Caution: This post contains a good deal more theorizing and unorthodox ideas not accepted by Modern linguistics. As always, corrections on facts are appreciated, but you might not want to cite this as anything other than a young, naive linguistics student ranting.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a blanket term for the idea that the grammar and lexicon of a person’s language subtly affects their thoughts and perspectives on the world. It’s a very hotly contested issue in modern Linguistics, and although the most extreme variations (the idea that language determines your thought) have been disproved through some pretty ingenious color studies, the more subtle varieties are still supported in some senses.

If the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is true, a speaker of the Hopi language (which has a very different system of tenses than English) will perceive time in a fundamentally different way than an English speaker. Similarly, a Spanish speaker will have a slightly different view of the world than an English speaker, simply due to the underlying differences between the two languages. If this is, in fact, the case, then there are huge ramifications in Linguistics, Cognitive Science, and the world in general.

However, up until today, nobody has constructed a method to conclusively prove or disprove the idea of the language you speak affecting your thoughts (linguistic relativity).

The LinguisticMystic Method for proving/disproving the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, in three easy steps:

  1. Find monolingual native speakers of Hopi and Mandarin Chinese
  2. Find a skilled telepath, ideally one who can speak the same language as the researcher
  3. If the telepath can read (and understand) the minds of the Hopi and Mandarin people, then complete determinism has been disproved. If he/she can read them and understand parts of it, yet notices differences, there might be some relativity going on. If the only difference between the two is the side of the room they’re sitting in, then I’d venture to say that Linguistic relativity is extremely weak or non-existent.

Actually, there’s some false advertising there. Only step one is easy, the others might just be impossible. With the right cash incentive (and a set of plane tickets), you could likely find a native speaker of pretty much any living language without too much trouble, but finding yourself a skilled telepath is far easier said than done. It’s not like you could just post a few flyers on campus (“Skilled telepaths wanted for research study! $$$$”) or check the Yellow Pages, and many people argue that no such people exist. In fact, the relative (or complete) lack of telepaths is the fatal flaw in this experiment’s design, and one of the many reasons that I myself haven’t submitted this to any reputable journals. However, it does underscore something that I’ve come to terms with throughout my study of the idea of linguistic relativity: without an impossible set of circumstances as in my experiment, it might not be possible to prove or disprove the idea, ever.

Why Sapir-Whorf may never be conclusively proved or disproved

Studying language’s effects on thought is a very troublesome area, because there are so many factors to control.

To begin, everybody views the world differently, and uses their language accordingly. For instance, my family is in the photographic printing business, so I’d likely be an extremely biased sample in a color chip study, due to my overdeveloped scrutiny of color. Similarly, there’s likely to be individual cognitive (and linguistic) quirks with every person, so really, there’s no neutral sample of a given language. You might be able to balance it out by performing the study with 150 speakers of a given language, but sadly, there’s nothing to average, much of it will be subjective.

Culture is also a complicating factor. Cultural beliefs and upbringing can have a profound effect on people’s views of the world, and in general, people sharing a given native language (or dialect) are likely to share a cultural background as well. So, you’re placed in the awkward spot of trying to decide whether a given effect is linguistic or cultural (or both). This gets into a “which came first, the chicken or the egg” type of debate that can derail an experiment pretty quickly.

Finally, there’s the issue of the experiment itself. You’re trying to study how people use language, without biasing them. However, you’re going to have to use language to explain the study and conduct the experiments. So, you’ll have to face the added complication of using a translator to pass on instructions, which may bias your participant right from the get-go. Also, keep in mind that, if there is some degree of linguistic relativity, it will likely be universal, and thus, the researcher will be affected by it too. Depending on the nature of these effects, a researcher studying this effect in another person might be like an inmate studying the behavior of fellow inmates. If we’re all looking at the same shadows, who can claim to be objective on their source?

Conclusion

Now, I don’t mean to say that it’s pointless to do research in this area. There are lots of really cool studies going on even now, and every little bit we learn about these effects (or their absence) is a Good Thing™. Although I doubt anybody will ever prove (or disprove) the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis beyond a shadow of a doubt, I’m less and less sure that we need to.

Humans have successfully lived with gravity throughout the history of our species, and only now are we starting to determine what it actually is. Similarly, if it exists, linguistic relativity has always been a force on us, and we’ve made do so far. There’s not really a way to escape it (that I can think of), so finding out more about it is a purely academic exercise. Knowledge is power though, and every little bit of knowledge about how humans function is a good thing.

However, if you do happen to see a Hopi speaker, a Mandarin speaker, and a telepath walk into a bar, keep them there and shoot me an email. I’ll put your name in my dissertation somewhere.

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, Language and Thought, Linguistic Anthropology, Linguistic Mysticism | 1 Comment


So, today’s post finds me in an awkward situation. I’m obliged to admit an opinion I’ve expressed earlier wasn’t, in fact, a smart one. So, in typical linguistic mystic style, I’ll couch it in a brief discussion of a delightful English idiom (an idiom is a set phrase with a certain meaning which might not be obvious from the words themselves). Today’s utterly applicable idiom is “To Eat Crow”.

For those unfamiliar with the expression, “To Eat Crow” (or “eating crow”) is an American English expression which refers to humbling yourself by admitting that a previously (and often strongly) stated opinion was wrong or incorrect. It’s roughly equivalent to the British expression “to eat humble pie” (colorfully discussed here). Now, here’s an example from this very blog to better show you the meaning.

A Brilliant Example of Crow Consumption

A few weeks ago, in my post “A Conditional Surrender”, I said the following:

I still don’t care for the Intel Chips, and would still love nothing more than a new line of PPC Macs, produced by Apple Computers, which would ideally be split off from Apple Music Whoring™.

(and)

6) I will be allowed to maintain my prior sentiments that iTunes, Spotlight, iChat, and, most importantly, the Intel Switch, suck.

Why am I eating crow, you ask? Well… I’m currently writing this post from an Intel Mac (MacBook Pro), and quite frankly, it’s a wonderful machine.

Recently, our family business lost one of its laptop computers, the poor old Powerbook was cracked in half in a terrible stroller-folding accident. Because of this, I was given the opportunity to upgrade my machine and pass my old one down to replace the less-used machine. After doing some research, I realized that, even though the soul might be different, the Intel Macs have a lot going for them in terms of specs.

So, I upgraded to a 17″ MacBook Pro, and have been very impressed. I’ve only run into a few bugs with the Intel software. (One is worth mentioning here: Praat‘s amplitude bars don’t work during recording, but it still records. It’s a known issue in the Intel version, and the creator is working to fix it as soon as he can.) The performance gain is huge, and the software (front row and photo booth) is slick. The MagSafe adapter alone is worth the price of admission.
Here’s the part where I eat crow: The Intel switch might not have been such a bad idea after all. It gets us better specs, more efficiency, and a whole new set of chip options. Yeah, the transition might have cost a little of the computer’s essence, but given the performance I’ve seen, it’s worth it. If you’ve got the cash to do so, upgrading to a MacBook Pro is definitely worth it. I was wrong, and you can disregard my previous knocks on the Intel Macs. (Note, however, that the iTunes Music Store still sucks. That’s not gonna change any time soon.)

How about the Idiom?

So, now that I’ve eaten my share of crow (purely for linguistic benefit, mind you), let’s discuss this beautiful idiom. Another wonderful example of conventional usage comes from a pet project of mine, the EnronSent Corpus:

enronsent24:33788:I’m back in the office today. Well I see you have to eat crow! I didn’t get a chance to watch the game but I saw CU play Kansas St. and CU looked good. I even think CU has a good chance of beating UT in Austin this weekend.

So, it’s mainstream enough to have been used in the emails of Enron employees. The next question, of course, it where the idiom came from. This article explains the origins as follows:

The origin seems fairly obvious: the meat of the crow, being a carnivore, is presumably rank and extremely distasteful, and the experience is easily equated to the mental anguish of being forced to admit one’s fallibility.

The author also gives a very inventive folk etymology (a story about the origin of a word created by people at large, which is usually just as colorful as it is wrong) for the expression involving two officers in the war of 1812, but then points out that the expression didn’t show up until the 1850′s, and even then, was in the form “to eat boiled crow”.

Wikipedia comes up with another wonderful etymology (explanation of the word’s origin) for the term:

Another possible connection comes from a short story by Rudyard Kipling. In his story ‘The Strange Ride of Morrowbie Jukes’ Morrowbie Jukes falls into a place from which he cannot escape. Another man trapped there catches wild crows and eats them, but Morrowbie in his pride declares, ‘I shall never eat crow!’ After days of nothing to eat, his hunger and desperation finally forces him to do what he swore he would never do – literally eat crow.

However, I’m tempted to say that this is another folk etymology. If the first article is to be trusted, the expression first showed up in the 1850′s, and Rudyard Kipling was born in 1865. Unless he had a pension for prenatal storytelling, the expression was likely not coined by him, although he may well have written it into a story.

Interestingly, my electronic etymology dictionary mentions the existence of a “Walter Etecroue” in the 1361 calendar of letter books of London. It also dates the expression’s first appearances to 1877 (when Rudyard Kipling was 12), so the Kipling hypothesis is still doubtful.

So, really, like so many other expressions and words, the origins of this idiom are lost. However, it’s still a great expression. Recanting a badly thought out belief is never pleasant for anybody, but I should really be more cautious then I am. I’m a vegetarian, and it wouldn’t do to be eating crow often. I wonder if Soy Crows count…

Tagged with Computers and Software, Conventional Linguistics, Language Usage, Notes, Words, Phrases, and Idioms | 4 Comments


Hello everybody. I hope you all had/are having/will have a Happy (insert holiday/festival/winter activity) here. Sorry for the recent lack of posts, but I hope to get back on the right foot today.

One of our good friends/employees has a one-year-old little girl, and since she frequently brings her to work, I’ve been able to watch her develop language, and as a linguist, phonetics nerd, and a person, this fascinates me. Recently, she’s been expanding her phonetic inventory (the number of sounds she can make). So, (with her mother’s blessing), I’ve been making a point of listening to the sounds she’s making, and making a number of non-English sounds around her, just to keep her mind open to new things.

Now, a confession: O Human Research Committee, I have a sinned against thee. I’ve been told that any linguistic study with participants under the age of 18 requires around 6 months of Human Research Committee meetings, so listening to the sounds that a baby is making must truly be a cardinal sin. Of that, I am guilty. I beg your pardon, and will duly start pushing papers your way if I every intend to do anything more serious than writing a blog post with the information gathered.

Anyways, today, I was bantering back and forth with the baby and we got into some mimicry (“Can you say Da Da?” “Da Da!”). She’s pretty good with voiced consonants (like B, N, M and D), but I still hadn’t heard her make anything voiceless (like a T, K, or P). Since she’s pretty good with “Da Da”, I started asking if she could say “Ta Ta”, because the only difference between the two sounds is whether your vocal cords (more accurately, vocal folds) are vibrating while your tongue is against the roof of your mouth (try it). At first, she just kept saying “Da Da”, but then, she slowly began to make what sounded to me iike a very a different sound, an Unaspirated T.

This isn’t a sound that most English speakers can distinguish (it’s not a phoneme in English), but it does happen from time to time in certain contexts, like the T in “stick” or “stop”. Most English just hear it as a “D”, and the only reason I can sometimes hear it is because I’ve done a fair amount of training and practice for my various phonetics classes. It’s different from both the English “T” and “D”, but in a very subtle way.

Aspiration 101

This is the part where you get to make fun sounds. Put your fingers on your neck (guys, find your adam’s apple) and say “Ahhhhhhhh”. You’ll feel a vibration. That’s your vocal folds vibrating to give the A its sound. Now, keep your fingers there and say “Dadadadadadadada”. You’ll feel your tongue moving, but the vibration will be pretty constant. Now, try “Tatatatatatatata”. This time, the vibrations will feel like they’re going on an off, off during the T, on during the A. This is because, as I said above, T is a “Voiceless” sound, and D is “voiced”. (If you’re still interested, try the same with “Kakaka” and “Gagaga”, as well as “papapa” and “bababa”).

Now, put your hand in front of your mouth and say “Ta”, then “Da”. Did you feel that puff of air with “Ta”? That burst of air, the momentary delay between the release of the tongue and the start of the voicing, is called aspiration (Wikipedia Link).

Here’s a little hand-drawn graph to help show what the little girl did that astounded me so (click to enlarge):

Aspiration

In the Aspirated T (shown on top) like we have in English “Tap” or “Tip”, the voicing (wavy line) doesn’t really kick in until after the puff of air you felt, so there’s a brief period of time where the tongue is ready to make the A sound, but without the vocal folds vibrating.

In the English D (bottom), like in “Deck” or “Dock”, the voicing is more or less constant, throughout the closure of the tongue.

In the Unaspirated T, the voicing kicks in the moment the T is released, with no delay (or “Voice Onset Time”). That’s why it sounds so much like a D to English speakers, we’re really used to hearing that puff of air.

If you’d like to hear the difference, go to this site featuring the Smalley Phonetics exercises and click 7.13. Listen to the file, keeping in mind that the sounds in the first half labeled Unaspirated are P, T, and K, no matter what they might sound like.

What use would an infant have for a Korean Consonant?

This may seem like a really, really picky distinction. However, it’s actually used in lots of languages. In Korean, for instance, they have different letters for each T/D sound (aspirated, unaspirated, and voiced), as well as for K/G and P/B. Thus, the difference between an unaspirated T and a D could be the difference between two completely different words (like “Cake” and “Bake” in English). Remember, just because we don’t have the distinction in English, doesn’t mean that it’s not important.

So, back to the little girl. It seemed as though she did in fact contrast what I’m pretty sure is an unaspirated T with D (“say TaTa” versus “say DaDa”), and it seems like she really does see the sounds as different. However, this was all lost on her mother (for whom I had to draw the above graph), and who thought that she was just saying “dada” for everything.

The beauty of language acquisition is that eventually, the girl will learn to Aspirate like the rest of the English speakers, and might even forget that she ever could do otherwise. For now, though, I’m going to be watching her voice onset time closely and with great interest.

Maybe I’ll post a followup when her aspiration arrives. If I don’t post anything else, you can just assume that the Human Research Committee got me and banished me to the land of meetings and paperwork. I just hope there’s internet access there…

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, Language Acquisition, Phonetics and Phonology, Psycholinguistics | 4 Comments

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