One famous example is the Guugu Yimithirr language[0], which uses absolute directions (North, South, East, West) instead of relative ones (left, right, in front of, behind). So one would say, "Can you pass me the salt to your North?" As a result, people in these cultures are constantly keeping track of which way North is: their language forces them to.
There is a link between whether a culture's language requires temporal markers and various economic markers.
"For example, a German speaker predicting rain can naturally do so in the present tense, saying: Morgen regnet es which translates to ‘It rains tomorrow’. In contrast, English would require the use of a future marker like ‘will’ or ‘is going to’, as in: ‘It will rain tomorrow’" [1]. It is found that "speakers of [timeless] languages: save more, retire with more wealth, smoke less, practice safer sex, and are less obese."
[1] http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/keith.chen/papers/Langu...
Interestingly the street grid isn't a language feature.
As you say, this isn't a language feature. For me the concepts of N,E,W,S and the easy visualization matters more than my language. I picture a map, but not the words on the map.
It sounds like you're not a native -- in your observation, is the ability to navigate easily in the 'rotated downtown' area correlated with having grown up nearby?
That would make a cool study.
I live in a grid-based city and I would dispute that. I'm pretty comfortable with cardinal directions but that hasn't been true of nearly anyone I've tried to provide directions to.
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'I push his head back' and 'I drop it in water and it floats,' though very dissimilar sentences in English, are similar in Shawnee. The point of view of linguistic relativity changes Mr. Everyman's dictum: Instead of saying "Sentences are unlike because they tell about unlike facts," he now reasons: "Facts are unlike to speakers whose language background provides for unlike formulation of them."
We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity, which holds that all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated.
From this fact proceeds what I have called the "linguistic relativity principle," which means, in informal terms, that users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward different types of observations and different evaluations of externally similar acts of observation, and hence are not equivalent as observers but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world.
Concepts of "time" and "matter" are not given in substantially the same form by experience to all men but depend upon the nature of the language or languages through the use of which they have been developed.
Obviously as a species we can develop concepts we have no words for to begin with, this is evolution. But that would also mean that they can evolve separately, which in turn means different languages can have different concepts that can't be translated. At least not without detours, or loss of meaning. Much more abstract concepts than airplanes.
I remember asking my friends the other day: "is there a word for karma, that also encompasses the effects your poor actions have on innocent people around you?"
That is a concept very closely related to a concept we already have a word for, so it wasn't too difficult to explain. What I imagine it really means is that there could be concepts I can't even fathom because my imagination is only articulated in the languages I understand.
Ps. The word we ended up with was "splash karma" or "collateral karma".
Are you claiming the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis isn't true on ycombinator?
This is a forum famous for talking about blub languages and lisp. And if it's true for artificial languages, that's a strong indicator that it's true for human ones.
But sadly there are very few studies comparing programming languages and I've never seen one comparing human languages qualitatively.
The problem of Blub is less that people are incapable of understanding concepts, but that the people explaining concepts are incapable of explaining them. I've yet to find a feature that I couldn't explain to a "Blub" programmer. If you take, e.g., call/cc, sure, describing that to a mediocre Java programmer would probably elicit a blank stare. But I could instead describe the yield operator and get excited responses on to where it would be useful, despite it being basically the same thing as a call/cc (modulo issues like saving the call stack).
The evidence for natural languages is equally poor, although it's obfuscated by the extreme difficulty of separating culture from language in early childhood instruction.
Do you have to write a program that operates on lists? Lisp probably is better than Java.
Do you have to write a formal proof? Coq is probably better than Python.
Do you have to write distributed networking code? Erlang is probably better than PHP.
How can the strengths of each language not be direct support for linguistic relativity? All that means is that certain concepts are easier to manipulate and understand in certain languages.
The principle of linguistic relativity is that language (particularly L1) influences the thought patterns of those who use it. It does not state that certain thought patterns are easier to express in various languages.
To demonstrate support for linguistic relativity, it's not sufficient to say that Perl is better at text manipulation than C. You'd have to say first that Perl programmers tend to view generic programming problems (say, how to route email messages) as questions of text manipulation rather than other paradigms. You would also have to show that this paradigmatic shift is a result of the language itself, and not other factors including (but not limited to) language instruction or library availability.
In terms of natural language, sure, I can't translate the sentence "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana" effectively into French (since the different senses of "to fly" are «voler» and «mouche»). But that doesn't matter for linguistic relativity. The linguistic relativity argument is over whether or not the difference between English tending to use "do" for its modals precipitates a different worldview than the French «faire» ("make").
Which I think you could actually make a strong case for. It's very natural in Perl to reach for a regular expression instead of other tools, and to join data into and split data out of strings, since the core data types don't distinguish between numerical and string data, the operators do.
I can agree that different languages are more suitable for different purposes and affect how we express different problems. That is consistent with a very weak form of Sapir-Whorf. If that's the extent of your claim, then I don't think there's much controversy over that specific claim.
And, yes, if a concept is hard to express in a language that it, potentially, limits your thinking. If all thought is just language, then it may even bar thinking of concepts. But that gets into another debate, is language the key to thought, or is language an expression of thought. We can all probably conceive of things or maybe even have witnessed things which we are unable to articulate in many or all existing languages, but language expands or we adopt new languages (such as mathematics and calculus in particular to express physics). The precise motion of the planets could be explained in plain English, through complex circumlocutions. But calculus and its derived languages allow us to express this concept far more easily (even if just the English translation of the formulae and expressions, and not the precise notations used by physicists and mathematicians).
If an individual can't express a concept, how can you be sure they 'possess' that concept?
(answer might be found in bilinguals. There was an early saint from capadoccia who was grateful some of the more sophisticated greek heresies couldn't even be expressed in his language).
The strong form of Sapir-Whorf proposes that language completely determines the scope of cognitive processes. This form is generally considered to be false.
The weak form suggests that language influences thought, but the extent of such influence claimed can vary greatly depending on who is talking.
I would tend to think that might be true in the weaker forms, but at the same time my experience with programming languages is that you can write your desired type of code in any language and many developers do so, so I don't believe there is evidence that the influence is very strong.
E.g. I've written object oriented assembler. Object oriented C is almost a rite of passage. You can implement closures in C (been there done that), or co-operative multitasking (not been there, but others have).
Greenspun's Tenth Rule states:
"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
And you can write functional Ruby (you can even write Ruby with immutability by freezing objects, though you'll find a lot of third party code breaking). Back when C was still relatively young and Pascal was still popular, it was not unheard of to come across C code that started something like:
#define begin {
#define end }
If anything, programming languages have a long history of people inventing ways of emulating things they've seen and liked in other languages, but that are foreign to the language they are working in.
So while I do think that language influences thinking to some extent, I also think that influence is weak enough to be easily overridden by other things, such as sufficiently strong zealotery with respect to the advantages of some programming practice or another.
I'm Norwegian, but live in the UK and mostly think in English, and I do occasionally come across things that might qualify as language having influenced my thinking, but they are unremarkable enough most of the time that I rarely take note of it. In fact, trying to think of it now, I can't really come up with any good examples.
For programming languages it is easier. I would not immediatly think "first let's make a class for ..." when programming assembler, for exampl. You may eventually end up with concepts of objects and classes in assembler programs too, but if that's the first tool you think of, you'd probably pick another language. How to structure control flow changes. How to treat variables changes (if things can fit in registers vs. is suitable to push on the stack vs. directly accessing memory suddenly matters much more).
But still, at the same time, you can program assembler the way you program a higher-level language if that is what you want. The language only shapes your thinking as much as you let it. You'll probably be a better programmer in that language if you let it shape how you write code in that language, though.
Neanderthals weren't able to build airplanes, and their language probably didn't have a word for airplane (presumably), but B wasn't the cause of A.
The vedic indians had flying vehicles in their literature and were also not able to build airplanes.
Most cultures that can build flying machines have one or more names for them.
I don't know what it would mean to have the concept for something without having a word (or a sentence) to describe it.
If the S-W claim is that 'it's more common for a concept to underly a word than for a word to exist for a concept', I don't agree with that either -- kids who read a lot will often know the part of speech for a word and its context but not much else.