I wouldn't know Sapir-Whorf from Mr. Wongo's Book Of Children's Games.
It's always good to learn more about the history of one's ideas. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was considered pretty revolutionary when it was first introduced and has since entered common discourse stripped of context. Remnants of this context can be found whenever someone repeats the old saw "Eskimos have N words for snow." I think based on talking to people about this and my own reactions when I learned of it, that most people who don't know anything about linguistics now believe some variation of linguistic determinism, even if they have no idea of its history.
I was reasonably careful to avoid making that proposition. I said 'variance from normative construction', so as to steer clear of value judgements regarding the quality of the resulting mind.
Your effort to do so is significant, I think.
What might be the case is that a mind framing thoughts in non-standard grammar would have difficulty apprehending the thoughts and feelings of the normative majority. A barrier to comprehension at a very low level.
A barrier to communication, certainly. But it would only be a barrier to comprehension more broadly if grammar is the basic level of human thought, which hasn't been demonstrated to my satisfaction yet.
If you put aside the race aspect and talk instead about poor, poorly-educated adolescents, you find, for example, a notable incidence of ADHD among young offenders.
Except the article you link doesn't say that has been found, it just says it's been suggested. I don't know how it is in the UK, but in the US you cannot validly put aside considerations of race from considerations of the justice system, considering the much higher proportion of people of color compared to white people at each stage—prosecution, conviction, and incarceration. And diagnosis of ADHD, considering how frequently it is misdiagnosed and how blurry a category it is, is problematic itself. Besides which you haven't said anything about these kids' language, just that they are poorly-educated—a fact that is also not evident to me from the article. Do you have another source?
I take exception to 'mysterious oriental thought', with its none-too-subtle implication of colonial racism. I find languages intriguing and beautiful, and any language I don't speak is by definition mysterious to me.
I'm talking here about the attribution of the understanding that there are different kinds of truth to Japanese people, uniquely or particularly. I think it rests on stereotypes about "Eastern thought" and "Western thought" that are not borne out.
More to the point, I'd be interested to see a map of those languages and their 'varying degrees'. Degrees being nuance, and nuance being the name of the game.
Do you mean a graphic map, or are you speaking figuratively? That's something I don't have access to, but maybe given some time and a research grant I could produce one.
Would you accept, though, that the acquisition of a language - some form of communication which lends itself to abstract thought - is key to the fuller development of the mind? I believe it's also not too much of a leap to say that in learning language, we form pathways in the brain.
I'm not sure. Pinker suggests that the development of the brain inevitably produces language and grammar, rather than the reverse, if I recall his argument correctly. I have been largely unconvinced by his research methodology and his idiosyncratic way of expressing his conclusions. I am not enough of a neurologist to understand what is really meant by "pathways in the brain." Given these limitations, I just can't say for sure if I'd agree with that or not.
So the possibility of an influence on brain architecture - however small - of differences in the kind of language is not ruled out.
I wouldn't rule it out. I'd suggest an alternative—that it's of little significance what kind of language is learned in comparison to how many have been learned. Language acquisition research does show that how many languages have been previously acquired affects the difficulty of a new language for an adult learner in ways that suggest that something complex is going on in terms of mental functioning. One's third language is usually significantly harder to acquire than one's second, with common errors that suggest that for awhile after acquiring a second language and before fully acquiring the third, one has developed a categorization system of "Native Language" and "Foreign." This could well have something to do with the effects of language acquisition on brain structure—but it seems to be pretty across the board without regard to which languages are acquired, with some variability depending on the syntactical similarities among the languages.
If anything, I would have said that the Japanese have taken the art of the planning horizon to a higher level than anyone else
Can you quantify that in some way? (Preferably, since we agree that language has some effect on how we think, with reference to "Japanese people" or "native speakers of Japanese" as opposed to "the Japanese"?)
It might be interesting in this context to examine Japan before and after the Second World War - the shift from an imperial culture to a modern industrial one; how badly dented was the Japanese world view at that time, and what were the effects on language and culture?
There's also a problem here with framing Japanese culture before American occupation as premodern. I take your meaning—it was a massive shift, as colonization is always culturally traumatic. On the other hand, would you expect to find that Japanese people were less capable, or more capable, of long-range planning prior to American occupation? Would you not expect to see a shift towards use of a grammatical future tense in the Japanese language? And given the number of different groups of Japanese speakers, including Okinawan people and Ainu people, with distinct cultures of their own, does it even make sense to be talking about "the Japanese" as a monoculture?
There are only three hundred of them alas, so I can't challenge you too strongly on the notion that there are high achievers from every culture in every field - but I think you'd have to acknowledge that a mathematician from this background seems vanishingly unlikely.
I've read the Piraha research before, yes. I have to say I'd like to see some examination into how Piraha people do their necessary mathematical tasks and determine whether this system, whatever it may be, is not as functional for their purposes as mathematics stemming from a base-ten Arabic numeral system is for ours.
I'm interested in learning more about how our uses of language affect our thinking patterns. I am, however, deeply suspicious that some of the attention being paid to this research, at least in the popular realm, is due to its perceived potential to uphold people's beloved ethnic stereotypes against any form of critical analysis. I'm especially wary of three things:
1) In the absence of research to this effect, projecting possible cultural differences about some group based on a perception of their language, particularly when this perception of the language comes from an outsider, non-speaker's perspective.
2) Attempting to explain perceived, but not soundly demonstrated, cultural differences by reference to language.
3) Attempting to draw broad conclusions towards a generalized field theory of language and its determination of culture, based on few anomalous results such as that of the Piraha. |
