Lingustic Relativity / Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

[Terra]

Once again I've had to listen to someone spread the lie of "Eskimos have over 9000 words for snow.", and what I see as very dubious claims about linguistic relativism.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow says that Eskimo-Aleut languages do not have an unusually large number of words for 'snow', but Sami languages do! It gives http://scandinavian.wisc.edu/dubois/Cou ... eToday.pdf as a source. I am unsatisfied. While the source is hosted by a university, it is hosted only by the Scandinavian Studies department, not the Linguistics Department (if one even exists), and the article itself does not seem to be written by a linguist, but by a journalist, whose name I cannot even find in the article.

Another line of study by Frode Strømnes examined why Finnish factories had a higher occurrence of work related accidents than similar Swedish ones. He concluded that cognitive differences between the grammatical usage of Swedish prepositions and Finnish cases could have caused Swedish factories to pay more attention to the work process where Finnish factory organizers paid more attention to the individual worker.

Am I the only one who thinks this sounds ridiculous? Did they have the same strictness and frequency of safety checks? What about real working conditions? Did the factories produce the same types of products? Did they use similar tools/machines? Were the management styles similar? Hours? Wages? Holidays? Living conditions outside of the factory? Were there really no other variables than one spoke Swedish, and the other Finnish!? And if there really no other (identifiable) variables, what extrapolations and expectations can we make for other countries/cultures and their factories? and how do they turn out?

I haven't read the whole Wikipedia article yet, as I don't have the time at the moment.

* * *

Can others point me towards some good sources done by LINGUISTS on this subject? What're your thoughts on it?

[sucaeyl]

I think the rumor is that Eskimos have 40 words for snow.

[Yng]

lol sapir-whorf

Incidentally, poor Edward Sapir loses out by being associated with this theory.

[Astraios]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow says that Eskimo-Aleut languages do not have an unusually large number of words for 'snow', but Sami languages do! It gives http://scandinavian.wisc.edu/dubois/Cou ... eToday.pdf as a source. I am unsatisfied. While the source is hosted by a university, it is hosted only by the Scandinavian Studies department, not the Linguistics Department (if one even exists), and the article itself does not seem to be written by a linguist, but by a journalist, whose name I cannot even find in the article.

Sámi languages do have lots of words for types of snow (e.g. cuoŋu hard crust on snow), and lots for types of reindeer (e.g. golggot male reindeer exhausted from mating).

Am I the only one who thinks this sounds ridiculous?

No, that's just rubbish.

[Trailsend]

Can others point me towards some good sources done by LINGUISTS on this subject?

Lera Boroditsky has done a ton of interesting research on the issue. Check out, for example, "Constructing agency: the role of language".

[Yng]

Isn't she the one that did that study on the Australians with the 'absolute direction' language?

[Trailsend]

Yep--"Remembrances of Times East: Absolute Spatial Representations of Time in an Australian Aboriginal Community."

[Aurora Rossa]

Sámi languages do have lots of words for types of snow (e.g. cuoŋu hard crust on snow), and lots for types of reindeer (e.g. golggot male reindeer exhausted from mating).

Sounds like an oddly specific word for a reindeer.

[Astraios]

Sounds like an oddly specific word for a reindeer.

Why, yes, that's just exactly what it is. Thank you for pointing that out.

[Gojera]

Inuit doesn't have a high number of root words for snow, but it can derive a wide variety of terms for snow, much as English can in terms like "powdery snow". It's the nature of the polysynthetic morphology that Inuit has tons of words for snow. They have tons of words for everything else, too. Wikipedia: "This sort of word construction is pervasive in Inuit language and makes it very unlike English. In one large Canadian corpus – the Nunavut Hansard – 92% of all words appear only once, in contrast to a small percentage in most English corpora of similar size. This makes the application of Zipf's law quite difficult in the Inuit language."

Here's a great quote from Guy Deutscher's NYT piece "Does Language Shape How You Think?":

Since there is no evidence that any language forbids its speakers to think anything, we must look in an entirely different direction to discover how our mother tongue really does shape our experience of the world. Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different 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.

Or look at The Original Whorf; there's a link to a great PDF there.

[Gojera]

How does our language shape the way we think? by Lera Boroditsky

[Ouagadougou]

It makes sense to have such a word, though, since herding the animals has been their lifestyle for hundreds of years.

[Xephyr]

Isn't she the one that did that study on the Australians with the 'absolute direction' language?

Also she's real purrdy.

[MisterBernie]

Sounds like an oddly specific word for a reindeer.

There's that language (whose name escapes me right now) which has a specific term for a sexually mature cow who hasn't had a calf yet.

[Bob Johnson]

Sounds like an oddly specific word for a reindeer.

There's that language (whose name escapes me right now) which has a specific term for a sexually mature cow who hasn't had a calf yet.

English? Heifer.

[Matt]

Once again I've had to listen to someone spread the lie of "Eskimos have over 9000 words for snow.", and what I see as very dubious claims about linguistic relativism.

Every time I hear someone put forth the claim that "Eskimos have X number of words for snow" I like to respond that English probably has that many words for "money".

[MisterBernie]

English? Heifer.

That's the joke.
(Or German Färse, Swedish kviga...)

[Rodlox]

Isn't she the one that did that study on the Australians with the 'absolute direction' language?

Also she's real purrdy.

I liked her better in the National Geographic Channel special about the tricks our minds play on us. but in both that case and this one, I agree with you.

[cromulant]

Isn't she the one that did that study on the Australians with the 'absolute direction' language?

Also she's real purrdy.

I agree.

[----]

Sounds like an oddly specific word for a reindeer.

There's that language (whose name escapes me right now) which has a specific term for a sexually mature cow who hasn't had a calf yet.

I raise you !Xóõ ǂúũ sàʻã 'The place on the surface of an ostrich egg where a hole has been drilled through'

[chris_notts]

If you want serious work on the subject, I refer you to the work of Stephen C. Levinson. He is a linguist who's done a lot of work investigating how languages express notions to do with space, specifically constructions involving location or motion. It is typically assumed that the underlying conceptualisation of space basically doesn't vary with culture/language, but his work shows that it isn't so.

For example, languages typically use one or more of three different coordinate systems for expressing location relative to another object:

(i) intrinsic - based on directions assigned using inherent features of the ground, e.g. "The cup is at the nose of the tea pot" (nose = spout)
(ii) relative - based on projecting a coordinate system based on the orientation of the speaker onto the ground object, e.g. "The cup is to the (speaker's) left of the tea pot"
(iii) absolute - based on directions independent of the speaker, e.g. cardinal directions like "north" or "south", e.g. "the cup is north of the tea pot"

Firstly, which frame of reference is predominant has to affect what speakers remember. For example, in languages where the absolute frame of reference is dominant (as it is in many Australian aboriginal languages), speakers must remember information about bearings in order to speak about the past accurately. If they don't, then there's no way they can use the absolute frame of reference correctly when talking about the past. And in fact speakers of these languages do get their bearings correct normally when talking about the past. Because of their use of the absolute frame of reference, they constantly remember information that an English person would not - if I asked you which cardinal direction you were facing during events that you remember, you probably wouldn't be able to tell me.

It is then possible to do experiments to test non-verbal spatial reasoning and see if the frame of reference preferred by the speaker's L1 influences their reasoning. For example, Levinson did tests where showed the speaker an arrangement of objects, rotated the speakers to a new table, and then effectively got them to either arrange a new set of objects in the "same" way (being careful to avoid language that might bias the speakers to reason in a certain way). Speakers of relative dominant languages would rotate the coordinate system with them, so e.g. the leftmost object remained the leftmost object. Speakers of absolute dominant languages typically did not - instead they would maintain spatial relations in terms of their absolute bearings, so the westmost object remained the westmost object but left/right were flipped.

This is all from memory, so don't pick holes in my description of the experiments and assume his work is flawed. You'd be better off going to his books and reading them before doing that.

[chris_notts]

My own take is that it's not as simple as having a hundred words for show, and language is typically not some straight jacket that you can't escape. But the language you speak can influence you to pay more attention to things that speakers of other languages: if you speak a language where the absolute frame of reference is used for everything, you need to be able to find your bearings instantly and to remember absolute orientation in a way that a speaker of English typically doesn't unless it is relevant. If you speak a language with evidentials you will have to track more closely exactly how you came by information, or risk being called a liar.

[chris_notts]

Here is a description of one of Levinson's books:

http://ebooks.cambridge.org/ebook.jsf?b ... 0511613609

[Observer]

What does Eskimos having X number of words for snow, or claims thereof, have to do with linguisic relativity? I'm unfamiliar with the claim that the content of a lexicon constitutes linguistic relativity. The link is clear in the article that claims factory accident frequency as a function of language, but not in the Eskimo example.

Terra, I've never found Wikipedia useful for learning about anything, only ever as a reference. To my eyes, the linguistic relativity page is especially poorly-written. Here are some links on the subject that may provide less ridiculous to you.

How color words affect color perception. In short, if a language has a specific word for a color, speakers are more likely to remember it. If such a word is missing, speakers are less likely.

How reading format affects time perception. In short, English reads left-to-right. English speakers have an easier time constructing timelines left-to-right and a more difficult time constructing them in other fashions. The same applies to Chinese speakers and the top-to-bottom direction.

How arbitrarily marking gender affects personification of inanimate objects. When asked to assign attributes to inanimate objects, speakers of languages which arbitrarily mark gender tend to assign attributes they associate with the gender. For example, in the experiment, German speakers tend to assign feminine characteristics to bridges, Spanish masculine. The German word for "bridge" is feminine, the Spanish masculine.

How grammar affects association of events and time perception. When shown three images of a man in three stages of kicking a soccer ball (about to, doing so, having done so), Indonesian speakers, whose language doesn't mandatorily mark tense, described all three using the same words. Later on, when asked to recall the content of the photos, they couldn't remember them being any different. English speakers, whose language necessarily tenses verbs, described the three photos as being different, and could readily recall the differences between them later.

[Gojera]

The stronger versions of Sapir-Whorf aren't worth much, but some of the weaker forms are interesting. I like the idea that language less restricts what can be thought, than enables it. That by codifying concepts, language enables people to understand and manipulate ideas more easily.

Somewhat as in Number as a cognitive technology: Evidence from Pirahã language and cognition.