David's World

March 17, 2005

Myth Sapir-Whorf: We won't think more than we can say.

(In)famous among linguists: the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. In a nutshell, it says that our thought is either determined or at least strongly influenced by the language we speak. This thesis, originally brought forward by A. v. Humboldt, has influenced generations of thinkers and political activists. It predicts that we actually think differently about someone, depending on whether we call him a nigger as opposed to a African-American.
And indeed, experiments seem to show that speakers of a language that can only count up to three indeed have problems counting and indentifier larger (>3) sets of objects.
The problem with this is that everyone who learns a language also adopts a whole cultural mindset. Of course, a car mechanic knows more types of screwdrivers and has learned more words to identify them. Of course, people who have never learned to count to 10 and usually don't use that many objects in their daily lives won't do well in the math experiments. Our language merely reflects our cultural reality. Individuals don't need language to think.
Society, however, needs language to think! It's our main way of communication. By using politically correct terms (say: Sinti and Roma), I can express misalignment (disagreement) with the coined meaning for the default term (here: Gypsies - which is not synonymous, but similar). However, the misalignment technique only works for a couple of years.
The reason: our communicative standards underly a fast-paced evolution. The meanings of African-American and Sinti and Roma are subject to cultural evolution: once such terms see widespread use, their meanings will converge to some consensus. Meaning, of course, lives on what society thinks of a concept, or a group of people, in short, the context in which the word is used most often. That obviously depends on its cultural, social foundations and the way people live. Cultural foundations aren't changed by language manipulation. If we associate something positive or negative with nigger, we will attribute that to African-American sooner or later, too, if the usage context is the same. Too bad: there goes our well laid-out plan for organized p.c. misalignment. We end up exactly where we started.
And that is the big lie underlying political correctness. Political activists use "politically correct" terms to cover up unfavorable public opinions and bad social conditions. Even that doesn't work so well. As individuals we're perfectly able to think and say something overly good or bad about someone right-away, whether he's Physically Challened or handicapped - no evolution needed!
That doesn't mean everyone always converges on the same meaning for a given word. In fact, different generations associate different concepts with the same word, and different levels of education with a certain way of speaking. What does that lead to? Uniformly across continents, elders seem look at young people with contempt for the way they use language. They assume that the young generation lacks culture and ability to reason, because they use shorter words and entirely new codes of communication. Again, the young people are just a little further in the linguistic evolution. They do not necessarily belong of unfavorable parts of society. Humboldt's misguided Weltanschauung has successfully spread prejudice among the older generation.
Another example: institutions like the Académie Française. They follow a prescriptive, top-down approach at influencing linguistic development: the Académie decides about the way people are supposed to talk. Needless to say, people listen, people agree, and then people go on speaking the way they'd like to speak. Again, language is a product of evolution, and not one of creation. Another reason why political correctness can't work if the underlying roots aren't changed.
I concede: our cognitive and linguistic abilities are connected, like everything in our brains is. But language as a thought filter is a popular intellectual myth.

Yay, the Sapir-Whorf bogosity is on the run. It was amazingly condescending to say the least.

My favorite counter-example involves the creation of pidgins ("trading languages") and creoles ("composite synthetic languages"). Pidgins are demonstrably incomplete, though people may find themselves in situations where they are the only speaker of their native language and must use a pidgin to communicate. Their communication is thereby limited.

But, when children want to communicate and have insufficient language, they will simply develop one, and that langauge will be capable of expressing the full gamut of the verbally describable. This holds for spoken and signed languages.