There's so many easily identifiable phenomena suggesting some bidirectional relationship between language and thought that individuals can personally relate to that it seems strange to say they're...
There's so many easily identifiable phenomena suggesting some bidirectional relationship between language and thought that individuals can personally relate to that it seems strange to say they're mostly unrelated. It may be accurate that the effect of language on your neuroscience is fairly weak, but one doesn't need to think for long to see how the effect of language on psychology can be quite significant.
The current stance (at least the one that was taught to me in a master's degree a couple of years ago) is that the strong version (deterministic) is abjectly false, while there is still wiggle...
The current stance (at least the one that was taught to me in a master's degree a couple of years ago) is that the strong version (deterministic) is abjectly false, while there is still wiggle room on the weak (relativist) version, but the inability to replicate scientific studies is casting doubt onto the whole thing.
I think Tom might have gone into the weeds a little more, but I suppose a 5 minute YouTube doesn't allow for a huge amount of nuance in a position.
I just wish he didn't end the video by concluding determinism is 'thankfully, just fiction' after hand-waving it and talking mostly about relativism, rather than showing how determinism has been...
I just wish he didn't end the video by concluding determinism is 'thankfully, just fiction' after hand-waving it and talking mostly about relativism, rather than showing how determinism has been disproved. As mentioned, the Wikipedia has some really interesting examples (which Tom Scott has even explored in a prior video). A couple extra minutes would have gone a long way, but I'm glad it's introduced me to the idea.
Linguistic determinism has been pretty thoroughly debunked, though -- and not just through absence of evidence. We have studies showing people whose languages don't have words for certain colors...
Linguistic determinism has been pretty thoroughly debunked, though -- and not just through absence of evidence. We have studies showing people whose languages don't have words for certain colors can still sort things according to those colors, for instance. The science is more wishy-washy for linguistic relativism, where there may be some effect but may not and we're not sure about the degree, but linguists don't say strong Sapir-Whorf/linguistic determinism is false without an evidentiary basis for doing so.
I'm curious, did you acquire Japanese as a child or study and learn it later in life? Anecdotally, I have known a couple of people from Japanese families who were born and grew up in the UK,...
I'm curious, did you acquire Japanese as a child or study and learn it later in life? Anecdotally, I have known a couple of people from Japanese families who were born and grew up in the UK, speaking Japanese at home but English everywhere else. Their parents despair of their childrens' ability to speak in those polite, hierarchical terms that you mention, because they don't have the cultural experience to know that it's necessary. To the point that one family was considering never going back to Japan even for a holiday for fear of people thinking that they were bad parents with rude children.
That is anecdotal of course, but arguably it shows that the hierarchical features of Japanese are a reflection of surrounding culture, and not of a mode of thinking specific to having acquired the Japanese language. I too speak Japanese, but I don't feel like it has altered my perception of myself in any kind of hierarchical terms, at least not to a point that I was already aware of that, having grown up in the UK with a pretty strongly-defined (if vexed and veiled) class system.
Linguistic determinism (the strong version of Sapir-Whorf that all linguists straight-up agree isn't true) would posit that it's not possible for you to conceive of these concepts without the...
When I speak Japanese I'm acutely more aware of how I see myself in a social hierarchy even outside of Japan itself.
Linguistic determinism (the strong version of Sapir-Whorf that all linguists straight-up agree isn't true) would posit that it's not possible for you to conceive of these concepts without the Japanese language. No one disputes that it's easier to talk about specific culturally-relevant concepts in a language that has dedicated terminology for them -- but Sapir-Whorf goes quite a ways beyond this, especially in its strong version.
A good, quick video on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The references to 1984 and Newspeak are straight out of Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct, which is old, but still worth a read. It wasn't...
A good, quick video on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The references to 1984 and Newspeak are straight out of Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct, which is old, but still worth a read.
It wasn't until I studied a bit of linguistics that I learned how flawed the popular conception of Sapir-Whorf is, and that the common belief that speaking multiple languages makes you think differently is just plain wrong. Until that stage, I happily bought into the idea that the stronger versions of the theory were correct, all the way up to (and including) the very dubious notion that Ancient Greeks couldn't see the colour blue. I didn't know that some of the more recent studies into things such as gendered nouns and such have been unreplicated, which is fascinating in and of itself. I'll be keen to read a few more attempts at replicate some of the more well known examples (the "goluboy-siniy" distinction in Russian, for example).
All that said, the point about being able to discern certain sounds in your language's phonetic inventory does constitute (I would argue) affecting the way you think, and you can learn to distinguish and produce those sounds even as an adult through dedicated study. Not all thought is conscious, and automatic processing of linguistic input is still cognitive in nature, but I concede that a lay definition of "thought" is more in relation to the conscious act of thinking than all of the neurological processes that occur without one's control
I actually found myself a tad unsatisfied by the video. Mostly because the examples: they're emotions or things that continue to exist as concepts within our minds even if we don't have the words....
I actually found myself a tad unsatisfied by the video. Mostly because the examples: they're emotions or things that continue to exist as concepts within our minds even if we don't have the words. I think the hypothesis is much stronger when we get into thoughts that are inherently abstract: If you're sitting on a pile of abstractions to manage the complexities of e.g. mathematical or social systems, having adequate words is crucial. Imagine arguing a case as complex as racial discrimination within current-day western nations: The topic is complicated enough as it is, and we're heavily relying on abstract concepts that carry a lot of the meaning. Without those words, I don't think that thought could form much beyond "this feels unfair", and not everything that feels unfair is unfair. So it takes additional thought about very abstract and complex problems to even reason yourself into the position that it is in fact unfair, much less reason someone else into it. Or take one of the more abstract branches of maths, and tell me you could reason about it as well as you can now if all those abstract words to describe previously had thoughts weren't there anymore. I don't think I could do my job nearly as effectively if I didn't have those words, and that's only considering the communication problem within my head, not between me and coworkers.
Of course that doesn't mean that arriving at these abstract thoughts without the words is impossible, but I think it's massively more difficult.
Agreed, I had a similar thought while watching the video. At a minimum, thinking about more abstract concepts and expanding on them further is made more difficult by not having the vocabulary to...
Agreed, I had a similar thought while watching the video. At a minimum, thinking about more abstract concepts and expanding on them further is made more difficult by not having the vocabulary to describe them.
Considering how much effect language can have on the persuasiveness of an argument (see and good public speaker), it seems to be that restricting language must have some effect on the range of opinions held by the populations who speak it.
Words ≠ language though, which is a very important distinction. Yes it's harder to discuss complex topics without the correct vocabulary, but that doesn't mean you can't conceive of them. As an...
Words ≠ language though, which is a very important distinction. Yes it's harder to discuss complex topics without the correct vocabulary, but that doesn't mean you can't conceive of them. As an anecdotal example, Ramanujan was an incredibly talented mathematician who had a highly intuitive understanding of maths without ever being formally taught (and indeed his lack of traditional education probably went in his favour).
I don't disagree that having specific, specialised vocabulary is a useful heuristic for more efficiently communicating with others. To use a musical example: you can still hear and conceive of the difference between an aeolian scale and a phrygian dominant scale, and maybe even put into words some of that distinction. But without knowledge of musical theory and the use of the specialised vocabulary of that field of study, you wouldn't be able to have the same level and speed of discourse that two proficient musicians would have. This specialisation and tendency towards efficiency is a fundamental aspect of language, and it makes up a large portion of Pragmatics and Relevance Theory. It makes things faster to communicate about, and makes it easier to acquire new knowledge; but your cognition (which is what the SW-hypothesis talks about) is unchanged, even if your ability to discuss domain-specific topics at length is.
I disagree. Granted, I'm working with the vocabulary, so this is just a counterfactual, but some concepts I simply can't imagine even thinking without having words for foundational concepts. Sure,...
I disagree. Granted, I'm working with the vocabulary, so this is just a counterfactual, but some concepts I simply can't imagine even thinking without having words for foundational concepts. Sure, some amount of maths is readily accessible to intuition, and from there you can build a stack of intuition, but in my mind, not having language to describe the intuitions and formalize them prevents you from abstracting and building even higher. Maybe it's to do with what people here have said about having or not having an internal monologue - me being in the former group - but at a certain level of abstraction, the words help me to structure the lower levels into concepts that fit into working memory better. And eventually, as you build the tower of abstractions high enough, working memory would be the limiting factor when dealing with the raw concepts, but abstractions help you to push onward.
And to clarify, yes I'm talking only about building that tower of abstractions for yourself, in your own bedroom, not communicating it to others. The communicating part is made thoroughly impossible depending on just how far you want to restrict language, while the thinking part (IMO) is just made prohibitively expensive.
That's fair enough, although it sounds as though your personal approach to thinking is effectively similar to communicating to yourself? I'm one of those unhelpful "doesn't have a mental monologue...
And to clarify, yes I'm talking only about building that tower of abstractions for yourself, in your own bedroom, not communicating it to others.
That's fair enough, although it sounds as though your personal approach to thinking is effectively similar to communicating to yourself? I'm one of those unhelpful "doesn't have a mental monologue or image" people, so I can't relate to that unfortunately. Please do correct me if that is an uncharitable characterisation.
You mention not being able to conceive of thinking about concepts without having words for them, but it sounds like you are aware of their existence, and perhaps even how they fit into the larger framework of your cognition about xyz topic. You might not be able to verbally express them, but even by learning the vocabulary your cognition is unaltered. Your ability to refer to those concepts and abstractions which before may have taken many words and bytes (as it were) of working memory is altered by the awareness of and ability to use domain-specific words. The learning of a new word doesn't immediately open up a new branch of knowledge; it is the use of that word in context for long enough that its meaning and implications are internalised in your mind that gives you the ability to move on. You are referring the acquisition, internalisation, and schematicisation of knowledge, which is facilitated by language but does not require language to do.
First paragraph is fair, the internal monologue sometimes does take the form of communicating to myself. Though of course I don't have to make explicit every single thought, cause I already know...
First paragraph is fair, the internal monologue sometimes does take the form of communicating to myself. Though of course I don't have to make explicit every single thought, cause I already know them, if that helps you conceptualize it? It's also not always active. There's no voice in my head that says "screw goes into hole, righty tighty" when assembling ikea furniture.
You mention not being able to conceive of thinking about concepts without having words for them, but it sounds like you are aware of their existence, and perhaps even how they fit into the larger framework of your cognition about xyz topic.
To clarify, this is only really correct when applied to abstract things. I can think about screw and screwdrivers without the words to describe them. I don't think I can meaningfully reason about e.g. monads without the internal monologue, as many of the concepts that monads are building on top of are too abstract and high-level to put into working memory. Like, I can work with that definition ("is a structure that combines program fragments (functions) and wraps their return values in a type with additional computation.") because all those words (functions, return values, computation) stow away the respective concepts into things I can better reason about. I could basically "unzip" those words into the raw concepts, but at that point it becomes intractable to think about how they all interact with one another. I'd basically have to redo the abstraction for functions, return values and computations on the fly to work out how those interact to form a monad. Or I leave them zipped and reason about the more abstract units, without worrying about the internals. In a way, I guess what I'm saying, is that I identify the abstract concept with its name, and if you take away the name, I lose the abstraction?
Mostly, I agree that I was dissatisfied, which is unusual for most of what Tom Scott releases. I can think of many counter points which I think are driven mostly by cultural influence, whereby...
Mostly, I agree that I was dissatisfied, which is unusual for most of what Tom Scott releases. I can think of many counter points which I think are driven mostly by cultural influence, whereby maybe it isn't language which prevents an ability to express ideas, as much as it is trying to express those thoughts to someone else when you don't have an express way to communicate those ideas.
Your math example is actually a great example of this. For a couple of decades now I've thought about mathematical objects which would support higher spatial dimensions than what we observe. The concept relies on curvature on an infinite manifold. In other words, and simplified to one dimension, does an observable straight line mean that there isn't any curvature over any finite segment? If the answer is no, then it follows that there might be other dimensions to that curve, a straight line, that we cannot observe, but they exist none the less. If division by zero is defined such that +∞ and -∞ are continuous at ∞, then for ℝ, ∞ is just as well defined as an abstract concept as 0, being continuous from +0 and -0.
This idea had me exploring non-Euclidean geometry to try and understand this more. Without an understanding about this mathematical object, I didn't even know what questions to ask. I'm still not sure, but I haven't found anything which tells me this doesn't work.
This has implication for our spatial dimensions and suggests to me that Space-time might be a 5-dimensional infinite Klein bottle manifold. An interesting property of this is that you could observe in 3-dimensions that a particle is in isolation, but it's anti-particle pair might be on the other side of this infinite manifold and interact with each other, thus attributing to some of the quantum fluctuations. The other interesting property this would have, is that this would balance all particle and anti-particle pairs in the Universe. The electron could fluctuate between this dimensional boundary and perpetually tunnel across it so that it is popping in and out of existence, although if it were exchanging with the anti side of the manifold, I expect it would annihilate with its positron pair when it transits. Maybe there are more than 5-dimensions and the electron is transitioning into a different parallel. Lastly, and this is where I've had some doubt, gravity as we observe it in our spatial dimensions might actually be a 5-dimensional structure by which we only observe its shadow in 4-dimensions, (3 spatial). The reason I'm uncertain about this is that I'm not sure the inverse square law would still hold. On the other hand, it might also be that in higher dimensions gravity would still be observed to follow an inverse square law in lower dimensions.
Its taken me a couple of decades to be able to write this concept down, and I'm not sure I'm communicating the concept to anyone who has a deep understanding of math. I know the concept based on my limited knowledge, but it is difficult for me to express it because I don't have the language.
If the question is whether or not we can have concepts and ideas which we can't explain with a limited language domain, then Tom might be right. On the other hand, if we can't communicate those ideas to others because we're limited by language, I think it becomes a more philosophical question, something like a tree falling in a forest. If you can't use language to describe a concept, do you even have that concept? There must be some foundational concept which gives a new concept footing.
I'm not a linguist, so I don't know what the actual non-simplified theory is, but to me as a layman "language shapes thought" and "to reason about or communicate sufficiently complex topics, we...
I'm not a linguist, so I don't know what the actual non-simplified theory is, but to me as a layman "language shapes thought" and "to reason about or communicate sufficiently complex topics, we first need to build an abstraction layer" (which is partly words and partly just math) honestly feel like two separate things.
To add, I think pretty much anyone can relate to the experience of discovering a new word and having a resulting shift in perspective. I don't think using the phrase "I don't have the words to...
To add, I think pretty much anyone can relate to the experience of discovering a new word and having a resulting shift in perspective. I don't think using the phrase "I don't have the words to expressing what I'm feeling now" as a heuristic is all that useful, since the individual's thoughts on their emotional experience could just be very disorganized (and actually, having the words would most probably help them crystallize their mental state from a constellation of sentiment into thought).
This is technically not off-topic because Tom Scott talks about those in the video. I watched the movie Arrival and read the novella Story of Your Life. I find both to be excellent, and I don't...
This is technically not off-topic because Tom Scott talks about those in the video. I watched the movie Arrival and read the novella Story of Your Life. I find both to be excellent, and I don't expect my science fiction to be actual science.
I don't know about scientific theories, but I definitely think differently in English than I would in my own language, and there are certain kinds of thoughts and ideas that I naturally have in English and others that naturally transition to my native language. I switch pretty much all the time. So I do believe there is a difference, but maybe not one that is relevant or pronounced enough to those studies.
Translating my short stories into English and back is pretty revealing.
Myself and others I know have mentioned feeling like we have a different demeanour / character depending which language we’re thinking of. I put it down to the difference in character of the...
Myself and others I know have mentioned feeling like we have a different demeanour / character depending which language we’re thinking of. I put it down to the difference in character of the languages themselves. It’s why I think that indigenous peoples languages must be supported, otherwise the colonisation continues in cereberal form.
I have also had similar impressions among myself and my multilingual friends, of having an almost different personality in our other languages. I remember a friend telling me once “you know I’m a...
I have also had similar impressions among myself and my multilingual friends, of having an almost different personality in our other languages. I remember a friend telling me once “you know I’m a much funnier person in German”.
Perhaps humour is a good example of this being about the language and not culture as every language seems to have their own kinds of humour perhaps as jokes are often about playing with language.
Germans for example are stereotypically said to lack a sense of humour but their humour is just very different as they have a very precise language and jokes that involve double entendres or playing with words do not work so well.
I agree with you also about indigenous languages needing to be supported. Apart from ways of thinking, languages are also, in a sense, wells of accumulated knowledge and experience, especially about living in the landscapes in which they developed.
It’s really sad to think about all the knowledge and experience lost with the many indigenous languages that have gone extinct or become endangered. Im thinking about Australia in particular where the situation is really dire as languages are going extinct faster than they can be documented.
I never really bought into the idea of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It seems that people find it plausible because they think in words. If you think in words, that is to say if you have an internal...
I never really bought into the idea of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It seems that people find it plausible because they think in words. If you think in words, that is to say if you have an internal monologue, it is not a big leap to get the idea that the words themselves pose some limitation on what is thinkable.
But that's not how my mind works so I never understood it. I can have an internal monologue, but left to it's own, that is not what my brain defaults to. Then I read a blog post that explained that there is a difference in how people experience this thought process. Some have monologue, others don't. This was a very weird thing to realize.
In my experience, learning new languages does change how you think about language, at least. It disabuses you of assumptions and makes you think more about your native language. I think that's...
In my experience, learning new languages does change how you think about language, at least. It disabuses you of assumptions and makes you think more about your native language. I think that's opposite, or at least orthogonal to Sapir-Worf: language isn't shaping how you perceive things so much as learning another language requires that you be able to stop looking at words as magical, reality-shaping things with inherent solidity.
Like many people, I took some Spanish in middle/high school to fulfill requirements. While I can't speak it conversationally, it forced me to understand the grammar of English better at the time and the overlapping history with Latin word roots definitely widened my understanding of English words. More importantly, it was an exposure to thinking of things more abstractly: it's more effective to think of the abstract idea of the color red as its own thing, with "red" and "rojo" being associated descriptions of that idea, than it is to "translate" it in your head.
Much more recently, I decided I wanted to teach myself Japanese. And that concept is much, much more important. There's far less linguistic overlap, and being able to think that way is crucial. You're not only dealing with very different systems of writing and a different phonology (and considerably different grammar), but there's a greater likelihood that words or idiomatic phrases won't be a 1:1 match. Simple words like "I" may also have different variants with different implications.
Edit: That being said, I do interpret language in a more...textual way than is apparently normal. It's one of the reasons I dislike not having subtitles on things: unfamiliar words (like made up names) are just meaningless noise until I can see something in print. "Bene Gesserit" annoyed me throughout Dune until I could Google it after and see how it was spelled.
I did open by saying that learning a new language changes how you think, so I don't think I said language doesn't change our thinking at all. I am skeptical, as to how much it does, when it seems...
I did open by saying that learning a new language changes how you think, so I don't think I said language doesn't change our thinking at all.
I am skeptical, as to how much it does, when it seems more likely that socialization and development inform language at least as much as the other way round. In English, at least, we constantly generate new words and compounds to describe social and technological phenomena. Sure, learning it for the first time, you're being "onboarded" to that social context...but language is definitely pliable. I feel the Japanese social context informs the language more than the other way, in causality terms, but that also means learning the language makes understanding that context is essential.
It's also interesting that someone else brought up the Greek blue/green thing, when Japanese is another language that has had the blue/green disjunction.
Related Tildes topics/discussions that you might find interesting: Do you have an internal monologue? How do you think? Do you have an internal narrative or monologue, and if so what do you mean...
I think it also comes down to a basic misunderstanding that words = language, which is not the case. There is a lot of discussion in this thread about being unable to talk about domain-specific...
I think it also comes down to a basic misunderstanding that words = language, which is not the case. There is a lot of discussion in this thread about being unable to talk about domain-specific concepts before having the language (ie. words) to do so, and I suspect a lot of those commenters are conflating having knowledge with having altered cognition via the language used to gain that knowledge. Some have even mentioned being able to comprehend concepts before they were able to discuss them!
Also: hello fellow non-inner-monologue-haver! Can you create mental images? I don't have a "mind's eye" either (or even fully grok what that means), and I wonder if the two are related.
Ah, yeah. I remember reading some old Greek philosopher (I think it was Epicurus) once on physics. The nature of objects and things like how light works. I kept thinking: Wow, this text could be...
Ah, yeah. I remember reading some old Greek philosopher (I think it was Epicurus) once on physics. The nature of objects and things like how light works. I kept thinking: Wow, this text could be so much simpler if he had just known a few more words to describe particles, forces, etc. The words follow the thinking, but sometimes that is a hard and arduous process.
Also: hello fellow non-inner-monologue-haver! Can you create mental images? I don't have a "mind's eye" either (or even fully grok what that means), and I wonder if the two are related.
Mental images are really hard for me. Next to impossible. If I close my eyes I have hard time conjuring up the room I sit in, even if I conscientiously look around beforehand. Text and monologue is easy. What I find funny about it is that I like to read, but also that I am an avid movie watcher. I seek out interesting movies to see and watch multiple in a week. I like to write and do that every day, but I never, ever felt the urge to make a video. Consuming is different than producing, apparently.
The blog post I linked talks about a researcher named Russell Hurlburt that claims:
people generally think in five ways. Some people experience them all.
Apparently he wrote six books about it. I have to look into that.
Honestly, I think the linguistics of whether the "strong"/"weak" Sapir-Whorf are true in general won't have a lot of impact on your experience learning and using Toki Pona. This may be a...
Honestly, I think the linguistics of whether the "strong"/"weak" Sapir-Whorf are true in general won't have a lot of impact on your experience learning and using Toki Pona.
This may be a controversial thing to say, but I don't think Toki Pona is enough like a language that we should expect it to behave like a language. Among natural languages speakers/signers are basically never bound to a particularly limited number of morphemes[1], and usually they at least have the option to improvise new ones. You can't even loan words into Toki Pona, except for names
Of course the restrictions of Toki Pona are intentional, and I think they're well designed. But Toki Pona is like a combination of learning a new language and practicing extreme lateral thinking/playing word games. Both learning a new language and playing word games can be very beneficial psychologically, so I assume a combination of the two is even better. Plus the Toki Pona community is very nice, so you get social benefits on top!
[1]: citation needed, I'm making an assumption that I don't have the research to back up, although I'm confident there are no natural languages with as few total morphemes as Toki Pona
There are still cognitive and emotional benefits to learning a new language, so don't be too discouraged. Toki Pona is a fun language to learn, and although I have forgotten the overwhelming...
There are still cognitive and emotional benefits to learning a new language, so don't be too discouraged. Toki Pona is a fun language to learn, and although I have forgotten the overwhelming majority through lack of use, I feel like when I was using it, it achieved its goal. The sheer act of "doing the thing" helps with mental health, arguably less than the outcome. It can be hard to remember that in the depths of depression, but it's the routine and feeling of progress that really impacts you, not the final stage of having acquired the skill. Keep it up :)
Yes, that's me, hello! I would struggle to speak any Toki Pona with you these days, but it's a fun conlang with a really lovely community around it. There's an older thread here where the language...
Yes, that's me, hello! I would struggle to speak any Toki Pona with you these days, but it's a fun conlang with a really lovely community around it. There's an older thread here where the language was discussed a bit as well :)
At the moment I only really speak English. Once upon a time I was fluent in Japanese, but lack of use means that my skills have atrophied a lot. I can still understand and be understood, but my processing of the language is a lot slower these days, and I can't read half as many kanji as I used to be able to. It's not technically speaking, but I am learning a little British Sign Language at the moment. I recently met someone who uses BSL at the same time as her spoken English, which felt like a really cool accessibility feature and something that I want to try and replicate a little.
I agree with Tom that there no definitive one-directional affect of language on a way of thinking, but there definitely subtle affect, and we can't ignore it. My simple example is memes - we...
I agree with Tom that there no definitive one-directional affect of language on a way of thinking, but there definitely subtle affect, and we can't ignore it.
My simple example is memes - we continuously create new phrases, new words that make new ideas very simple to express and to exchange. For example take a word "cringe", you can say that something is "cringe" for you, and other person immediately understand what you means. Without this word you have to construct more complex phrase to express you feeling, so, language definitely makes new ideas more direct and more easy to grok and use. So, language definitely affect thinking.
That's a great example of how we can use language to influence other (i.e., communicate) but I'm not convinced it's important that you used a single word to reference something we could have...
That's a great example of how we can use language to influence other (i.e., communicate) but I'm not convinced it's important that you used a single word to reference something we could have described fine in a sentence in another language/cultural context.
What makes you think that having a single word makes it less complex/more fundamental than conveying the same thing in 5 words? It seems like you're just referencing a shared idea that could easily exist in any language, regardless of how we refer to it. People all across the world have watched Seinfeld and I could say "Soup Nazi" to any of them to evoke a complex concept because most words can easily be borrowed across languages or made up, they're not particularly fundamental to a language and I don't think are really implicated in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. (Although I think there are categories of words that are much harder to coin, things like colour/smell terms or relation/kinship, which are easier to make a case for)
This is also why I find the comments elsewhere on this thread about Japanese unconvincing, we're in a lull right now but English culture has definitely had a more hierarchical society in the past and English had plenty of fine-grained ways to show deference. Granted most of the time we had diglossia with all the important stuff happening in French or Latin, but it doesn't take much looking to find at least 30 different terms of address used by Shakespeare which are used with a whole lot of nuance. It seems to me like Japanese isn't making people think about social hierarchy, but that learning and navigating a new system of interpersonal relationships is.
Kind of unrelated to the main topic of conversation, but related your criticism of the notion that having one word for something somehow makes it less complex/more fundamental. Taking that notion...
Kind of unrelated to the main topic of conversation, but related your criticism of the notion that having one word for something somehow makes it less complex/more fundamental.
Taking that notion literally, it would mean most “ideas” in agglutinative languages are somehow less complex/more fundamental than those same ideas in a fusional languages. But I don’t think anyone would argue that. I also can’t imagine anyone would argue that “teyze” is somehow more fundamental than “maternal aunt” across languages or for that matter that “post office” is more fundamental than “hospital” within a language.
See “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” for more on memes and communication by reference, but “cringe” and “promissory estoppel” are equally meaningless for individuals who lack the necessary context and knowledge.
I don't think anyone would claim that after actually examining the implications, but it is what the whole "inuit has such and such number of words for snow" is meant to imply. "Darmok and Jalad at...
I don't think anyone would claim that after actually examining the implications, but it is what the whole "inuit has such and such number of words for snow" is meant to imply.
"Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" is a good callout here, I loved the episode that introduced that idea but it also frustrated me because I want to know how their stories are passed on if their language only points at moments in stories
I haven’t consulted with Daystrom Institute for more informed theories, but since you mentioned it: I suppose they could pass on knowledge with visual media - paintings, films, holo-novels - or...
I haven’t consulted with Daystrom Institute for more informed theories, but since you mentioned it:
I suppose they could pass on knowledge with visual media - paintings, films, holo-novels - or their written language and spoken language could follow radically different conventions.
Alternatively, The Children of Tama could learn their equivalent of Latin in childhood and use that language to read ancient texts about the allegorical events that are the foundation of their spoken language. But it isn’t used for verbal communication.
I also feel compelled to give a shout out to the two episodes of NOVA about the emergence and impact of written language. I’ll never look at “A” and alef the same.
There is a small detail in the video I wish he'd gone a bit more into: He once again references the Keys and Bridges experiment, then mentions others have failed to reproduce it. What he doesn't...
There is a small detail in the video I wish he'd gone a bit more into: He once again references the Keys and Bridges experiment, then mentions others have failed to reproduce it. What he doesn't mention is that it itself never got published in the first place. What he is citing (and has cited in a previous video as well) is a short summary article by the authors who mention having done this study, and included it in the bibliography as "Manuscript submitted for publication". But it never got published. One of the most widely cited experiments on this topic essentially does not exist.
Tom has much more experience and references many more studies than I could, but to me this doesn't pass the sniff test. It is clear that language can't set a hard definitive line in thought,...
Tom has much more experience and references many more studies than I could, but to me this doesn't pass the sniff test. It is clear that language can't set a hard definitive line in thought, beyond which thought is not possible. But I still instinctively think that it can still limit thought.
I think the human mind is only willing to think so far beyond the supportive structure of language. If you take a college philosophy class, much of the beginning of the class is teaching a shared set of vocabulary. You may dismiss this as just a way to allow people to communicate with each other better, but I think it does shape the directions that thought takes.
As my very unscientific evidence, I would like to consider the Andy letter from CarTalk. I highly recommend reading through it, and even listening to that episode of CarTalk. But here are the basics. Andy considers the question: does 1 person who knows nothing about a topic know more or less than 2 people who know nothing about a topic? His conclusion is that 2 people know considerably less. One person will only go so far out on a limb. 2 people will support and encourage each other and end up going way further out on that limb.
In your recent conversations regarding electric brakes on a cattle carrier, I believe you definitely answered this query and have put our debate to rest. Amazingly enough, you proved that even in a case where one person might know nothing about a subject, it is possible for two people to know even less!
One person will only go so far out on a limb in his construction of deeply hypothetical structures, and will often end with a shrug or a raising of hands to indicate the dismissability of his particular take on a subject. With two people, the intricacies, the gives and takes, the wherefores and why-nots, can become a veritable pas-de-deux of breathtaking speculation, interwoven in such a way that apologies or gestures of doubt are rendered unnecessary.
In the same way that another person can provide support and structure to speculation, I think language can provide support to thought. I don't know how, but it would be fascinating to do some more research into this. From my own experience, I feel certain it is true, but we need research to back it up with research.
To use some examples from Tom's video, he talks about the phrase "I wish I had the words to express how I am feeling". He says that this clearly shows how people can think beyond language. I think it also can show how people can be limited by that language. The continuation after this sentence usually isn't more understanding of that feeling, its a philosophical shrugging that the language is inadequate. He also cites the many words for love in greek all translating to "love". I think this also, if you read between the lines, can also prove my point. Words like "bromance" came around to make platonic male friendships more societally acceptable.
As another example, take a look at this video from Brian David Gilbert that feeling when you bite into a pickle and it's a little squishier than you expected. While it is clearly sattire, the fact that we can now think about zjierb in a single word allows us to expand our concept of this feeling and make connections in our everyday life. If we had to go through BDG's whole song and dance routine every time we thought about this feeling, it would limit our thoughts simply because it would be too much to think about.
There's so many easily identifiable phenomena suggesting some bidirectional relationship between language and thought that individuals can personally relate to that it seems strange to say they're mostly unrelated. It may be accurate that the effect of language on your neuroscience is fairly weak, but one doesn't need to think for long to see how the effect of language on psychology can be quite significant.
The current stance (at least the one that was taught to me in a master's degree a couple of years ago) is that the strong version (deterministic) is abjectly false, while there is still wiggle room on the weak (relativist) version, but the inability to replicate scientific studies is casting doubt onto the whole thing.
I think Tom might have gone into the weeds a little more, but I suppose a 5 minute YouTube doesn't allow for a huge amount of nuance in a position.
I just wish he didn't end the video by concluding determinism is 'thankfully, just fiction' after hand-waving it and talking mostly about relativism, rather than showing how determinism has been disproved. As mentioned, the Wikipedia has some really interesting examples (which Tom Scott has even explored in a prior video). A couple extra minutes would have gone a long way, but I'm glad it's introduced me to the idea.
Linguistic determinism has been pretty thoroughly debunked, though -- and not just through absence of evidence. We have studies showing people whose languages don't have words for certain colors can still sort things according to those colors, for instance. The science is more wishy-washy for linguistic relativism, where there may be some effect but may not and we're not sure about the degree, but linguists don't say strong Sapir-Whorf/linguistic determinism is false without an evidentiary basis for doing so.
I'm curious, did you acquire Japanese as a child or study and learn it later in life? Anecdotally, I have known a couple of people from Japanese families who were born and grew up in the UK, speaking Japanese at home but English everywhere else. Their parents despair of their childrens' ability to speak in those polite, hierarchical terms that you mention, because they don't have the cultural experience to know that it's necessary. To the point that one family was considering never going back to Japan even for a holiday for fear of people thinking that they were bad parents with rude children.
That is anecdotal of course, but arguably it shows that the hierarchical features of Japanese are a reflection of surrounding culture, and not of a mode of thinking specific to having acquired the Japanese language. I too speak Japanese, but I don't feel like it has altered my perception of myself in any kind of hierarchical terms, at least not to a point that I was already aware of that, having grown up in the UK with a pretty strongly-defined (if vexed and veiled) class system.
Linguistic determinism (the strong version of Sapir-Whorf that all linguists straight-up agree isn't true) would posit that it's not possible for you to conceive of these concepts without the Japanese language. No one disputes that it's easier to talk about specific culturally-relevant concepts in a language that has dedicated terminology for them -- but Sapir-Whorf goes quite a ways beyond this, especially in its strong version.
A good, quick video on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The references to 1984 and Newspeak are straight out of Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct, which is old, but still worth a read.
It wasn't until I studied a bit of linguistics that I learned how flawed the popular conception of Sapir-Whorf is, and that the common belief that speaking multiple languages makes you think differently is just plain wrong. Until that stage, I happily bought into the idea that the stronger versions of the theory were correct, all the way up to (and including) the very dubious notion that Ancient Greeks couldn't see the colour blue. I didn't know that some of the more recent studies into things such as gendered nouns and such have been unreplicated, which is fascinating in and of itself. I'll be keen to read a few more attempts at replicate some of the more well known examples (the "goluboy-siniy" distinction in Russian, for example).
All that said, the point about being able to discern certain sounds in your language's phonetic inventory does constitute (I would argue) affecting the way you think, and you can learn to distinguish and produce those sounds even as an adult through dedicated study. Not all thought is conscious, and automatic processing of linguistic input is still cognitive in nature, but I concede that a lay definition of "thought" is more in relation to the conscious act of thinking than all of the neurological processes that occur without one's control
I actually found myself a tad unsatisfied by the video. Mostly because the examples: they're emotions or things that continue to exist as concepts within our minds even if we don't have the words. I think the hypothesis is much stronger when we get into thoughts that are inherently abstract: If you're sitting on a pile of abstractions to manage the complexities of e.g. mathematical or social systems, having adequate words is crucial. Imagine arguing a case as complex as racial discrimination within current-day western nations: The topic is complicated enough as it is, and we're heavily relying on abstract concepts that carry a lot of the meaning. Without those words, I don't think that thought could form much beyond "this feels unfair", and not everything that feels unfair is unfair. So it takes additional thought about very abstract and complex problems to even reason yourself into the position that it is in fact unfair, much less reason someone else into it. Or take one of the more abstract branches of maths, and tell me you could reason about it as well as you can now if all those abstract words to describe previously had thoughts weren't there anymore. I don't think I could do my job nearly as effectively if I didn't have those words, and that's only considering the communication problem within my head, not between me and coworkers.
Of course that doesn't mean that arriving at these abstract thoughts without the words is impossible, but I think it's massively more difficult.
Agreed, I had a similar thought while watching the video. At a minimum, thinking about more abstract concepts and expanding on them further is made more difficult by not having the vocabulary to describe them.
Considering how much effect language can have on the persuasiveness of an argument (see and good public speaker), it seems to be that restricting language must have some effect on the range of opinions held by the populations who speak it.
Words ≠ language though, which is a very important distinction. Yes it's harder to discuss complex topics without the correct vocabulary, but that doesn't mean you can't conceive of them. As an anecdotal example, Ramanujan was an incredibly talented mathematician who had a highly intuitive understanding of maths without ever being formally taught (and indeed his lack of traditional education probably went in his favour).
I don't disagree that having specific, specialised vocabulary is a useful heuristic for more efficiently communicating with others. To use a musical example: you can still hear and conceive of the difference between an aeolian scale and a phrygian dominant scale, and maybe even put into words some of that distinction. But without knowledge of musical theory and the use of the specialised vocabulary of that field of study, you wouldn't be able to have the same level and speed of discourse that two proficient musicians would have. This specialisation and tendency towards efficiency is a fundamental aspect of language, and it makes up a large portion of Pragmatics and Relevance Theory. It makes things faster to communicate about, and makes it easier to acquire new knowledge; but your cognition (which is what the SW-hypothesis talks about) is unchanged, even if your ability to discuss domain-specific topics at length is.
I disagree. Granted, I'm working with the vocabulary, so this is just a counterfactual, but some concepts I simply can't imagine even thinking without having words for foundational concepts. Sure, some amount of maths is readily accessible to intuition, and from there you can build a stack of intuition, but in my mind, not having language to describe the intuitions and formalize them prevents you from abstracting and building even higher. Maybe it's to do with what people here have said about having or not having an internal monologue - me being in the former group - but at a certain level of abstraction, the words help me to structure the lower levels into concepts that fit into working memory better. And eventually, as you build the tower of abstractions high enough, working memory would be the limiting factor when dealing with the raw concepts, but abstractions help you to push onward.
And to clarify, yes I'm talking only about building that tower of abstractions for yourself, in your own bedroom, not communicating it to others. The communicating part is made thoroughly impossible depending on just how far you want to restrict language, while the thinking part (IMO) is just made prohibitively expensive.
That's fair enough, although it sounds as though your personal approach to thinking is effectively similar to communicating to yourself? I'm one of those unhelpful "doesn't have a mental monologue or image" people, so I can't relate to that unfortunately. Please do correct me if that is an uncharitable characterisation.
You mention not being able to conceive of thinking about concepts without having words for them, but it sounds like you are aware of their existence, and perhaps even how they fit into the larger framework of your cognition about xyz topic. You might not be able to verbally express them, but even by learning the vocabulary your cognition is unaltered. Your ability to refer to those concepts and abstractions which before may have taken many words and bytes (as it were) of working memory is altered by the awareness of and ability to use domain-specific words. The learning of a new word doesn't immediately open up a new branch of knowledge; it is the use of that word in context for long enough that its meaning and implications are internalised in your mind that gives you the ability to move on. You are referring the acquisition, internalisation, and schematicisation of knowledge, which is facilitated by language but does not require language to do.
First paragraph is fair, the internal monologue sometimes does take the form of communicating to myself. Though of course I don't have to make explicit every single thought, cause I already know them, if that helps you conceptualize it? It's also not always active. There's no voice in my head that says "screw goes into hole, righty tighty" when assembling ikea furniture.
To clarify, this is only really correct when applied to abstract things. I can think about screw and screwdrivers without the words to describe them. I don't think I can meaningfully reason about e.g. monads without the internal monologue, as many of the concepts that monads are building on top of are too abstract and high-level to put into working memory. Like, I can work with that definition ("is a structure that combines program fragments (functions) and wraps their return values in a type with additional computation.") because all those words (functions, return values, computation) stow away the respective concepts into things I can better reason about. I could basically "unzip" those words into the raw concepts, but at that point it becomes intractable to think about how they all interact with one another. I'd basically have to redo the abstraction for functions, return values and computations on the fly to work out how those interact to form a monad. Or I leave them zipped and reason about the more abstract units, without worrying about the internals. In a way, I guess what I'm saying, is that I identify the abstract concept with its name, and if you take away the name, I lose the abstraction?
Mostly, I agree that I was dissatisfied, which is unusual for most of what Tom Scott releases. I can think of many counter points which I think are driven mostly by cultural influence, whereby maybe it isn't language which prevents an ability to express ideas, as much as it is trying to express those thoughts to someone else when you don't have an express way to communicate those ideas.
Your math example is actually a great example of this. For a couple of decades now I've thought about mathematical objects which would support higher spatial dimensions than what we observe. The concept relies on curvature on an infinite manifold. In other words, and simplified to one dimension, does an observable straight line mean that there isn't any curvature over any finite segment? If the answer is no, then it follows that there might be other dimensions to that curve, a straight line, that we cannot observe, but they exist none the less. If division by zero is defined such that +∞ and -∞ are continuous at ∞, then for ℝ, ∞ is just as well defined as an abstract concept as 0, being continuous from +0 and -0.
This idea had me exploring non-Euclidean geometry to try and understand this more. Without an understanding about this mathematical object, I didn't even know what questions to ask. I'm still not sure, but I haven't found anything which tells me this doesn't work.
This has implication for our spatial dimensions and suggests to me that Space-time might be a 5-dimensional infinite Klein bottle manifold. An interesting property of this is that you could observe in 3-dimensions that a particle is in isolation, but it's anti-particle pair might be on the other side of this infinite manifold and interact with each other, thus attributing to some of the quantum fluctuations. The other interesting property this would have, is that this would balance all particle and anti-particle pairs in the Universe. The electron could fluctuate between this dimensional boundary and perpetually tunnel across it so that it is popping in and out of existence, although if it were exchanging with the anti side of the manifold, I expect it would annihilate with its positron pair when it transits. Maybe there are more than 5-dimensions and the electron is transitioning into a different parallel. Lastly, and this is where I've had some doubt, gravity as we observe it in our spatial dimensions might actually be a 5-dimensional structure by which we only observe its shadow in 4-dimensions, (3 spatial). The reason I'm uncertain about this is that I'm not sure the inverse square law would still hold. On the other hand, it might also be that in higher dimensions gravity would still be observed to follow an inverse square law in lower dimensions.
Its taken me a couple of decades to be able to write this concept down, and I'm not sure I'm communicating the concept to anyone who has a deep understanding of math. I know the concept based on my limited knowledge, but it is difficult for me to express it because I don't have the language.
If the question is whether or not we can have concepts and ideas which we can't explain with a limited language domain, then Tom might be right. On the other hand, if we can't communicate those ideas to others because we're limited by language, I think it becomes a more philosophical question, something like a tree falling in a forest. If you can't use language to describe a concept, do you even have that concept? There must be some foundational concept which gives a new concept footing.
I'm not a linguist, so I don't know what the actual non-simplified theory is, but to me as a layman "language shapes thought" and "to reason about or communicate sufficiently complex topics, we first need to build an abstraction layer" (which is partly words and partly just math) honestly feel like two separate things.
To add, I think pretty much anyone can relate to the experience of discovering a new word and having a resulting shift in perspective. I don't think using the phrase "I don't have the words to expressing what I'm feeling now" as a heuristic is all that useful, since the individual's thoughts on their emotional experience could just be very disorganized (and actually, having the words would most probably help them crystallize their mental state from a constellation of sentiment into thought).
This is technically not off-topic because Tom Scott talks about those in the video. I watched the movie Arrival and read the novella Story of Your Life. I find both to be excellent, and I don't expect my science fiction to be actual science.
I don't know about scientific theories, but I definitely think differently in English than I would in my own language, and there are certain kinds of thoughts and ideas that I naturally have in English and others that naturally transition to my native language. I switch pretty much all the time. So I do believe there is a difference, but maybe not one that is relevant or pronounced enough to those studies.
Translating my short stories into English and back is pretty revealing.
Myself and others I know have mentioned feeling like we have a different demeanour / character depending which language we’re thinking of. I put it down to the difference in character of the languages themselves. It’s why I think that indigenous peoples languages must be supported, otherwise the colonisation continues in cereberal form.
I have also had similar impressions among myself and my multilingual friends, of having an almost different personality in our other languages. I remember a friend telling me once “you know I’m a much funnier person in German”.
Perhaps humour is a good example of this being about the language and not culture as every language seems to have their own kinds of humour perhaps as jokes are often about playing with language.
Germans for example are stereotypically said to lack a sense of humour but their humour is just very different as they have a very precise language and jokes that involve double entendres or playing with words do not work so well.
I agree with you also about indigenous languages needing to be supported. Apart from ways of thinking, languages are also, in a sense, wells of accumulated knowledge and experience, especially about living in the landscapes in which they developed.
It’s really sad to think about all the knowledge and experience lost with the many indigenous languages that have gone extinct or become endangered. Im thinking about Australia in particular where the situation is really dire as languages are going extinct faster than they can be documented.
I never really bought into the idea of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It seems that people find it plausible because they think in words. If you think in words, that is to say if you have an internal monologue, it is not a big leap to get the idea that the words themselves pose some limitation on what is thinkable.
But that's not how my mind works so I never understood it. I can have an internal monologue, but left to it's own, that is not what my brain defaults to. Then I read a blog post that explained that there is a difference in how people experience this thought process. Some have monologue, others don't. This was a very weird thing to realize.
A quick search gave me this: https://jabberwocking.com/do-you-think-in-words-not-everyone-does/
In my experience, learning new languages does change how you think about language, at least. It disabuses you of assumptions and makes you think more about your native language. I think that's opposite, or at least orthogonal to Sapir-Worf: language isn't shaping how you perceive things so much as learning another language requires that you be able to stop looking at words as magical, reality-shaping things with inherent solidity.
Like many people, I took some Spanish in middle/high school to fulfill requirements. While I can't speak it conversationally, it forced me to understand the grammar of English better at the time and the overlapping history with Latin word roots definitely widened my understanding of English words. More importantly, it was an exposure to thinking of things more abstractly: it's more effective to think of the abstract idea of the color red as its own thing, with "red" and "rojo" being associated descriptions of that idea, than it is to "translate" it in your head.
Much more recently, I decided I wanted to teach myself Japanese. And that concept is much, much more important. There's far less linguistic overlap, and being able to think that way is crucial. You're not only dealing with very different systems of writing and a different phonology (and considerably different grammar), but there's a greater likelihood that words or idiomatic phrases won't be a 1:1 match. Simple words like "I" may also have different variants with different implications.
Edit: That being said, I do interpret language in a more...textual way than is apparently normal. It's one of the reasons I dislike not having subtitles on things: unfamiliar words (like made up names) are just meaningless noise until I can see something in print. "Bene Gesserit" annoyed me throughout Dune until I could Google it after and see how it was spelled.
I did open by saying that learning a new language changes how you think, so I don't think I said language doesn't change our thinking at all.
I am skeptical, as to how much it does, when it seems more likely that socialization and development inform language at least as much as the other way round. In English, at least, we constantly generate new words and compounds to describe social and technological phenomena. Sure, learning it for the first time, you're being "onboarded" to that social context...but language is definitely pliable. I feel the Japanese social context informs the language more than the other way, in causality terms, but that also means learning the language makes understanding that context is essential.
It's also interesting that someone else brought up the Greek blue/green thing, when Japanese is another language that has had the blue/green disjunction.
No worries.
Related Tildes topics/discussions that you might find interesting:
Do you have an internal monologue? How do you think?
Do you have an internal narrative or monologue, and if so what do you mean by that?
I think it also comes down to a basic misunderstanding that words = language, which is not the case. There is a lot of discussion in this thread about being unable to talk about domain-specific concepts before having the language (ie. words) to do so, and I suspect a lot of those commenters are conflating having knowledge with having altered cognition via the language used to gain that knowledge. Some have even mentioned being able to comprehend concepts before they were able to discuss them!
Also: hello fellow non-inner-monologue-haver! Can you create mental images? I don't have a "mind's eye" either (or even fully grok what that means), and I wonder if the two are related.
Ah, yeah. I remember reading some old Greek philosopher (I think it was Epicurus) once on physics. The nature of objects and things like how light works. I kept thinking: Wow, this text could be so much simpler if he had just known a few more words to describe particles, forces, etc. The words follow the thinking, but sometimes that is a hard and arduous process.
Mental images are really hard for me. Next to impossible. If I close my eyes I have hard time conjuring up the room I sit in, even if I conscientiously look around beforehand. Text and monologue is easy. What I find funny about it is that I like to read, but also that I am an avid movie watcher. I seek out interesting movies to see and watch multiple in a week. I like to write and do that every day, but I never, ever felt the urge to make a video. Consuming is different than producing, apparently.
The blog post I linked talks about a researcher named Russell Hurlburt that claims:
Apparently he wrote six books about it. I have to look into that.
Honestly, I think the linguistics of whether the "strong"/"weak" Sapir-Whorf are true in general won't have a lot of impact on your experience learning and using Toki Pona.
This may be a controversial thing to say, but I don't think Toki Pona is enough like a language that we should expect it to behave like a language. Among natural languages speakers/signers are basically never bound to a particularly limited number of morphemes[1], and usually they at least have the option to improvise new ones. You can't even loan words into Toki Pona, except for names
Of course the restrictions of Toki Pona are intentional, and I think they're well designed. But Toki Pona is like a combination of learning a new language and practicing extreme lateral thinking/playing word games. Both learning a new language and playing word games can be very beneficial psychologically, so I assume a combination of the two is even better. Plus the Toki Pona community is very nice, so you get social benefits on top!
[1]: citation needed, I'm making an assumption that I don't have the research to back up, although I'm confident there are no natural languages with as few total morphemes as Toki Pona
There are still cognitive and emotional benefits to learning a new language, so don't be too discouraged. Toki Pona is a fun language to learn, and although I have forgotten the overwhelming majority through lack of use, I feel like when I was using it, it achieved its goal. The sheer act of "doing the thing" helps with mental health, arguably less than the outcome. It can be hard to remember that in the depths of depression, but it's the routine and feeling of progress that really impacts you, not the final stage of having acquired the skill. Keep it up :)
Yes, that's me, hello! I would struggle to speak any Toki Pona with you these days, but it's a fun conlang with a really lovely community around it. There's an older thread here where the language was discussed a bit as well :)
At the moment I only really speak English. Once upon a time I was fluent in Japanese, but lack of use means that my skills have atrophied a lot. I can still understand and be understood, but my processing of the language is a lot slower these days, and I can't read half as many kanji as I used to be able to. It's not technically speaking, but I am learning a little British Sign Language at the moment. I recently met someone who uses BSL at the same time as her spoken English, which felt like a really cool accessibility feature and something that I want to try and replicate a little.
I agree with Tom that there no definitive one-directional affect of language on a way of thinking, but there definitely subtle affect, and we can't ignore it.
My simple example is memes - we continuously create new phrases, new words that make new ideas very simple to express and to exchange. For example take a word "cringe", you can say that something is "cringe" for you, and other person immediately understand what you means. Without this word you have to construct more complex phrase to express you feeling, so, language definitely makes new ideas more direct and more easy to grok and use. So, language definitely affect thinking.
That's a great example of how we can use language to influence other (i.e., communicate) but I'm not convinced it's important that you used a single word to reference something we could have described fine in a sentence in another language/cultural context.
What makes you think that having a single word makes it less complex/more fundamental than conveying the same thing in 5 words? It seems like you're just referencing a shared idea that could easily exist in any language, regardless of how we refer to it. People all across the world have watched Seinfeld and I could say "Soup Nazi" to any of them to evoke a complex concept because most words can easily be borrowed across languages or made up, they're not particularly fundamental to a language and I don't think are really implicated in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. (Although I think there are categories of words that are much harder to coin, things like colour/smell terms or relation/kinship, which are easier to make a case for)
This is also why I find the comments elsewhere on this thread about Japanese unconvincing, we're in a lull right now but English culture has definitely had a more hierarchical society in the past and English had plenty of fine-grained ways to show deference. Granted most of the time we had diglossia with all the important stuff happening in French or Latin, but it doesn't take much looking to find at least 30 different terms of address used by Shakespeare which are used with a whole lot of nuance. It seems to me like Japanese isn't making people think about social hierarchy, but that learning and navigating a new system of interpersonal relationships is.
Kind of unrelated to the main topic of conversation, but related your criticism of the notion that having one word for something somehow makes it less complex/more fundamental.
Taking that notion literally, it would mean most “ideas” in agglutinative languages are somehow less complex/more fundamental than those same ideas in a fusional languages. But I don’t think anyone would argue that. I also can’t imagine anyone would argue that “teyze” is somehow more fundamental than “maternal aunt” across languages or for that matter that “post office” is more fundamental than “hospital” within a language.
See “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” for more on memes and communication by reference, but “cringe” and “promissory estoppel” are equally meaningless for individuals who lack the necessary context and knowledge.
I don't think anyone would claim that after actually examining the implications, but it is what the whole "inuit has such and such number of words for snow" is meant to imply.
"Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" is a good callout here, I loved the episode that introduced that idea but it also frustrated me because I want to know how their stories are passed on if their language only points at moments in stories
I haven’t consulted with Daystrom Institute for more informed theories, but since you mentioned it:
I suppose they could pass on knowledge with visual media - paintings, films, holo-novels - or their written language and spoken language could follow radically different conventions.
Alternatively, The Children of Tama could learn their equivalent of Latin in childhood and use that language to read ancient texts about the allegorical events that are the foundation of their spoken language. But it isn’t used for verbal communication.
I also feel compelled to give a shout out to the two episodes of NOVA about the emergence and impact of written language. I’ll never look at “A” and alef the same.
There is a small detail in the video I wish he'd gone a bit more into: He once again references the Keys and Bridges experiment, then mentions others have failed to reproduce it. What he doesn't mention is that it itself never got published in the first place. What he is citing (and has cited in a previous video as well) is a short summary article by the authors who mention having done this study, and included it in the bibliography as "Manuscript submitted for publication". But it never got published. One of the most widely cited experiments on this topic essentially does not exist.
Good follow-up video on the topic of grammatical gender: https://youtu.be/1q1qp4ioknI?si=RCj5Oqguy0RTVb03
Tom has much more experience and references many more studies than I could, but to me this doesn't pass the sniff test. It is clear that language can't set a hard definitive line in thought, beyond which thought is not possible. But I still instinctively think that it can still limit thought.
I think the human mind is only willing to think so far beyond the supportive structure of language. If you take a college philosophy class, much of the beginning of the class is teaching a shared set of vocabulary. You may dismiss this as just a way to allow people to communicate with each other better, but I think it does shape the directions that thought takes.
As my very unscientific evidence, I would like to consider the Andy letter from CarTalk. I highly recommend reading through it, and even listening to that episode of CarTalk. But here are the basics. Andy considers the question: does 1 person who knows nothing about a topic know more or less than 2 people who know nothing about a topic? His conclusion is that 2 people know considerably less. One person will only go so far out on a limb. 2 people will support and encourage each other and end up going way further out on that limb.
In the same way that another person can provide support and structure to speculation, I think language can provide support to thought. I don't know how, but it would be fascinating to do some more research into this. From my own experience, I feel certain it is true, but we need research to back it up with research.
To use some examples from Tom's video, he talks about the phrase "I wish I had the words to express how I am feeling". He says that this clearly shows how people can think beyond language. I think it also can show how people can be limited by that language. The continuation after this sentence usually isn't more understanding of that feeling, its a philosophical shrugging that the language is inadequate. He also cites the many words for love in greek all translating to "love". I think this also, if you read between the lines, can also prove my point. Words like "bromance" came around to make platonic male friendships more societally acceptable.
As another example, take a look at this video from Brian David Gilbert that feeling when you bite into a pickle and it's a little squishier than you expected. While it is clearly sattire, the fact that we can now think about zjierb in a single word allows us to expand our concept of this feeling and make connections in our everyday life. If we had to go through BDG's whole song and dance routine every time we thought about this feeling, it would limit our thoughts simply because it would be too much to think about.