I get quite suspicious when a linguist claims that there's some language where you can't possibly give directions by reference to your body orientation. What's more likely is that giving directions that way is stigmatised very strongly, so that the linguist never hears anyone do it, and if he accidentally did it himself, it would confuse his interlocutor.
To give an analogy: if a linguist from Mars gathered a corpus of business English conversation, he'd notice that men refer to something 36 inches off the ground as "desk height" rather than "penis height", and call a sphere an inch or so in diameter "ping pong ball size" rather than "testicle size". Similarly a small discus is "penny sized" (adjusting for your local currency) rather than "anus sized", a small stone is "fist-sized" rather than "ballsack-sized", etc. Is this because in English it's linguistically impossible to make comparisons to your genital or excretory organs? No, it's because it's socially unacceptable at work; someone may complain to HR and get you fired if you make that comparison.
Similarly, the reason the egocentric direction system is so dominant in Western (and Chinese, Japanese, etc.) culture is because of habit and custom --- urban civilians don't usually see sunrise or sunset from inside the office buildings and malls in which they're most likely to give these kinds of directions, so they never get instinctively oriented and the habit of giving directions by compass points never takes off. It has nothing to do with linguistics.
And in the right situation, giving east-west-north-south style directions actually can take hold (which is helpful when you've got two sets of elevators and telling someone to "turn left" after getting off will send them walking in a fairly random direction). At certain times in my life, all my colleagues knew their north from their south. Were we all members of a sensitive indigenous tribe with a deep connection to nature due to our special mother tongue? No, we were stock traders; we knew which way was east in the building because our asses were in our seats before dawn and we watched the sun rise through the same window every day and set through the opposite one. Put us in a different building (e.g. due to switching jobs) and we'd be confused for a few days, just like the Bali kid who tried to get dance lessons from a teacher in another village.
I'm not a linguist but it does seem like they would have taken this into account. Maybe they haven't thought about this but I find that rather unlikely. Perhaps the New York Times isn't the place to delve into the finer details and thus they don't explain the reasoning in its entirety.
I tend to give the benefit of the doubt to people who spend their lives studying an issue. They've probably thought of the obvious possible counterexamples and have a valid reason for discounting them. That doesn't make their theory correct but surely their reasoning isn't so easily foiled. Well, one hopes.
Do you know whether or not they've accounted for this possibility? The topic interests me and I really would like to know if their reasoning is so shallow.
Your reasoning doesn't work if the language in question really doesn't have a word for 'left' or 'right'. Whether this is the case because they never though of it or because it was strongly stigmatized in the past and as a result these words came out of use and eventually were forgotten, the result is the same: Present day speakers truly have no possible way to say 'left' or 'right' without making up new words or describing it in some way.
I was always intrigued by the fact that some languages (especially ancient ones) appear to miss the word for "yes" and "no".
I've heard that gaelic and latin for example don't have a real word for "yes", but instead the answer repeated the affirmative form of the verb or similar.
Many argue that latin did indeed have the word for yes, namely "ita", but all the dictionaries I looked at translate it as "so; thus; indeed; ..."
Other languages like japanese rely much on repetition of the verb but do have words for yes and no (hai to iie).
I wonder if it really makes a difference to think in a language which doesn't have a word for yes and no (for whatever reasons is not present in the language, historical stigma etc).
I see how it can change your way to discuss with people: "don't be tricky! answer simply, ehm uhm" but I feel this doesn't count as a major mind shaping issue.
Don't get me wrong, I was intrigued as anyone with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis but I'm aware that sometimes some intriguing memes get more resonance than they deserve.
>I've heard that gaelic and latin for example don't have a real word for "yes", but instead the answer repeated the affirmative form of the verb or similar.
Yes, the fact that you don't have a specific word for a concept doesn't mean that you don't have a concept
The trick is probably that some concepts are activated when our language center parses more than one word; we don't think about them as separate words. There are plenty of examples in the vocabularies of various languages, one of my favorites is the word 'alarm':
I asked a lot of people in the Italy if they recognize what the word "allarme" comes from. Surprisingly only few recognized the exhortation "all'armi!" (to the weapons!) (http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=alarm). Sometimes this effect creates a new word, but sometimes a concept remains indirectly expressed, while the speaker unconsciously extracts the high level meaning of it.
However, I noticed that most of the amateur discussions about linguistics scratch only the surface because mostly only nouns are touched.
For example when I was younger and still living in Croatia. A relative of mine was Macedonian and told me that they have a verb mood that is used when you state something which you are sure that is true, vs only being told that is true.
>> I've heard that gaelic and latin for example don't have a real word for "yes", but instead the answer repeated the affirmative form of the verb or similar.
That is commonly used the same way in Chinese (at least on the Pimsleur beginner lessons). The answer to 'do you want' is 'want' or 'don't want'. I asked a native Chinese speaker if they have a way to say yes and no without referring to the action involved, and he said that they do.
I have notice that people who have gender-neutral pronouns have a lot of trouble mixing up 'he' and 'she' in English.
I can understand lack of "yes", but lack of "no" seems pretty strange. What do babies in these cultures shout when they don't want something? The idea of "do not want" seems to be one of the most basic things a human will want to express, starting from a very early age.
Classic Arabic has few words for "no", each expressing refusal/denial/rejection of a different sort: la, kalaa, balaa, lam, laysa, lan, etc.
la no
kalaa definitely not
balaa but not
lam did not
laysa is not
lan will not
However, colloquial arabic just uses the ma- prefix and collapses all those different words into one: maa/mish/mush/makoo, depending on the dialect. E.g. "I will not try":
Is there really any language which completely lacks words for left and right? At minimum, people want to distinguish their good hand from their bad hand, or the side of the body that has their liver from the side that has their stomach. I can't say anything for Australian aboriginal languages, but I'm quite familiar with Malayo-Polynesian languages in general (I speak Tagalog and Malay) ... and Balinese has definite words for left and right (kiwa and tengen). And you can elicit these very easily from a native Balinese speaker. Be a foreigner or an Indonesian from another island, ask "where's the bathroom" in heavily accented Balinese, then act confused if the answer has anything about geographic directions.
Like I said, there's no linguistic barrier against giving directions based on left or right in Balinese. It's merely cultural. Balinese people just don't do it when talking to each other. You might say, they demonstrate solidarity with each other against outsiders by using this geographic knowledge which sets them apart. (In Honolulu, which was originally populated by very distant linguistic relatives of the Balinese, the buses run "windward" and "leeward" even in English.) And besides, it's not very deep knowledge anyway --- the direction words are literally seaward-sunriseward-mountainward-sunsetward. What's more confusing is, there's Balinese villages both north and south of the big mountain, and they all use those directional words according to their local geography. Thus the ordering of the points is different. A counterclockwise turn for a southerner and a counterclockwise turn for a northerner take them through the above-mentioned points in opposite orders. I suspect the problem with the Balinese dancer boy to which the NYT is alluding comes from the following problem: his teacher wanted him to do something in a circle and he kept going the wrong way.
Which leads to the final rambling point: you'll probably notice that all the languages the NYT have mentioned are tiny ones you haven't heard of, unless you did a linguistics degree or came from the same province. I highly doubt all the big languages have always been purely egocentric-direction ones. Rather, they became that way when people who came from widely separate geographic areas had to use them with each other. It's easy to keep track of your North and South if you're in the middle of a giant desert or in a village where you've lived your whole life. It's hard if you're a merchant who sailed from the other end of the archipelago and walked down the streets of an unfamiliar port city, and so, you start asking for, and receiving, left/right directions instead.
Your reasoning doesn't work if the language in question really doesn't have a word for 'left' or 'right'.
An explanation as to why an argument isn't a proof doesn't "not work" simply because the statement being argued happens to be true. GP suggests that a particular argument is used to justify the claim that some language lacks some term, and he points out that that argument does not prove the claim.
The claim that language shapes our thinking is consistent with the claim that language is itself shaped, by environmental factors, customs, etc. Also, I think the effect of language on our thinking is not so simple as "We give directions from an egocentric perspective, so this makes us more selfish," as if we are naive and unaware of how our own language works. It's possible that it works in the opposite way: because we think of direction egocentrically, in order to give directions, you have to imagine yourself in someone else's shoes. You also end up with phrases like "Who's 'left'? My left or your left?" which draws attention to the fact that two people see the world differently. Really, our idea of direction promotes the Western cultural idea of individuals as different from each other, and also the idea of equality between individuals. I can't force you to adopt my directions because you are facing a different way; literally, you have a different viewpoint.
Geographic directions transcend my own personal viewpoint, but they also transcend everyone else's viewpoint as well. Arguably, this would make people less sensitive to the issue of selfishness vs unselfishness, which is only a moral consideration when you assume individualism.
This was one of the main topics of Orwell's 1984 as well as some of his essays.
If you restrict a language, you make it harder to think about certain topics. Making it impossible is far too strong a statement. Even very rudamentary languages can express virtually any concept. But it can certainly make it harder to think about those concepts, especially highly nuanced ones, with precise words fitted for it.
Mathematical history provides a good example of this. There is nothing you can express with Hindu-Arabic numerals that you cannot express with Roman numerals. Yet, the Hindu-Arabic numerals we vastly easier to work with and think about, and their importation into Europe facilitated mathematical development there.
Your argument is flawed, but the example is fine. Roman numerals are restricted in comparison with Arabic ones. AFAIK, there is no way to write "zero" or negative numbers in Roman numerals. Zero, in particular, was a major innovation.
Roman numerals are now dead, nobody would be taken seriously if he extended the roman numeral system in order to prove that the roman numerals could have a zero (or negatives). Right?
But when cultural systems were alive, they routinely changed, adapted, imported concepts. Sometimes they were replaced, but not simply because they lacked something that could be added
One could simply add "N" as nulla and invent something for negative numbers or spell it as a full word.
The key point in the arabic/hindi zero is not the 'zero' value of the symbol, but the positional feature of the numbering system. The zero just turns out to be useful to express a lot of numbers in a positional system.
Zero by himself is probably less useful and as a concept can be expressed as a full word "nulla" if needed.
I don't think that's the complete picture with programming languages. People already bring biases with them when they start using a programming language. They're more likely to become an expert in a language that agrees with the way they already think.
So just because c++ developers think alike, it's not necessarily because the language influenced them to think that way.
That doesn't really happen with spoken languages. You're born and have to learn the one (or maybe two) languages your parents speak. So the language influences you at a much earlier age.
"Regardless of visibility conditions, regardless of whether they are in thick forest or on an open plain, whether outside or indoors or even in caves, whether stationary or moving, they have a spot-on sense of direction. "
and:
"It was impossible to teach the boy anything, because he simply did not understand any of the instructions. When told to take “three steps east” or “bend southwest,” he didn’t know what to do. The boy would not have had the least trouble with these directions in his own village"
and then:
"This habit of constant awareness to the geographic direction is inculcated almost from infancy: studies have shown that children in such societies start using geographic directions as early as age 2 and fully master the system by 7 or 8"
That makes me a little skeptical but it's still an interesting article.
The bit about specifying the gender of one's neighbor sounds like the work of somebody who knows just enough to be really wrong.
My French and German are weak, but Spanish has vecino/vecina, and you can equivocate easily enough by saying that you spent the evening with "una persona que vive cerca", and I'd be very surprised if you can't do similar in French or German. ("Une personne qu'habite ne pas loin" in French?)
Somali: ninka dariskeenaa (m)/naagta dariskeenaa(f). Literally, "the man who is our neighbor", "the woman who is our neighbor".
The somali is complicated because "neighbor" is never a singular person, always plural. The concept of a person living alone is unheard of, and people are usually suspicious of bachelors.
Yes, Arabic (juwaar/jiraan) and Somali (daris/jaar/jiraan)
None of those words carry gender because they're plural.
In the singular, Arabic uses the male "jaar" word for both genders. While the same word is plural in northern Somali, since, as mentioned, it has no singular word. Arabic also has the dual (jaaraan/jaarataan) our two neighbors (m/f)
So apparently the Guugu Yimithirr have a pitch-pefect conception of cardinality at all times, because they describe space in north-south-east-west, which probably depends somehow on a periodic synchronization with the position of the sun.
Would be curious to see how they'd thrive in Alaska.
Among Whorf's well known examples of linguistic relativity are examples of instances where an indigenous language has several terms for a concept that is only described with one word in English and other European languages (Whorf used the acronym SAE "Standard Average European" to allude to the rather similar grammatical structures of the well-studied European languages in contrast to the greater diversity of the less-studied languages). One of Whorf's examples of this was the supposedly many words for 'snow' in the Inuit language, which has later been shown to be a misrepresentation[13] but also for example how the Hopi language describes water with two different words for drinking water in a container versus a natural body of water. These examples of polysemy served the double purpose of showing that indigenous languages sometimes made more fine grained semantic distinctions than European languages and that direct translation between two languages, even of seemingly basic concepts like snow or water, is not always possible.
Another example in which Whorf attempted to show that language use affects behavior came from his experience in his day job as a chemical engineer working for an insurance company as a fire inspector[13]. On inspecting a chemical plant he once observed that the plant had two storage rooms for gasoline barrels, one for the full barrels and one for the empty ones. He further noticed that while no employees smoked cigarettes in the room for full barrels no-one minded smoking in the room with empty barrels, although this was potentially much more dangerous due to the highly flammable vapors that still existed in the barrels. He concluded that the use of the word 'empty' in connection to the barrels had led the workers to unconsciously regarding them as harmless, although consciously they were probably aware of the risk of explosion from the vapors. This example was later criticized by Lenneberg[14] as not actually demonstrating the causality between the use of the word empty and the action of smoking, but instead being an example of circular reasoning. Steven Pinker in The Language Instinct ridiculed this example, claiming that this was a failing of human sight rather than language.
Whorf's most elaborate argument for the existence of linguistic relativity regarded what he believed to be a fundamental difference in the understanding of time as a conceptual category among the Hopi.[15] He argued that in contrast to English and other SAE languages, the Hopi language does not treat the flow of time as a sequence of distinct, countable instances, like "three days" or "five years" but rather as a single process and consequentially it does not have nouns referring to units of time. He proposed that this view of time was fundamental in all aspects of Hopi culture and explained certain Hopi behavioral patterns.
Cursing is a good example. Some low level subcultures are using high amount of sex/genital related cursing and word substitutes. (Russian underclass is the most famous example) while other cultures (say, Indian) aren't.
Of course, language usage shapes what you thing and by which chains of associations your mind wanders along.
If you're able to switch your mind's language for at least several minutes (naming and calling things on your second language) you will have a different projection of the same reality and your behavior will also be changed.
To give an analogy: if a linguist from Mars gathered a corpus of business English conversation, he'd notice that men refer to something 36 inches off the ground as "desk height" rather than "penis height", and call a sphere an inch or so in diameter "ping pong ball size" rather than "testicle size". Similarly a small discus is "penny sized" (adjusting for your local currency) rather than "anus sized", a small stone is "fist-sized" rather than "ballsack-sized", etc. Is this because in English it's linguistically impossible to make comparisons to your genital or excretory organs? No, it's because it's socially unacceptable at work; someone may complain to HR and get you fired if you make that comparison.
Similarly, the reason the egocentric direction system is so dominant in Western (and Chinese, Japanese, etc.) culture is because of habit and custom --- urban civilians don't usually see sunrise or sunset from inside the office buildings and malls in which they're most likely to give these kinds of directions, so they never get instinctively oriented and the habit of giving directions by compass points never takes off. It has nothing to do with linguistics.
And in the right situation, giving east-west-north-south style directions actually can take hold (which is helpful when you've got two sets of elevators and telling someone to "turn left" after getting off will send them walking in a fairly random direction). At certain times in my life, all my colleagues knew their north from their south. Were we all members of a sensitive indigenous tribe with a deep connection to nature due to our special mother tongue? No, we were stock traders; we knew which way was east in the building because our asses were in our seats before dawn and we watched the sun rise through the same window every day and set through the opposite one. Put us in a different building (e.g. due to switching jobs) and we'd be confused for a few days, just like the Bali kid who tried to get dance lessons from a teacher in another village.