I've been interested in the general idea since reading 1984... where language shaping and limiting thought is a central idea. But I'd be curious to know how much scientific support this idea has.
The Wikipedia article you linked has some of the details, but they are obscured a bit if you aren't looking for them. The linked main article on Linguistic determinism has some more direct details in its Criticism section: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_determinism
Linguistic determinism is something more among the lines of Newspeak from 1984 or Apple's Emoji Gun Control: By making it harder to talk about something, you make it harder to think about it, and harder to put into action. Thus, you can force language into a certain direction and culture will follow.
"Harder" is actually the weak hypothesis. The strong hypothesis is much more "impossible".
The common critical dissent to the strong hypothesis is often the Piraha and their lack of numbers and counting words, but demonstrated ability to count and do simple arithmetic even if not name the results verbally in their language. In the strong hypothesis, they wouldn't be able to count at all. Certainly they exhibit some symptoms of the weak hypothesis, because they may have a harder time at it than those with words to describe the effort. (The common criticism to the Piraha criticism is that we've also taught horses, pigs, dolphins, primates, etc to count and do simple arithmetic with no mutually distinguishable language whatsoever, so maybe that's not an impressive example, because maybe counting/arithmetic are outside of the linguistic faculties of the brain.)
> You can always invent things first and name them later.
I find a more impressive example of a disproof of the strong hypothesis and implication for the weak hypothesis to be the Calculus. Though the example is still in the domain of math, I feel that particularly as math trends towards more abstracted thought its entanglement with language seems ever stronger (see computing and programming languages as further examples).
Newton and Liebniz were both polymaths that spoke multiple languages and referenced many of the same primary sources (in those primary sources' own languages), but they had distinct native languages and cultures (Newton's English and Liebniz's German), yet both co-evolved the Calculus independently (to most accounts; let us dismiss the accusations of theft in one direction or the other). They evolved very different notations/jargon/language for the same concepts, but you could still see the underlying concepts as isomorphic, and that those concepts didn't particularly have names or words until the pair invented names and words for them.
Liebniz's notation was superior, in that it made it easier to see similar concepts as similar and easier to work with some of the more complex concepts, which is why the notation we use today is closer to Liebniz's than Newton's (though still somewhat of a pidgin/fusion of the two). Yet, Newton, despite using an "inferior" notation to do so is still best known for discovering so many more of the Calculus' implications to other sciences, especially Physics. In that case a potential disproof of even the weak hypothesis, or rather one anecdotal outlier of the weak hypothesis that seems to indicate how particularly "weak" it may be.
http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2014/0...
It is not necessary to have a grammatical future tense to talk or think about the future. In fact, English does not have a future tense in the technical grammatical sense of 'tense'.
More generally, there's no evidence for the existence of human languages with the sort of lack of expressive power that you're talking about. All languages appear to be more-or-less equivalent in their expressive power, although of course that does not imply that exact translation is possible in all instances.
I was thinking the other day about that language that has no relative left/right and instead everything is based on (effectively) compass direction. The speakers reportedly have excellent direction sense compared to the average non-speaker. Their language is much more efficient at certain tasks we struggle with (English has crutches like "stage left", "starboard", and "your left" to compensate, but unless expected and practiced those are always effort/error prone. I myself fail at simple right/left way too often.)
Obviously this is a linguistic (and arguably cultural) trait with some value, without denying the value of also having relative kedtýright.
This language is unique (? or at least very rare), which tells me it failed to spread. Logical, as it would be hard for non-native speakers to pick up.
But that means "losing the evolutionary race" has no particular relation to the VALUE to us.
Would be OK to forget how to make stone tools because we don't need them for now?
Traits are useful in some circumstances and not some useful when circumstances change, who say you would not miss them in the future?
Knowledge is knowledge, it adds to our always imperfect understanding of the world.
https://numberwarrior.wordpress.com/2010/07/30/is-one-two-ma...
Idioms. Metaphors. Reference to background material. Such things may not be expressible in as few words, but there is no idea that cannot be expressed eventually.
Bad example. We know how to decipher hieroglyphs because we discovered that there were actually equivalent to another language that was well known at the time. There's tons of other languages we have no idea idea how to decipher, such as Linear A.
If the language dies before a substantial amount is written down, the training data will never exist.
What is now China with a few local variants was once covered in numerous dialects like India today, though not as numerous. However, one unifying language has led to a less fractured nation compared to say India or even Europe.
I'm not sure requirements can be said to be strict when the locals will tell you to your face that the mountains are high and the emperor far away.
Just because something is doesn't mean it's right. Tooth decay is also a natural process, as is myopia, and cancer.
I've no problem with Cymraeg, it's interesting, part of my ancestry, part of British history, half of its fluent speakers prefer it. But if the government stopped putting it up, and supported more learning of major World languages in its place, then I think Wales as a whole would be better off.
Just because something is old, arose in one's own country, etc., doesn't mean it's automatically more valuable (not even culturally) than other things. [And vice-versa of course.]
Handwriting is giving way to typing and other means of writing (I'm swyping this), should we make computing lessons include handwriting in order not to let that "culture" die out. Sure, support those who choose it, but don't hobble those who don't.
Propping up a language at great expense is costly. I don't wish Cymraeg to be discarded (far from it, historic languages are fascinating), I wish other languages - ones suitable for widespread communication - to be fostered.
As a statistic 19% of the population is in the 20-30 year age bracket and so will have had 6 or more years of compulsory Cymraeg (it's been compulsory for 20 years). The number of adults in total that can _speak_ any Cymraeg is <15%. The response to this natural move to using English - spend more and more money on Cymraeg, make it compulsory within every other primary school lesson.
Pushing Cymraeg in this situation has a great cost directly, but indirectly there's an economic cost in the damage to children's education (our numeracy and literacy scores have dropped relative to the rest of the UK).
Culture changes and "progresses", spending more and more to try and halt that progress is misguided.
Trying to prevent the natural decline of one language in the face of a populations preferred use of another costs time and money. There's a cost involved directly and indirectly in not having those resources to spend elsewhere.
Which is not intended as celebration, just conversation.
Maybe a brash conclusion would be to think that small cultures hamper progress by elevating the barriers to communication and spending energy pointlessly (from an utilitarian point of view) on little artisanal trinkets that are vastly more inefficient compared to, albeit somewhat dystopic, modern manufacturing and unified cultural anglosaxon mish mash.
I don't think art is a linear progression.
> It might be a sensitive topic
You're telling people of non-dominant cultures that their art and "artisanal trinkets" are, at best, a worthless waist of time.
True, I lumped it together with technology. The case with art is, it benefits from perspiration from other artists which ocurrs mostly at the scale of bigger cultures.
> You're telling people of non-dominant cultures that their art and "artisanal trinkets" are, at best, a worthless waist of time.
Well, that's the logical conclusion from a pragmatic viewpoint, but emotion bends logic, therefore causing many inefficiencies (which may look "efficient", but just because of looking at them through the filter of emotion).
However, I don't follow the dogma of pragmatism on a personal level, which is just another point that explains the human paranoia between logic and emotions.
Even the instinct to survive is an emotion. An emotionless agent wouldn't care about survival.
Logic can show you how to arrive to any place, but only e-motion will compel you to move and go.
By now, we don't have an coherent answer as our main method of value assesment is money (whose value is shared as a belief).
Also, before we proceed we should try to strip our incentives of every trace of emotion, which we'll assume as flawedly disposed against us, as it lags by millenia behing our rational brain, which makes most emotional feedback futile nowadays.
We should first strive to develop a framework that encompasses and evaluates every aspect of existence (which money can't capture yet), and then deny our emotions and work towards achieving the goals of said framework. That or wander aimlessly on this planet guided by our hormonal responses and never leaving the Solar System, just living by our feelings. Unless, of course, we'll manage to reduce the lag of experience-emotions to one comparable to that of reason.
That was the fundamental belief behind the eurocentric approach to anthropology, and other ethnocentric supremacist belief systems which from ignorance brought a lot of hardship to the world.
You don't have to look far enough to see how your culture, not long ago, was just as niche and pointless as the ones you're criticising now. You should also know that dominating cultures have already succumbed into irrelevance in spite of all the supremacist beliefs. Perhaps there's something to be learned about poopooing other cultures
However, this optimization makes also our civilization more fragile, so the tradeoffs are more complex than in your version of the theory.
Maybe that wasn't your intent, but that's certainly what you did. You basically said that all they have to contribute is knowledge of herbs.
The standard knee-jerk reaction of wailing at the passing of yet another little-spoken language always fails to take into account the other side of the equation: a huge number of problems on this planet stem from the fact that people speak different languages and profoundly fail to understand one another.
Paying the price of losing little-spoken languages and the bits of culture that tag along with it is a very cheap price to pay when compared to what is gained.
I strongly disagree with whatever led you to believe such a thing.
That was the original thought behind Esperanto... the idea was that there was strife between different groups of people because they speak different languages, and that a universal language would solve this (or at least bring them closer together). [1] Whether this worked out or not is left as an exercise to the reader. ;-)
How much of this do you really attribute to different languages? By and large everyone in America speaks English, but the past couple years in particular has very much demonstrated that we profoundly fail to understand one another. To me the language is obviously important for literal communication, but to an extent pretty irrelevant to the communication barriers in society.
I'm sure common language helped Russia and Ukraine when they went into war.
What you're looking for is single worldwide culture. But I doubt that could happen. E.g. colonies in "New World" soon departed from their parent cultures. Even if someone would establish a single culture, it's set to collapse and split into a myriad of smaller ones.
There're a lot of things that define culture. Looking at US coasts-vs-flyover divider, language is not what keeps people together. Even if they shared a somewhat similar culture, different environments make people go in different ways.
> I really disagree with this idea that the death of a language somehow means we are cut off from the culture that used the language.
Culture is much more than just translating words. Different people care more about different things. That PoV is lost when nobody speaks the language natively. Well, it may exist in a book in a library. But there's no way to experience the culture anymore. So yes, it's dead, but not lost.
No. Google translate. I really disagree with this idea that the death of a language somehow means we are cut off from the culture that used the language. Nobody speaks ancient Egyptian but we can still translate their hieroglyphs. Universally common language promotes communication, cultural exchange, understanding and general world peace. I'd rather focus on the promotion of wold languages than the maintenance of isolated regional dialects. I'd rather learn Arabic than Welsh, Cantonese over Romansh.
Wow. "Romansh" is recognized by my spellchecker. But "Shia" of Shia Islam is not. Makes one think.