Talk:Linguistic relativity

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In popular culture
The short story 'Story of Your Life' is a fine reference, and there are also full books which predate it and treat the subject at more length. One example is the well known Iain Banks novel "The Player of Games". One passage (for example) about 80% of the way in (p.247 in a 310 page edition) goes as follows:

“The man had altered, slipped deeper into the game and the society. It had been warned this might happen. One reason was that Gurgeh was speaking Eachic all the time. Flere-Imsaho was always a little dubious about trying to be so precise about human behaviour, but it had been briefed that when Culture people didn't speak Marain for a long time and did speak another language, they were liable to change; they acted differently, they started to think in that other language, they lost the carefully balanced interpretative structure of the Culture language, left its subtle shifts of cadence, tone and rhythm behind for, in virtually every case, something much cruder. Marain was a synthetic language, designed to be phonetically and philosophically as expressive as the pan-human speech apparatus and the pan-human brain would allow. Flere-Imsaho suspected it was over-rated, but smarter minds than it had dreamt Marain up, and ten millennia later even the most rarefied and superior Minds still thought highly of the language, so it supposed it had to defer to their superior understanding. One of the Minds who'd briefed it had even compared Marain to Azad. That really was fanciful, but Flere-Imsaho had taken the point behind the hyperbole. Eachic was an ordinary, evolved language, with rooted assumptions which substituted sentimentality for compassion and aggression for cooperation. A comparatively innocent and sensitive soul like Gurgeh was bound to pick up some of its underlying ethical framework if he spoke it all the time.”

And it comes up in various such ways throughout the Book. For people who are interested, this seems to be a good example of a literary use of the concept. I think it would be too bulky (and too full of additional weird references) to include sample passages within the article as "proof".

I've tried to add a very brief reference to this fairly well-known book, much like the similar example already there, but one individual seems to be abusing a script to instantly revert it pedantically rather than reasonably and helpfully... "Anti-vandalism tools... should not be used to undo good-faith changes". Claiming that "Sources are required for ALL content", despite the fact that the published and well-known book was named, and wikipedia guidelines to the contrary: - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_overkill "Wikipedia policy requires all content within articles to be verifiable." (Simply... "verifiable"... and the text is readily available.) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:You_don%27t_need_to_cite_that_the_sky_is_blue#Citing_everything "A common misconception ... is that everything must be cited to an inline source, which leads to comments such as "the end of paragraph 3 is uncited", without specifying why that is an issue." - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citation_overkill - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:What_%22Ignore_all_rules%22_means#Use_common_sense

I don't think mentioning this book as an example of Linguistic relativity requires a 3rd party citation to support the simple observation, because it's apparent to anyone who bothers to just look inside the book. If someone asks me to find a provide a citation that "Hamlet is about Earthlings", I can't do it because not every unlimited number of easily observable things about every book is commented on where it can be cited.

Anyway, I'm not going to continue to edit-war with this guy, so if someone thinks this example might be appreciated by readers interested in the topic, then please feel free to add a reference to it back in however you like. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 104.5.72.176 (talk) 09:39, 13 August 2019 (UTC)

What about the movie Arrival, as well as the Heinlein works Gulf and Stranger in a Strange Land? Dfmclean (talk) 18:03, 15 April 2021 (UTC)


 * Gulf is the one I immediately thought of! Of further note, artificial languages of the "loglang" variety try to actually work out Heinlein's description in detail, and I think I have seen at least one of these inventors cite Gulf as inspiration. Of further note, languages that have fewer phonemes tend to be spoken more quickly than the ones with many phonemes, so that the typical bit rate of human language is preserved. The natural language extremes are perhaps fast-spoken, phonemically simple Japanese versus slow-spoken, phonemically ultra-rich Navajo; but a similar, if less pronounced, contrast between the Germanic and Romance languages will be more familiar to most. What is germane to the Gulf/loglang principle here is: the Navajo do not as the Gulf principle predicts exploit the potential for conciseness of their language to the hilt, i.e. to make words as short as they could be; in fact, Navajo words for everyday things are about as long as English words, often a bit longer and a bit more descriptive. 2A01:CB0C:CD:D800:D402:C7D:C36F:E0B4 (talk) 10:09, 15 January 2023 (UTC)

Mathematics proves Saphir-Whorph is true.
Mathematicians as old as Plato knew that the correct choice of notation was important for the ability to express mathematical thought. In other words, the way that an idea was expressed matters: for example, it's not a matter of much controversy that Roman Numbers are more awkward to do arithmetic with than the Arabic ones that we use today.

In fact, most new domains of mathematics do use new notation (or, more commonly, extend an older notation to express a more general context) to introduce new concepts -- Einstein did it with tensor notation for relativity, scientists use various symbols to express physical quantities, chemists use chemical notation, quantum mechanics introduced bra-ket notation, and so on.

Just as symbolic notation allows us to express complex ideas with a concise notation, a concise notation in turn gives us the ability to more quickly discuss and describe aspects of complex reasoning that would take many hundreds or thousands more symbols if expressed in the corresponding set of words in a natural language.

What's more, because of the strict equivalence between the concept and it's expression, mathematical concepts can be visualized and manipulated directly in terms of their expressions, using rules that were originally derived from the underlying concepts being described, but which may otherwise be used independently of their previous representation.

We can speak of numbers without using set theory: but we can prove the rules of numerical manipulation that we follow to be valid within the axioms of a given set theory, such as ZF.

Similarly, a concise choice of words for mathematical symbols ensures that we can express theorems in a small enough number of words that another mathematician can hear and remember them well enough to understand them when a mathematical expression is spoken; something that is *NOT* true of human language, simply because there are limits to how many sounds a person can remember.

By introducing words and defining specific meanings for terms, we are able to concisely express ideas that would be slower to express otherwise.

"The area of a circle is pi r squared." "The integral of e to the x is e to the x plus c". "E equals m c squared".

Humans can only remember so far back in time; and we only live so long -- any idea that we can't remember well enough to get the details right, or any idea that takes longer to listen to than we have to live is beyond us. We can only understand ideas if they can be expressed quickly enough: in other words, if the language that they are expressed in is sufficiently concise.

That means that choice of language DOES determine what we are capable of understanding and what we are capable of communicating -- or, in other words, the Saphir-Whorph theory is correct.

Q.E.D. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.230.30.30 (talk) 19:54, 17 February 2021 (UTC)


 * Please see Wikipedia is not a forum and WP:NOTOPINION. Ardenter (talk) 08:10, 21 May 2021 (UTC)
 * Good notation in maths can make concepts seem more obvious and bad notation can obfuscate them... this is true because that is precisely the criterion whereby mathematicians judge notation to be good or bad. However, your essay links the finite human "buffer capacity" to the ability to comprehend only to what can be expressed with sufficiently concise notation. You confuse notation with vocabulary/syntax, but even if your argument does not fall apart at that point, it should be pointed out that in maths the conciseness of the notation does not negate the long work of mastering its subtleties and implications. Thus your maths analogy for SW does not really work. You may also note that natural language tends not to expand inwards, by inventing ever more conceptually dense terms for ever more intricate concepts (an idea that often occurs in sci fi and the artificial language community), but outwards, exploiting combinatorial richness to express whatever needs to be expressed. Finally, you misspell Sapir, which might be indicative of the lack of attention you have paid to the details. 2A01:CB0C:CD:D800:D402:C7D:C36F:E0B4 (talk) 09:48, 15 January 2023 (UTC)

Warning
There is a lot of methodologically suspect work out there purporting to present evidence for some weak version of SW. You may have seen the one arguing that Chinese people remember recent personal history (what happened before what?) better than Europeans because the linguistic metaphor of time in mandarin is essentially that of a stack (something vertical) rather than (in most European languages) that of a line (or road etc.; something horizontal). Or it might have something to do with the fact that the entire C. culture and educational system is geared towards mnemmonic training. 2A01:CB0C:CD:D800:D402:C7D:C36F:E0B4 (talk) 09:55, 15 January 2023 (UTC)

Future tense
More evidence is needed or the section needs to be balanced. English can be considered as having no grammatical (inflected) future -- where would it rank in that view? Clearly as a language with future temse. Strikes me as possibly an Anglo-centric claim and this one study would not be enough to claim this view in such a way. MinTrouble (talk) 04:24, 4 December 2023 (UTC)


 * There is https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40881-021-00103-x which can be summarized as "does not replicate, hypothesis invalid". Probably worth adding. Mathnerd314159 (talk) 05:12, 4 December 2023 (UTC)
 * Yes, that was my impression. I think this section on the "linguistic savings" hypotheses that makes a great fuss about grammatical future tense vs. no future tense and lexical marking of future ought to be scaled back to a footnote at best. MinTrouble (talk) 22:51, 18 December 2023 (UTC)
 * The particular incarnation of the reproducibility crisis in this domain probably needs to be expounded upon in general, and at significantly greater length than a lot of the miscellany currently in the article. Remsense  留  00:32, 19 December 2023 (UTC)
 * True, but I don't think we have to go so far as to question the entire methodology. There are considerable problems with the connection of a grammatical feature (future tense) with strong social claims concerning the speakers that we should considerably tone down. A much more limited application of a narrow interpretation of Sapir-Whorf, i.e. there are millisecond differences in recognition of concepts between those that are linguistically primed and those that are not (whose languages don't have such categories) is what I'm accustomed to from the discourse. Abby Kaplan's 2016 book is a good summary, in my opinion.
 * Abby Kaplan, Women talk more than men… and other myths about language explained. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. xvi, 308. Pb. $24.99. MinTrouble (talk) 19:30, 22 December 2023 (UTC)
 * thank you for the book rec, it's just what i was looking for! Remsense  留  20:52, 22 December 2023 (UTC)
 * My pleasure. Kaplan does a good job with summarizing the findings that support a narrow Sapir-Whorf interpretation: the difference is minor but measurable. It's in reaction time, it's in tiny differences in the likelihood to see connections, not in a categorical difference of a deterministic kind. The latter, however, is what I see in the "linguistic savings" hypothesis, which, btw, I've never encountered in any linguistic context. So this is news to me, which does, of course, not mean that it is not valid or should not be here. But the evidence is quite clear, at least in linguistics (it could be different in business writings etc.): it's a fringe theory in linguistics and should be treated as such: in a sentence, as a footnote. MinTrouble (talk) 19:40, 23 December 2023 (UTC)