How Language Seems to Shape One's View of the World

Re:How Language Seems to Shape One's View of the World by ethanpoole on Thursday January 02, 2014 @06:09PM (#7003057)

Reading and language are not the same thing, e.g. you can speak a language without being literate. You might therefore expect different writing systems to use different capabilities. Of course, "different parts of your brain" does not mean different capabilities. They could be the same capabilities instantiated differently in the brain.

It may very well be that speakers of a language with feature A can perform some task better than speakers of a language without feature A. However, it does not meant that the speakers have different cognitive capabilities (e.g. you can provide sufficient task training), which is the ultimate argument of people supporting linguistic relativity.

I cannot comment on the political motivations to deny linguistic relativism. I am just a linguist.

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Re:How Language Seems to Shape One's View of the World by jgg on Thursday January 02, 2014 @09:33PM (#7003843)

If a writing system doesn't count (it's a fair point, and I understand what you're saying), then how does one counter the evidence in the article that one speaker of one language does a task better than speakers of a different language?

If my language is, for example, French or (older) Welsh, and my counting system is vigesimal (base 20), why is it wrong to claim that a person who speaks French would have an easier time with the basic idea of base 20 math, or just counting in terms of 20's, than a native English speaker, assuming no extra training on the part of either? Why is it wrong to assume that a language with a case system would yield native speakers who were better at explicitly identifying the subject and object of a sentence than speakers of languages that don't have a case system?

I just have a hard time grasping how people conditioned to think a certain way via their (or, a) language couldn't have a better understanding of some concepts than others.

>I cannot comment on the political motivations to deny linguistic relativism. I am just a linguist.

Sorry if you felt that I was pigeonholing you, thanks for your input.

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Re:How Language Seems to Shape One's View of the World by thaumasiotes on Friday January 03, 2014 @12:43AM (#7004348)

How does French qualify as using a base-20 counting system? Intuitively, I'd expect that to mean

- special words for the numbers 1-19

- special words for 20, 40, 60, 80, 100, 120, ..., 380

- special words for 400, 8000, 160,000, etc.

Instead, what we actually see in French is

- special words for the numbers 1-16

- special words for 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, and 80

- special words for 100, 1000, 1,000,000, etc.

This is a base-10 system (with the odd quirk), as far as I can see.

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Re:How Language Seems to Shape One's View of the World by jgg on Friday January 03, 2014 @11:03AM (#7006070)

It is actually referred to as a "base 20" counting system, although I agree that it isn't a very good one. It's definitely not a "pure" base-20 system, but many numbers are expressed of a multiple of twenty + remainder.

Perhaps a better example of a feature in a language that would provide more prominent cognitive differences would be one of the languages that requires users to mark a statement based on how they know the fact (witness, second-hand account, etc.), whose names escape me. Ah well.

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