The language hoax

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1. AengeuadOct 2021
   I can't take credit for the arguments made, they mostly come form the excellent book 'The Language Hoax' by John McWhorter, I should have referenced this in the original comment but it's a bit too late to edit it. In the book he takes a very hard stance against linguistic relativism and demonstrates the harm the theory can have when applied by certain people to certain languages or peoples, he even goes as far as to caution about the recent trend for weak relativism. There's also a 45 minute talk he did on the book as well (0).

   One example in the book would be the Pirahã who famously don't have words for numbers, they can describe 1 'that', 2 'pair', a few, and many, but not much else. It wouldn't be hard to imagine the harm that would be caused by taking a Whorfian approach would have on such a tribe. In this subchapter he does make the point that it's culture that drives the linguistics, and the subtitle of which is pretty pertinent, 'Tribe without Paper or Pencils Mysteriously Weak at Portraiture'.

   Lera Boroditsky is a good mention as well, she authored both of the mentioned studies on Mandarin. The first was 'Does Language Shape Thought?: Mandarin and English Speakers’ Conceptions of Time' (2001) (1). Other researchers have tried to replicate this study (2) and were unable to do so, although they note that all documented examples of linguistic relativity can't be dismissed just from one flawed study, and explicitly note that the effect of the mechanisms is unknown and that the issue is with the claim that language is the mechanism. Boroditsky followed up with 'Do English and Mandarin speakers think about time differently?' (2010) (3). It still seems to be an active area of research and I don't think we'll get a conclusive answer any time soon.

   (0) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QglKeIIC5Ds

   (1) http://lera.ucsd.edu/papers/mandarin.pdf

   (2) 'Re-evaluating evidence for linguistic relativity: Reply to Boroditsky (2001)' https://ruccs.rutgers.edu/images/personal-karin-stromswold/p...

   (3) http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.690...

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2. AengeuadJul 2020
   >In that, people literally cannot see the difference between blue and green if their language does not have words to distinguish them.

   People literally can see the difference between blue and green even if their language doesn't differentiate between the two, I don't know if you're misremembering a claim and a negation sneaked in so please don't take this post too harshly if that's the case, but the idea that say Japanese people can't tell the difference between blue and green is patently false and should be addressed, in fact the video you linked almost does so at 2:34 -

   >Some researchers took this and other ancient writings to wrongly speculate that earlier societies were colour blind.

   That Homer described the ocean as wine in colour is not an issue of perception but one of language in trying to describe a colour that is not differentiated from other colours, the same is true for other 'perception' issues in the ancient world like green coloured honey. To be clear visual acuity tests have been done on modern populations and tribes which don't differentiate between such colours or overall define less colour categories and it should be no surprise to learn that they can see the difference between those colours just fine.

   The whole idea that it's a difference in perception is fraught with issues, like what happens when a language naturally develops words for new categories of colours or new colours? Does a generation undergo the collective experience of literally being able to see/differentiate a new colour? If so why isn't this written about more, is it something that only happens in kids? What would be the reason for this sudden shift in perspective, because it certainly isn't a physiological change that occurs.

   What happens when an adult learns a second language which differentiates between more colours? The classic romanticised view here is that learning a new language literally let's you see the world in a different perspective, but then why is it that enhanced perspective rarely more than a curiosity (language x has two words for this colour)? The Russian language has separate words for a dark blue (siniy) and a light blue (goluboy) but English doesn't differentiate between them, do the Russians see an extra colour? What does the science say? Well the science is somewhat interesting here, Russians are able to differentiate between dark blues and lighter blues ever so slightly faster (124ms), but this is worlds apart from the claim that some languages are literally capable of seeing more colours.

   In general this line of thinking is known as linguistic relativity, or the view that language shapes perception and cognition, and is something that has generally been discredited among linguists as being discriminatory and harmful as well as being based on faulty reasoning or studies and occasionally fraudulent papers. For example, and I really don't mean to attribute any malice to your post, but if we're considering Homer as being unable to differentiate between an ocean blue and a dark red wine, what do we make of cultures and languages that don't differentiate between smoking, drinking, or eating? Do they not know the difference between those actions? What about the Pirahã people who only have two words (differentiated by tone) for 'small quantity' and 'large quantity' and no other words for numerals? This line of thinking is fairly harmless when applied to the way we perceive colours but can be actively harmful to people who perceive the world the exact same way we do but don't have as expressive language for these particular topics.

   For anybody interested in more linguistic oddities and/or the damage linguistic relativism can do I recommend the book 'The Language Hoax' by John McWhorter, there's also an hour long talk on it available on Youtube [0]. The book deals with the more recent studies on how language affects the ways we think in a grounded way and shows how minor some of the best examples given can be like in the case of dark and light blue in Russian. The book is also in response to the general public's view and romanticism of linguistic relativity and in particular in response to a book by another linguist Guy Deutscher titled 'Through the Language Glass', where Guy feeds into the perception that language helps shape the way we think, and it is a good book but it still doesn't get close to saying that other languages see more colours.

   [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yXBQrz_b-Ng

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3. woodandsteelSep 2017
   You're right, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been thoroughly disproved. A good book on this is The Language Hoax by linguist John McWhorter.

   The main reason it still hangs on is that it is used by people to try to support the left-wing ideological idea that human nature is entirely a product of socialization, and so can be formed to produce a perfect socialist society. And let me add that, as Marxist writer Norman Geras explains in his book Marx and Human Nature, this is not at all what Marx himself thought.

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4. zetsurinMar 2024
   First thought was of John McWhorter's book [The Language Hoax](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/18579574), where he refutes Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I think in that book he talks about this phenomenon too.
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5. ketralnisMar 2024
   John McWhorter has a book about this called The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language in which he's extremely skeptical of Sapir-Worf, particularly the sort of stoner linguistics "what if we're all, like, made of language maaaaaan" as it's usually described in what seems to be the biannual Popular Science article.

   In fact, time perceived as volumetric rather than as a length is the specific example he uses and includes the actual research. There are extremely specific cases like this where it does in fact hold up but the effect is extremely minute, to the point that it's difficult to even measure properly. In most cases it doesn't hold up at all. But these very tiny barely measurable cases are often used as evidence for frankly nonsense claims so it's important not to extrapolate this to "Japanese blue and green are the same word so Japanese people must be colourblind", which is where people often take this.

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6. TainnorAug 2022
   > linguistic relativism

   is a really hot button issue in linguistics, because it obviously correlates with certain ideological worldviews one way or another.

   If you actually look at the data... it's complicated. In my view, neither the hardcore relativists nor the hardcore universalists are right. Probably there is some symbiotic relationship between the concepts we express in language and the saliency of certain distinctions in our habitual cognition.

   IOW, it's highly unlikely that the Ancient Greeks didn't perceive the colour blue (much less so that this was caused by their language), but it is possible that the distinction between the colour blue and certain other colours was not seen as as significant as other distinctions (e.g. saturation, brightness). But all this theory ultimately stems from this one expression in Homer about the "wine-red sea" and one can only speculate.

   If you want a good pop-sci overview of the situation, though still written by a linguist, try Guy Deutscher's "Through the Looking Glass". That said, he does come down a bit more on the pro-relativism side, so you may also want to read the counterarguments in John McWhorther's "The Language Hoax", which I haven't read though.

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