TLDR : If languages affect thought regarding basic concepts, the effect is at most a weak one. More plausibly it's the other way around : if a culture understands a basic concept differently to another, it expresses this linguistically, but even this is a weak effect.
The studies classify English as strongly requiring future-time reference, by contrast with languages such as German, Finnish, and Mandarin, in which speakers typically speak of the future using present-tense forms. Speakers of “weak future-time reference” languages will say the equivalent of “I have a meeting this afternoon”, or “I am going shopping later today”, or “I fly to Paris tomorrow”, whereas English speakers are constrained to say things like “I will have a meeting this afternoon”, or “I will be going shopping later today”, or “I will fly to Paris tomorrow”.
If you just said “No, wait, I do say all those ‘present-tense’ things about the future,” you’re right. It’s useless to speculate that we could improve our savings behaviour by saying “I’m going to the bank tomorrow” instead of “I will go to the bank tomorrow”. We already do say that. Chen used verb tenses in weather forecasts to shore up his classification, but you can’t generalise to a whole language from one idiomatic context.
English is an outlier, though: most of their other “strong future-time reference” languages, such as French, Italian, and Spanish, mark future tense unavoidably on the verb. But there are cultures such as the Pirahã, of the Amazon, and the Hadza, of eastern Africa, that do not distinguish between present and future in verb conjugations but also don’t value saving for the future. The more counter-examples we find, the less likely is the linguistic explanation of the correlation.
http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180806-can-language-slow-down-time
I didn't know people were still pursuing that branch of linguistic relativity... I thought it had been dead for decades.
ReplyDeleteThere is an interesting spatial example, though, where people whose language require absolute spatial grammatical coding are really good at navigation.
The mechanism for that, however, is thought to be sort of inverse: As the language requires constant practice, people get good at it.
Source for that is "Space in Language and Cognition" by Stephen Levinson of the Max Planck Institute for psycholinguistics.
I had this Math teacher who did just that, he would drone on, and time seemed to freeze, every minute taking hours to pass..
ReplyDelete;-P
You wrote: "If languages affect thought regarding basic concepts, the effect is at most a weak one".
ReplyDeleteI would like that to be true. There are, however, those who speak math & physics quite well and argue that there is no difference between mathematical models and what the models represent. I can only wonder if knowing math well is what makes some people believe there is no distinction to be made between the observable and the abstract.
Jack Martinelli Heh, interesting. I suppose you'd need a statistical sample with a control group who never learn maths and a similar demographic who do, and then you could compare their worldviews before and after (factoring in different mathematical ability levels reached and other variables). There are quite a lot of people who are fluent in mathematics but don't equate models with reality, after all.
ReplyDeleteJack Martinelli I identify that as what I call "The coder's malady".
ReplyDeleteThe brain is an induction engine (epistemological, not mathematical). It does one single thing, but incredibly well: It generalizes from patterns.
People who work mainly with abstract systems will provide their brains with an input that leads it to absurd conclusions.
There are two major symptoms:
1) Thinking deduction is the basis of reason
and
2) Confusing the map with the territory, such that they become unable to differentiate between models and what they represent.