The Language Hoax
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Last annotated on March 12, 2017
much more than upon humanities. Here’s why. The Language Hoax CHAPTERRead more at location 180
Note: neowhorfismo: il linguaggoo modella il pensiero. spesso gli esperimenti neowh sono accurati ma vengono presentati male sui giornali. qs libro vuole mettere i puntini sulle i test newh: l inglese sa predire meglio quando una linea che s allunga tocca un punto prestabilito. un greco vince nel test che vi chiede di predire quando il contenitore in cui si vrrsa la sabbia sarà pieno. non è un caso se x dire la stessa cosa l inglese dice long night mentre il greco big nihgt pinker attinge in abbondanza dai neowh esperimenti coi colori: chi parla una lingua che ha termini diversi x colori leggermente diversi li identifica più velocemente ma se le funzioni del linguaggio vengono bloccate facendo memorizzare una filastrocca le prestazioni tornano a normalizzarsi attenzione: le differenze di reazione sono minime millisecondi... difficile parlare di visioni differenti della vita... ma xchè la lingua russa distingue tra due blu? ci sono casi on cui il linguaggio sembra avere conseguenze più rilevanti ma in realtà quel che conta è il portato culturale che si riflette nel linguaggio. non lingua=>cultura ma cultura=>lingua prendiamo il caso dei popoli deboli in mate xchè la loro lingua nn ha i numeri... forse nn hanno i numeri xchè nella loro cultura nn ha sviluppato la necessità di fare operazioni aritmetiche. pensa all affermazione: "non scrivono xchènn hannolettere"assurdo molto più prob. il contrario. "il popoli senz'auto nn viaggiano in auto". indovina xchè gli eschimesi hanno molti nomi x la neve? il caso dei guguu che processano la direzione con i punti cardinali anzichè con i punti relativi. xchè pensare ad un linguaggio che rende il popolo che lo parla un burattino e non invece al fatto che i guguu sono ingegnosi difesa di whorf: ci sono culture simili che nn hanno quel termine. controreplica: nessuno afferma che le culture simili hanno la stessa lingua al limite una lingua somigliante è un problema di uovo e gallina? no. 1 es: la cultura e i bisogni vengono prima. nessuno nella foresta parla il linguaggio dei guguu 2 i guguu emigrati in città hanno perso l orientamento cardinale. 3 i vicini dei gugu hanno magari linguaggi diversi ma gli stessi processi mentali quindi... il linguaggio può influire ma in modo trascurabile... è una lente che noi scegliamo x vedere meglio il mondo date le ns esigenze ancora whor studies: forma o sostanza... usa vs giap. il linguaggio modella il pensiero? ma cosa intendi x pensiro? reazioni minime o un modo di vedere la vita e il mondo. come il giapponese ha influenzato la civiltà giapponese... decidere con qualche ms di ritardo innesca una visione diversa della vita vuoi sapere quanto gli uomini divergono? studia la cultura. vuoi sapere quanto gli uomini si somigliano? studia il linguaggio Edit
I may be taken as dismissing the work of Neo-Whorfians, but I mean no such thing.Read more at location 183
What I take issue with is the tendency to interpret this work as suggesting something about the human conditionRead more at location 186
In English we say a long time. In Spanish, one says mucho tiempo, a lot of time.Read more at location 196
Greek is the same way: you don’t have a long night in Athens, you have a big one, a “lot of” night.Read more at location 198
show an English speaker—who says a “long” time—a line slowly lengthening toward an end point on a screen, and then a square slowly filling up from bottom to top, and she’s better at guessing how long it will take the line to hit the end than for the square to be full. Yet a Spanish speaker is better with the square filling upRead more at location 205
the metaphor for time in people’s language determined their performance on the test.Read more at location 210
people are not asked about language during the experiment and thus were not primedRead more at location 215
Speaking Greek creates a distinct mental world in which, well, you’re a little better at predicting how quickly a space will fill upRead more at location 217
Yet while writing The Stuff of Thought, Steven Pinker had to stop telling people he was writing a book about language and thought because regularly people assumed it must be about language as a lens—that is, about the structure of your language making you see the world “diversely” from other people.Read more at location 221
Russian word for “gay” is goluboj, but as it happens the word’s basic meaning is “light blue.” Not just blue, because there is another Russian word for the darker, navy, Prussian version of blue, siniy.Read more at location 228
A neat Neo-Whorfian experiment presented Russian speakers with various tableaus of three squares on a computer screen: one on top, the other two right below it.Read more at location 230
The Russians were given a task: to hit a button when they identified which bottom square was the same shade as the top one.Read more at location 233
the researchers were trying to get at something: whether having different terms for dark blue and light blue has any effect on perception—thatRead more at location 234
Russians hit the button in a flash, while if the stray square was just a different shade of dark blue the average time before hitting the button was longer.Read more at location 237
Yet English speakers had the same response time wherever the stray square happened to fall in the blueness spectrum:Read more at location 239
This shows, in a really ingenious way, that having different terms for light blue and dark blue makes people differentiate those colors more quickly than people whose language has a single termRead more at location 242
The second experiment had the subjects not only distinguish the stray square, but at the same time recite a random string of numbersRead more at location 246
puts a temporary block on the processing of language, and in this version of the experiment, suddenly whether the stray square was of the other kind of blue made no difference in the response times.Read more at location 247
A current fashion advertises this kind of test as showing that what your language is like makes you see the worldRead more at location 249
we hit a snag when we try to go beyond the experiment and embrace the notion that it is telling us something about worldviews,Read more at location 254
Namely, when I described the difference in reaction times, I used vague terms such as in a flash and linger.Read more at location 255
upon what grounds are we to take a 124-millisecond difference in reaction time as signaling something about the way Russians experience life?Read more at location 262
The Herero people of Namibia in Africa speak a language in which one term refers to both green and blue.Read more at location 272
Rather, they were quite aware of the difference between the color of a leaf and the color of the sky—Read more at location 274
They just found the idea of a language having separate words for those colors, when they learned such languages existed, faintly silly.Read more at location 275
there is a scale of sensitivity to color upon which Russians are high up, English speakers are middling, and the Herero are down on the bottom. That ranking will feel distasteful to most of us—Read more at location 277
it may well be that an experiment could show that the Herero language wires the brain in some way that leaves its speakers a few milliseconds slower to distinguishRead more at location 281
But in this, we have departed from any meaningful discussion of differences in souls.Read more at location 283
“As strange as it may sound, our experience of a Chagall painting actually depends to some extent on whether our language has a word for blue.”Read more at location 284
As I have long experienced, the media (including publishers) tend to encourage academics to put things in that kind of way, in an endless quest for “eyes” (web hits).Read more at location 286
Would lacking a word for blue really impact one’s experience of a Chagall more than education,Read more at location 290
There have been some claims about language affecting thought and culture, which, if valid, would indicate much more dramatic effects than infinitesimal differences in mental processing. However, what they demonstrate is cultural traits that language reflects, like Thai words for you, not linguistic traits magically shaping the culture.Read more at location 294
endless media reports of the people who can’t do math because their language has no numbers.Read more at location 299
The coverage was sparked by Columbia University psychologist Peter Gordon’s work on the language of a tiny Amazonian tribe called the Pirahã, and the result was that today an obscure language of the Brazilian rain forest has been discussed in various books written for the general public, and was especially publicized by Daniel Everett.Read more at location 302
“Tribe without names for numbers cannot count” (Nature, August 19, 2004). “Experts agree that the startling result provides the strongest support yet for the controversial hypothesis that the language available to humans defines our thoughts” (New Scientist, same day).Read more at location 306
It’s not that the Pirahã of the Amazon have been misportrayed. They really do not count and are all but hopeless at learning math.Read more at location 308
Certainly not having numbers in your language will make learning math difficult. However, the fact that the language lacks numbers is not an independent variableRead more at location 324
Pirahã lacks numbers for a reason: an isolated hunter-gatherer culture has no need for a word for 116, or to do long division, or to speculate about the nature of zero.Read more at location 326
Rather, the lesson is that counting, as humanity goes, is an accessory, despite how fundamental it seems to us.Read more at location 332
“Tribe without cars doesn’t drive” sounds like something out of Monty Python,Read more at location 334
Suppose we encountered a tribe whose approach to food was relatively utilitarian, and found that in their language there was a single word that covered meat, vegetables, starches, and fruit.Read more at location 339
“Tribe’s not playing music is traced to their lack of musical instruments.”Read more at location 343
Steven Pinker gets it just right: “The idea that Eskimos pay more attention to varieties of snow because they have more words for it is so topsy-turvyRead more at location 344
There are groups in Australia who don’t think of things being in front of, behind, to the left of, or to the right of them. Rather, they think of north, south, west, and east.Read more at location 350
if a tree is in front of them and to the north, then they say it’s north of them, and even when they turn around, they do not say it’s behind them—they say it’s north, which it still is.Read more at location 353
However, the scholars who have publicized this aspect of the Guugu Yimithirr call it stunning evidence for Whorfianism.Read more at location 358
To them it’s not that the Guugu Yimithirr process direction differently than others do—it’s that their language forces them to.Read more at location 359
“Tribe with no words for clothing do not wear clothes.” Imagine: according to Scientific American, “Previously elusive evidence that language shapes thought has been discovered in Papua New Guinea, where the Stnapon tribe, who habitually wear no clothes, have been found to exhibit this trait because their language has no words for clothing.”Read more at location 361
In the same way, a Guugu Yimithirr man processes direction the way he does because his environment forces him to. The language part is just a result.Read more at location 364
just as Eskimos have a reason to focus on snow, the Guugu Yimithirr have a reason to rely heavily on geographical coordinates: they live on flat land in the bush.Read more at location 366
All evidence shows that people like the Guugu Yimithirr process the world as they do because of their environment, not their language. It is not even, as some might wonder, a chicken and egg case in which both sides are right.Read more at location 373
Exhibit A: There is no language like Guugu Yimithirr spoken in, for example, a rain forest or a town.Read more at location 374
Exhibit B: It is documented that among generations of Guugu Yimithirr who grow up outside of the indigenous environment, the geographical orientation quickly falls apart—this seems to have happened with countless Aboriginal groups.Read more at location 377
But can’t language play a part? Possibly, but the evidence suggests that it doesn’t in any significant way.Read more at location 379
Exhibit C: Next door to the Tzeltal live the Tzotzil, in the same kind of mountainside environment. As you might guess from the similarity of the names (one must guiltily admit they sound like two groups created by Dr. Seuss!), Tzeltal and Tzotzil are essentially variations on the same language:Read more at location 386
Processing direction geographically is something about culture, which can occur whether it penetrates language or not.Read more at location 396
The studies themselves are always intriguing, but if they are showing anything like different lenses on life, then the difference between the lenses is like the one between the two lenses that your optometrist shows you during an exam for glasses or contacts when you have to have her alternate between them several times to decide whether you see better through one or the other, because really, the chart looks the same through both. “Better? Or better? Better? Or better?” she says. “Well, uh …,” one ventures.Read more at location 403
My praise of these studies in themselves is not a backhanded compliment. For example, there is work on Japanese that gets less attention than it should because it came along before the media happened to pick up on Neo-Whorfianism. It perfectly illustrates how Neo-Whorfianism can be great work despite offering little or nothing to those of a mystical bent.Read more at location 408
In Japanese, when you talk about a number of something, the number has to come with a little suffix.Read more at location 410
Two is ni, dog is inu. However, two dogs is not ni inu, but ni-hiki no inu. Hiki is used when you are talking about small animals and using a number. But if you say “two beers,” ni biru is incomplete, and ni-hiki no biru would make the beer into a small animal. One neither pats, feeds, nor swats at a beer. You say ni-hon no biru, because hon is used for long, thin things, like bottles.Read more at location 412
In any case, the Whorfian seeks to see if this grammatical trait, where everything is marked as stuff instead of as an object, has any reflection beyond. In fact, it does.Read more at location 423
Whorfian experiment yet, Mutsumi Imai and Dedre Gentner laid out for their subjects triads of objects: say, a C-shaped mass of Nivea (have you ever smelled Nivea? Truly heaven, I’ve always thought), a C-shaped mass of Dippity-Do (a hair gel more popular in the old days, which smells pretty good too, although currently they push an unscented kind, anyone’s preference of which reminds me of people who poo-poo mackerel and sardines as “tasting like fish” as if that’s a minus), and scattered little dapples of Nivea. Or a porcelain lemon juicer, a wooden lemon juicer, and then some pieces of porcelain (that part was just plain nice to look at). Yes, all of this did apply to Whorfianism. Asked which two things go together out of the three, Japanese children were more likely to group the mass of Nivea with the little clumps of it, while American kids were more likely to group the similarly shaped masses of Nivea and Dippity-Do. The Japanese kids thought of the porcelain lemon juicer as forming a pair with the pieces of porcelain, while American kids grouped the two juicers and left those crummy shards of porcelain to the side. Americans group by shape, Japanese by material.Read more at location 425
A difference in thought must be of a certain magnitude before it qualifies realistically as a distinct “worldview.”Read more at location 443
find out how these Whorfian ripplets affect people and life as we know them?Read more at location 449
For example, in Mandarin Chinese next month is “the month below” and last month was “the month above.” Does that mean Chinese people think of time as stretching vertically rather than horizontally?Read more at location 453
Stanford University psychologist Lera Boroditsky (last encountered heading that study of blueness in Russian) taught us that Chinese people do sense time as up and down, and the study comes up often in conversations about Whorfianism’s plausibility.Read more at location 455
Mandarin speakers were faster to answer a question like “August comes earlier than OctoberRead more at location 457
Boroditsky has refined her experimentation. In the latest rendition, subjects are asked to hit early/late buttons arranged vertically as well as horizontally in response to pictures (such as of a young and an old Woody Allen). Mandarin speakers are quicker when the buttons are vertical,Read more at location 463
That is certainly a result. But then, English speakers are almost 300 milliseconds quicker at nailing what their language marks as previous, “left” over “right.”Read more at location 466
But the wonder is how in all of their diversity, these languages convey the same basic humanity. The cultural aspects qualify as scattered decoration.Read more at location 495
If you want to learn about how humans differ, study cultures. However, if you want insight as to what makes all humans worldwide the same, beyond genetics, there are few better places to start than how language works.Read more at location 498
