuracy is similar.
There’s been some research specifically on color perception and naming, with some debate persisting. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_color_naming_debate and https://neurosciencenews.com/color-perception-language-21650/
There’s also been some similar research into “perfect pitch”. Populations with a tonal native language (like Mandarin) have a higher rate of perfect pitch. It seems likely to me that this is because they learned to associate tone with meaning from a very young age as part of language acquisition. See https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/speaking-tonal-languages/
Language forms one’s mind, and, then, one’s formed-mind is reflected in the language one uses.
“Collaborative Intelligence” is a book on working-with 3 of the 4 kinds of innate-mind-language:
- AbstractShapeCognition, or implication-patterns
- VisualCognition
- AuditoryCognition
- KinestheticCognition
are the 4 kinds that I know-of.
The AbstractShapeCognition kind ( my kind ) apparently makes up a significant fraction of physicists.
The book only deals-with the other-3, however.
Why does that have any significance, whatsoever?
Translating EVERYTHING from AbstractShapes into English … gets exhausting & frustrating.
Temple Grandin has a couple of TED Talks.
She thinks in movies.
then translates what the variant-movies showed her into words, to communicate.
Language is confining.
Languate is enabling between people, and also between oneself & one’s thoughts, but it is crippling.
Douglas Hofstadter’s “Godel Escher Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid” is on how self-consistent-formal-systems are INHERENTLY mind-blind to all that the formation of the formal-system doesn’t/won’t see.
Leonard Shlain’s “The Alphabet Versus The Goddess” book identifies that women’s-rights simply doesn’t get much of anywhere, in language/cultures which speak more-gendered language.
ie Anglo cultures have more women’s-rights than Latin cultures, with their gendered-language.
That is consistent, & durable.
It gave me dispair for human potential, when I discovered that many language-families program people into genderizing everything, & locking “validity”, in establishment’s eyes, from “female”.
That isn’t going to change.
Which means that humankind is less-likely to endure The Great Filter, this century.
The “shackles binding our Potential” are too strong, and too strongly-valued, for humankind to break, enough?
It looks more & more like this is the case.
See the fallacy of wrong-framing, and understand that all human languages are wrong-framing something.
Each language is better at some things, but worse at others, and incapable of some concept-expressing…
That alters our viability, planet-scale.
In “The Design Of Everyday Things”, it noted that we’ve a species-wide mental-defect:
When we do something, and it doesn’t work, instead of agilely changing-what-we’re-doing, we do what we already-were-doing, MORE FORCEFULLY.
That is why I ditched Emacs for Vim: Vim keeps hitting one on the head with one’s not-changing-levels, thereby conditioning one’s mind into the habit of changing-levels, counter to that innate species-wide ignorance/incompetence.
Morass-of-capability ( emacs ) was fun, but I NEED to be able to see what need be seen, need to be able to think what need be thunk, etc, and not-changing-levels is an already-known-incompetence?
And I’m autistic? ( making that much worse, with woodenheadedness/monotropism )
Vim forces the change in mental-habit.
Some equivalent is going to be required, species-wide, to force-change our language, in order to make our viability more-likely, XOR our conditioned mental-habit is going to sink a greater percentage of our species’ life, this century.
Oh, & Temple Grandin’s thinking in movies nuked the entire “without language, thinking cannot happen” school of philosophy, didn’t it?
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