Maggiem22's List: Language and Thought

• Benjamin Lee Whorf let loose an alluring idea about language’s power over the mind, and his stirring prose seduced a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we are able to think.
• Eventually, Whorf’s theory crash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims.
• new research has revealed that when we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways.
• The general structure of his arguments was to claim that if a language has no word for a certain concept, then its speakers would not be able to understand this concept
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• nt languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about.
• English does oblige you to specify certain types of information that can be left to the context in other languages.
• When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time
• it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world
• In recent years, various experiments have shown that grammatical genders can shape the feelings and associations of speakers toward objects around them.
• More recently, psychologists have even shown that “gendered languages” imprint gender traits for objects so strongly in the mind that these associations obstruct speakers’ ability to commit information to memory.
• The area where the most striking evidence for the influence of language on thought has come to light is the language of space — how we describe the orientation of the world around us.
• So different languages certainly make us speak about space in very different ways. But does this necessarily mean that we have to think about space differently?
• we should look for the possible consequences of what geographic languages oblige their speakers to convey. In particular, we should be on the lookout for what habits of mind might develop because of the necessity of specifying geographic directions all the time.
• The convention of communicating with geographic coordinates compels speakers from the youngest age to pay attention to the clues from the physical environment
• might the language we speak influence our experience of the world? Recently, it has been demonstrated in a series of ingenious experiments that we even perceive colors through the lens of our mother tongue
• We may not know as yet how to measure these consequences directly or how to assess their contribution to cultural or political misunderstandings. But as a first step toward understanding one another, we can do better than pretending we all think the same.

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• "We think in words. The more words you know, the more thoughts you can have."
• scientists have had so much difficulty demonstrating that language affects thought that in 1994 renown psychologist Steven Pinker called Whorfianism dead.
• The recent study that comes closest is an investigation of number.
• some languages have only a handful of number words.
• This suggests a different way of thinking about the influence of language on thought: words are very handy mnemonics.
• We may not be able to remember what seventeen spools looks like, but we can remember the word seventeen.
• But more words do make it easier to remember those thoughts -- and sometimes that's just as important

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• A recent New Yorker article introduces us to a language Ithkuil, created by John Quijada to force us to be explicit about nuance.
• More recently, an excerpt from Guy Deutscher’s Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages claiming “our experience of a Chagall painting actually depends to some extent on whether our language has a word for blue” was on The New York Times website’s “most-read” list
• The theory started with amateur linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1930s, who claimed that the Hopi language has no ways to indicate past or future, and that this is connected to the Hopi’s cyclical sense of time.
• This is not to say that Whorfianism has no scientific value: Much current work in the subject does show tiny differences in perception
• Whorfianism appeals to some as a way past ethnocentrism to an appreciation of other cultures. However, properly speaking, it rejects and requires ethnocentrism at the same time

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