Languages and Thought

Some people say that the main flaw in George Orwell's "1984" is the idea that some thoughts can be erradicated from the mind of a people by changing some linguistic elements (such as giving a new, false, meaning to meaningful words like "freedom"). Others say that is his main contribution.

If entire cultures can thrive without being able to express a word for "saudade", or "simpatico" or "ormai", does this mean Orwell newspeak is possible? That some ideas may become unthinkable?

Just food for thought.

But don't saudade and simpatico express universal, or if not universal, widely experienced states of being (feelings)? Will no one notice these exist if the words are eradicated? I think they will - eradication of experience is difficult. New descriptive words will develop, or sets of words.









edit to add the part about new descriptions developing - perhaps not as coinages, perhaps just as descriptions in, say, books and songs.

Regardless of what kind of thought you're thinking of, it can't depend on language. If the idea of sodade would not exist without the word sodade, than how did the word come to be part of portuguese? Did someone find it lying under a rock and then discover the mystery of what it meant?

A word like "saudade" comes from a frame of mind. A need to express something. The problem is how is the need "nested" in the hearts and minds of a community. If the feeling is pervasive, a word in a language is created. If it is not, then it may become a part of an idiolect (a "jargon" spoken by a very restricted set of persons).
The key, I guess, is how a word form an idiolect can become common usage.

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I just remember another word that I think is untranslatable: "llamativa".
The literal translation would be "callingly", and the meaning is similar to "attractive", but has a tinge of "noticeable", that can also be negative.

"Esa muchacha es muy llamativa": That girl is "attractive" in the sense that she "calls you", catches your attention.
Same thing can be said about a shirt.

Where was the need for such a word generated? Why?

Cuz it's fun?



Can't remember the word, but during something or other on TV the other day, someone mentioned a Japanese word that translates as "effortless effort."

Now, this describes a sort of grace during exertion that we might recognize without a word for it. But the word gives your mind a convenient handle for this concept -- and perhaps you come to notice it more because you have a word for it, to talk about it with others. With the word, one can define oneself, in part, according to how they relate to this idea of "effortless effort."

In an acting class years ago I had a similar shared experience with another Japanese phrase: jo, ha, kyu (guessing at the spelling). It broke the smallest physical actions down into their initiation ("jo"), their motion ("ha"), and their stop ("kyu"). We spent a lot of time breaking down bits of business according to jo-ha-kyu, making sure every movement had each element. Just having the word radically changed how a group of us thought about what some would pretentiously call "our craft."

Just as thought is shaped by culture, so is culture shaped by language.

Yes, I see that.

Ok, sorry, I haven't had the time to read through all the posts. But this is how I think.

I think that some here have thought of the issue backwards.

First there is an enviornment, people come to this enviornment, adapt to it, culture develops and language develops. The environment and culture affects the language. Not the other way around. People use languages daily to convey thoughts between one person and another person. It affects very little how you think. Instead, how you think affects the way you speak the language and your word choices, idiom choices, and that's just speaking. Your way of thinking, your personal character, your mood affects the way you write and the choice of words you choose to form a sentence.

In short, I think that "languages will affect the way you think" only if you aren't a native speaker of the language, which means you have been exposed to the underlying logic of the language (grammar), or you could be a full-time grammarian. Otherwise, it has little if no factors affecting your way of thinking.


-Shibo

shibo77

Check out the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis and have another "think"!

Regards fresco.

Prolly at least want to read a bit of the thread...

Hope no-one minds if I interject here and perhaps steer the conversation in a more productive direction?

First of all, the form of strong determinism espoused by the Sapir-Whorf (even they waffled between strong and weak determinism) hypothesis of language influencing thought (re: the SPECIFIC language you speak influences the way you think) has long been discredited by linguists. There is NO linguistic evidence supporting it; the only evidence is non-scientific introspection and/or anecdotal evidence by non-professional linguists or archaic linguists, such as Whorf's own personal observations (note: NOT scientific examination) when studying the Hopi language.

That being said, there is little point in beating this particular dead horse any longer. Those who make claims that there is still something to it are merely spouting off anecdotal ideas such as: "this language has such-and-such a word that can't be translated into any other language therefore it shows that speakers have a different way of thinking" or "this language has a rigid structure therefore people who speak it think more rigidly". Let me repeat, there is NO credible scientific evidence that supports conclusions such as the 2 above.

Now, the question of whether language influences thought still remains interesting for the following reason: language is one of humankind's modalities of thought. Of course the languages we speak influence the way we think, the way we perceive things, the way we divide up and categorize things in the world. This DOESN'T mean, however, that just because I speak a language that only has 2 color terms (light and dark) or I speak a language that contains unique words for my father's brother versus my mother's brother, that the actual ways my brain computes things or reasons is different from a speaker of another language.

A large part of what gets confused for LANGUAGE influencing thought is actually societal conditioning, culture and personal experience shaping the way we perceive the world. This is reflected in the choices different languages make in terms of their vocabulary, but it has NOTHING to do with the grammatical structure of a particular language. Notions of "rigid" versus "lax" grammars are misguided. ALL languages possess full and regular grammatical systems, which includes not only how words are put together to form sentences, but also how words themselves are composed of smaller parts, how sounds are combined to form words, how meaning is computed from constituent parts, and so on.

Native speakers of a language are extremely fastidious in their judgments about what is a valid utterance and what isn't. Languages differ with respect to their complexities in certain parts of the grammar. Some languages have horribly complex phonology including tones (sound system), such as Chinese, but the syntactic structure of Chinese is simple. Conversely, a language may have very complicated noun conjugations (Estonian with its 14 cases), while at the same time having a relatively simple phonology. A language may not require the grammatical subject to be overt (subject drop languages like Japanese), which to non-native speakers makes such languages seem vague, but a native speaker will rarely be in doubt about what meaning was intended! NONE of the above-mentioned characteristics of a language influences the way speakers of that language think, process thought, or reason.

Finally, it should be noted that the MAJORITY of language-related research done in other (non-linguistics) fields such as psychology, anthropology, sociology, literature, and so on, is NOT based on current, or even relatively recent linguistic theory. One would think that with the incredible advances made by linguists over the past 40-50 years that those in other fields would be more aware of the academic climate, but sadly, in the majority of cases, they base their research on faulty linguistic reasoning, rudimentary understanding of the basic concepts of linguistic science, and erroneous ideas espoused by other non-experts.

I am not claiming that linguists are not guilty of similar practices, but the majority of linguistics research happens to focus on language, so these problems do not surface as much. These things happen when inter-disciplinary research is carried out by non-experts, WITHOUT consulting experts. In an ideal world, all interdisciplinary research would be carried out by experts of the disciplines involved.
/end academic rant

What I think would be interesting for this thread would be for people to talk about their own experiences with language and thought, specifically interesting things we notice about our own language and languages we come into contact with.

Perhaps a discussion of people's perception of other languages and why we may be perceiving them as such. For example, it was claimed that the harsh sounds of German were the result of the harsh climate endured in Germany. Of course, the fact remains that those same "harsh" sounds are found in Arabic (and countless other "hot-weather" languages), rendering that hypothesis silly.

Let's try to articulate our perceptions of foreign languages and try to justify why we feel what we feel about them. Then we can open things up and hopefully gain a better understanding of what is actually shaping our thought!

If anyone wants links/references/fun things to read about these topics, PM me!

"I am not a merry man!" - Whorf (or is it Worf)

rofl!

mezzie

Nice (Pinkeresque) summary !

How do you see Wittgenstein's "language games" fitting in to all that, perhaps with particular reference to your own usage of the terms "thought", "scientific" and "experts" :wink:

I would also be interested in your views about "reasoning" in view of developments in "logic" which allows for fuzzy or probabalistic set boundaries which can shift as a function of the perceptual set of the observer. (This has particular import with respect to the word "scientific" vis-a-vis the term "nominal measurement" as the basic level of "observation")

Right, I saw the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and I still think that these people are thinking backwards...

'He gave man speech, and speech created thought,
Which is the measure of the universe'

I don't know where to begin on this sentence.
Thought comes before speech. That is a definite! Does a squirrel or your pet dog have complex languages? But I bet they have complex thoughts. Chimpanzees are smart, they can do simple math. But they don't necessarily have a word for it.

Thought comes before speech and language.

Thought shapes languages.

Languages are necessary to transmit ideas between one and another.
If there were only one person in the world, or a person lived alone for one's entire life, language wouldn't be necessary for thought. But language would be a useful tool to have because languages can also help focus/standarise/organise our thought.

When there is a new thought, a new word is formed.
When the "radio", "television", "computer", "internet", "blogs" came into being. The English-language speakers invented these words to convey this idea.

A person would have first thought of the idea of a "blog" before the word "blog" was actually invented for such a thing.

This is the same mistake when calling Chinese characters "ideograms".
It says that words are created to convey ideas...
First comes the thought, then the language/characters.
We see an animal that swims in a river, and we name it "fish". Then a character for "fish" is drawn. Ideas create language/speech which creates words/characters.

Language transmits an idea from one person's brain to another person's brain.

When you see the word "rose" right now. An imaginary picture in your brain might be formed. For me it's a red rose with green leaves, tilted to the right, I'm looking from a profile view, there is sunshine and a fence in the background, and much like the rose in my garden. The word "rose" initiated a reaction in my brain, and my brain brought images from my past experiences which matched the word "rose". In my case, the red rose in my garden. In other words, my thought/past experiences shaped how the language ("rose"), would be conveyed in my brain. on the other hand, the rose that you thought might be a white rose, or a yellow rose, it might be tilted to the left, or not tilted at all, the background might be a black void instead of sunshine, you might be looking from above or below, your thought and past experiences shaped how the language ("rose") would be conveyed in your brain.

Translation between languages is possible because much of our thought and experiences have been much the same. We all live on the same planet, in roughly the same enviornment, thiking roughly the same things.
Therefore, our language developped to be pretty similar. Of course there are still lots of differences. The Inuits have dozens of words for snow, obviously, there language was shaped by their experiences which was shaped by their snowy environment.

Environment, then comes the people who have to adapt to the environment, there culture, and languages are then shaped/adapted to that environment, but generally the experiences/languages are the same, therefore much can be translated between languages.

It's a very simple idea, just thought the wrong way.

This is what I think.

I won't defend Sapir Whorf, but that statement itself I think provides the key into how language does influence thought -- because it influences social interactions, which profoundly influence the way we think. To originate an idea may not require language, but to receive an idea does.

Something that might be pertinent (to this dead thread)...

From the 7/22 issue of Nature ("Conceptual precursors to language"):

Patiodog, that's a different kind of influence though - that's language influencing interpretation, or influencing another person based on the fact that it's used to convey information. In that context, everything influences thought. It's not like the magical connection Sapir and Whorf suggest whereby the method of expressing thoughts actually changes the thoughts.

I didn't say it was, I just thought it might be of interest to folks on the thread. Nonetheless, if you accept that thought is, to some extent, culturally mediated, there is a connection. I'm not inclined to subscribe to a "hard" interpretation (if you will) of Sapir-Whorf.

"The method of expressing thoughts actually changes the thoughts"
I'm sure that's true, esp wrt feelings. When I try to articulate feelings, my language is inadequate, and the feeling itself seems to be suppressed (by the effort of describing it?)

This thread is out of my league, but....

Has anyone observed infants, too young to talk, relating to each other? They seem to be able to communicate. It seems like magic, extraordinary.