Sapir Whorf and More

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Royal
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Sapir Whorf and More

Post by Royal » Wed Sep 21, 2011 6:57 am

I stared at her for a minute. I wasn't quite sure about the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis was, but I knew it had to do with the limitations of language and how languages shapes our perception of reality. As wind blew from the north, I jotted down the impressive-sounding words "Sapir Whorf Hypothesis." The girl smiled at me. I vowed to learn more.

As we muse about language, let's start with the words of one of my heroes, visionary physisist Freeman Dyson, who reminds us the humans are a "species of ape that only recently climbed down from the trees." He writes:

"All our understanding of nature is based on human language. And human language is a tool contingent on the particular history of our species. It would be amazing if human language could comprehend aspects of the universe that no human has seen or experienced. If there are minds in the universe larger than ours, it is unlikely that our language could encompass their thinking. It is unlikely that our science could explain their concepts."

....


The argument that language partially shapes the way we perceive reality is an old one that gained accelerating interest in the early 1900s when anthropologist and linguist Edward Sapir (1884 - 1939) proposed that language and thoughts are interconnected like threads in a complex braid, and that humans are often restricted by their vocabularies and languages.

Sapir's student Benjamin Whorf, extended this concept of linguistic reality-shaping and believed that different world views are shaped by different languages. He also suggested that what we actually think is determined to a large extent by our language. However, I don't think Whorf would have said all our thoughts are confined to language. For example, you can imagine the visual, olfactory, or aural aspects of an object without resorting to language. You can imagine the face of Brittany Spears, the sound of the Beatles, the shape of Saturn, or the smell of roses without words. Even Albert Einstein didn't resort to words when he thought about the material universe. He wrote in his autobiographical notes that he often thought in terms of images, and that verbal thinking sometimes occurred at the end of a nonverbal progression. "I rarely think in words at all," he said. "A thought comes, and I may try to express it in words afterwards." Of course, in order to communicate his ideas to others, Einstein had to render his nonverbal thoughts as language. I wish that Whorf could have interviewed Einstein about Einstein's nonverbal thinking.

...


Joumana Medlej, launching from Sapir Whorf's Ideas, explains that the Hopi considers units of time like pearls in a necklace: "Instead of minutes ticking away, picture the minutes being strung so that every 'present moment' is a string of all the minutes that have passed already." Whorf believed that the Hopi language (and hence the culture and thought processes) would potentially allow the Hopi to contemplate certain aspects of quantum physics, or Einstein's theories of space-time, better than people speaking European languages.

...


Some of my colleagues frown when I claim that language can shape the architecture of our own thoughts. But after repeating a Baha'i prayer, reading about the word "Grok" in Heinlein's Stranger in a Strange Land, or "shibumi" in Trevanian's Shibumi, I perceived the universe in a whole new light, and it's not an exaggeration to say that compact expressions that consolidate a complex set of concepts have changed my life. There are numerous examples of these supramemetic words from literature- karass and granfalloon from Vonnegut are just two others that come to mind. In social structures, the granfalloon is a group of people united or organized by a decree of official hierarchies, a bureaucratic structure. A granfalloon within a corporation may often be constrained and ineffective. On the other hand, the karass are those social networks that actually get work done. Outside a company, the karasss is a spontaneously forming group, joined by unpredictable or informal links. I love working in the karass. My own karass of friends forms a hive mind, a group brain that I find immensely useful.


...

Language is like a skin for internal thoughts. The second Sapir Whorf Hypothesis, which we have discussed: language shapes thoughts. The third is that language and thoughts are identical. Here, thought is an internal form of speech. The fourth is that language and thought are interdependent. This is widely the held notion today. Neither language nor thought takes precedence over the other.


Pickover, Sex, Drugs, Einstein, & Elves.

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Egg
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Re: Sapir Whorf and More

Post by Egg » Wed Sep 21, 2011 6:50 pm

Read "Stranger in a Strange Land" by Heinlein.


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Royal
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Re: Sapir Whorf and More

Post by Royal » Sat Jul 16, 2016 1:45 am

Linguistic Relativity Today
by Daniel Albright, MA, PhD (c) | February 1, 2014

Linguistic relativity is the idea that the language you speak affects how you think. A lot of people know this as the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” or “Whorfianism” after one of its earliest proponents, Benjamin Whorf. Many people think that linguistic relativity has died out, that it has been disproven, or that it is generally accepted as nonsense. This is far from the truth.

However, the focus of linguistic relativity has changed radically. Previously, it was about “worldview,” a nebulous term that few people took the time to really develop. Today, researchers are looking into specific cognitive effects of language, and in very specific areas. For example, my supervisor has studied the difference in color perception between Greeks (who have twelve basic color terms) and English speakers (who have eleven). He found that there are slight differences in how they perceive color (if you are wondering how this is measured, it is often through reaction times on various tasks).

I have also mentioned Lera Boroditsky several times in my posts — she does a lot of research into metaphors of space and time and how they differ between languages. She has also found that this affects how people think about time. More recent investigations have been into motion perception, and have included languages ranging from English and Spanish to German, Czech, Swedish, and Algerian Arabic. The differences in these languages affect how speakers think about motion events that they perceive.

You may be wondering how we can tell that people think about something differently. This is a point of some contention, but there is a general consensus among researchers in this field that certain tasks are cognitively non-linguistic, meaning that linguistic parts of the mind and brain are not engaged in them. (Though this assumes that there are, in fact, processes that are non-linguistic, which some people disagree with.) And, depending on who you ask, this is the kind of thought we are talking about when we say that two people “think differently.”

For example, similarity judgment is often touted as a non-linguistic task: If you are presented with three different items, you can, theoretically, choose the two that are most similar without using language in any way. Memory is another one: The things that you remember are not always tied to language. Of course, these things are open to debate, but there is a general, if tentative, agreement on them at the moment. And, as I mentioned earlier, verbal interference tasks also prevent the use of linguistic information during a task.

These are the kinds of things that researchers have participants do to determine “how they think”. There are a lot of factors at play here, and there is a lot of room for debate over how valid these methods are.

The kinds of things that are being studied by relativity researchers today are quite minor in the grand scheme of things. What is the big deal if two different language groups think about color a little differently? If speakers of Swedish are slightly more likely to remember the endpoint of a movement than speakers of English, what does that tell us about anything?

I don’t have good answers to these questions — I can only say that we are looking into it. If nothing else, we are gaining a better appreciation of cognition and how the human mind works, which is certainly a good thing. The more we understand the mind, the brain, and the relationship between the two, the better we will be equipped to answer questions (potentially those concerned with pathology) about them in the future.

Anyway, I felt compelled, as a linguistic relativity researcher, to write this to help shed some light on what might be a few misperceptions on the field. I look forward to reading your comments and answering any questions you might have on this topic!

http://brainblogger.com/2014/02/01/ling ... ity-today/


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Royal
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Re: Sapir Whorf and More

Post by Royal » Wed Apr 26, 2017 4:25 am

Artificial Intelligence Systems Are Learning Our Racism And Sexism

The study provides some confirmation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the idea that the language we use shapes our thinking. Problematically, it indicates that all of us are probably absorbing prejudices simply from the language we use, a belief that motivated efforts to change terms like “chairman” to “chairperson” or simply “chair”. How true Sapir-Whorf is for humans remains debated, but it's clearly true for machines.

http://www.iflscience.com/technology/ar ... nd-sexism/


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