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


Readers, I cannot tell a lie. It was I who cut down that cherry tree.

What did the above statement mean to you? Some people might see it as a sort of confession, my confessing to an act that you might not have been aware of, but without much in the way of context. However, for the readers versed in American history and mythology, that statement likely evoked the words of George Washington, declaring to his father that he chopped down a cherry tree and being a shining pillar of honesty in the process. So, perhaps the question for them was twofold: Why is he talking about this, and why is he pretending to be George Washington?

Well, not to disappoint, but I’ve never cut down a cherry tree, and, considering that the statement was false, I apparently can tell a lie. However, I can prove a point with it as well. For those who were familiar with George Washington’s quotation, that statement had an entirely different meaning than for those of you who missed the reference. At least a part of the meaning in that statement was dependent on your knowing something about the background behind my word choice.

Now, imagine you walk up to a coworker, relieved at the successful conclusion of a long, drawn out project. Smiling, you enthusiastically proclaim “It’s over!!” He stares at you for a second, and promptly breaks into tears and runs off to the men’s room. You just stand, mortified, unsure what you said or did to get such a reaction, until later, he comes back, still teary eyed, and explains that only a week ago, his now ex-wife had used those same words as she presented him with unexpected divorce papers, and that your using the unintentionally called back on that. He explains that he too is happy that the project is over, and apologizes for the breakdown.

There’s really nobody at fault here, this was just an unfortunate usage of a phrase which had a different meaning to each party in the communication. This is also a very extreme example, but still, it emphasizes the fact that meaning and connotation of words can be very individual, even on top of the widely agreed “definition” among speakers.

When you walk up to a person on the street and mention the term “dog”, their interpretation will be very different depending on their life experiences. Whereas one person with a phobia might get apprehensive, a veterinarian might smile or show concern, another person might think of Sparky, their childhood pet, and a dog breeder might start picturing a specific breed or characteristic. It’s unlikely that somebody would think of one characteristic or image to the point where they wouldn’t get the reference to a generic domesticated canine, but it’s also very unlikely that a person would only see a generic, faceless, breedless dog with no connotation.

I’m sure there are some voices in semantic theory that would disagree (and they’re welcome to comment or email me to let me post their opinion), but often, the “meaning” of a word for every individual person is the sum of their past experiences with that word and what it might have symbolized. If a child got bitten by a dog, the word “dog” might have a terrible connotation the week after, but if they were to go on to work at an animal hospital, that connotation might be replaced or altered.

One could pretend that all words have a nice, easy, abstract meaning, found in the dictionary and independent of the people using it. However, in practice, every word has both a general meaning, shared by most speakers of the language, and then a more individual shade of meaning, unique to their experiences. Knowing the context, both in which you’ll use a word, and in which the listener will hear it, is vital to understanding what to say, when.

This is easier said than done, of course, because you can very seldom get in the head of your listener to know just what a given word means to them. However, it’s always worth keeping in mind, because once you do, saying “I am glad for the successful completion of our newest project” to your newly divorced co-worker doesn’t sound nearly as awkward, does it?

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, Dialects and Idiolects, Language Usage, Language and Thought, Linguistic Anthropology, Translation and Translation Theory | 1 Comment


Last night, I was laying in bed, idly thinking about a project for my family’s printing business. The problem is as follows:

In order for us to replicate an image on some other medium, we need a copy of the original image. Inevitably, our less technologically saavy customers will send us tiny, highly compressed files, later asking for a large print with that same image. This is equivalent to hiring a mural painter to do your living room wall, and handing them a postage stamp to work from. File compression is a big problem in the printing business, and something that few non-graphics people really understand.

At this point, I sat up in bed and was struck that this presents a beautiful metaphor for language, on several different levels. The following is an exploration of this metaphor. For the purposes of this article, I snapped a picture of a few, not-so-randomly selected good books, and I’ll be using the same picture throughout the article. The books, in case you’re wondering, are Language, Thought and Reality by Benjamin Whorf, The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Far from the Madding Gerund, the Language Log book.

The Original Image

So let’s start from a flawless original. In order to show you the original, I’ve uploaded it as a TIFF file. Now, the beauty of the TIFF file format is that absolutely nothing is lost when you save the picture. Every bit of detail that was there in the camera is there in the TIFF, earning TIFF the designation of being a “lossless” format. However, this is not without a price. Let’s view the file now:

See the image here… (1.8mb file, it may take a while to load, or might not load at all)

Because this is a lossless file, it is a very large and cumbersome. For this small picture, the TIFF file was a little more than 1.8 Megabytes. This is why it probably took some time to load for you. In addition, they’re difficult for some software to open. Firefox has to use Apple’s Quicktime to open them, and it can take a while even for a powerful program like Adobe’s Photoshop to open them. So, there’s a compromise here. You can get a high fidelity, lossless file, but it takes a long time to transmit, load, and open it.

Quality over Cost

The next option (that I’m going to explore) is the JPEG file format. JPEG is a “lossy” format, meaning that, in order to save space and time when opening it, it throws out some of the data and detail. Ideally, it’s only throwing out details that are unnecessary or invisible to the human eye, but often, some loss becomes quickly apparent. Below is the highest quality JPEG that Photoshop can make:

Trio100

This file (compressed at Maximum quality) is pretty detailed still, and little is visibly lost. However, the filesize has gone down from 1.8MB to 188kb. This is a very good compromise, because you can still get the detail across, but you don’t have to take up as much time and space to work with the file. Now, let’s check out the same file, compressed at 50% quality:

Trio50

Here, you start to see some “artifacts”, or little jagged patches in the solid colors (look around the text on “language, thought and reality”). However, from this loss of quality, we are able to shrink the file down to 40kb. Finally, just for grins, let’s look at 0% quality JPEG (the most compression with the least quality):

trio0.jpg

We’ve now hit a very, very noticeable loss in quality, although the file is only 16kb in this state.

Here too, we see evidence of the compromise between size and detail.

What does this have to do with language?

Compare the following four example interactions:

1. Kim: "Where's Mom?"
Pat: "Although I'm not entirely sure, as I've been out of contact with her, I have no means of locating her exactly (via GPS or otherwise), and she has been known to make stops unannounced, she had earlier expressed an intent and desire to go to the John's Hair Salon, on 28th Street. Considering that she left around 10am, it is now 10:15am, and her salon sessions usually last approximately one hour, there is a good chance that she is still currently at the Salon."

2. Kim: "Where's Mom?"
Pat: "She said she was going to John's Hair Salon when she left 15 minutes ago."

3. Kim: "Where's Mom?"
Pat: "At the salon."

4. Kim: "Where's Mom?"
Pat: "Out."

Here, we have a very similar situation to the one above. There is a block of information that needs to be expressed, and many options as to how to best express it to maximize detail and efficiency.

Answer one is the Maximum Quality JPEG file of verbal expression. It gives every bit of necessary detail (and more) at the expense of time and energy. However, Pat’s response violates both Grice’s Maxims of Quantity and Manner, giving FAR more information than required or desired, slowing down interaction and cluttering Kim’s mind with more detail than needed. If everybody talked like this, nothing would ever get done quickly.

Answers two and three are both slowly sacrificing detail in favor of brevity. Both are significantly faster than answer one, but have enough detail to be meaningful and answer the question. Depending on the situation, either could be an acceptable answer to Kim’s question.

Answer four is the 0% JPEG of the conversational world. Although it provides some information, it’s not really enough for most purposes, and violates Grice’s Maxims of Quantity and Manner, this time at the other extreme. This answer would likely only frustrate Kim, and would make Pat sound like a Smart-Aleck.

So, in language too, we have to make this compromise. Is detail more important than brevity? What detail should we include? All of these interactions were lossy, and although the degree of loss wasn’t problematic until example four, it’s still vital to keep this in mind when examining language.

So where’s the TIFF?

The biggest difficulty with this metaphor is trying to find out what the TIFF file of Pat’s response is, and does such a thing exist? Although answer one was long and drawn out, there is still some missing detail there that Pat might have known. He didn’t include any clarification of how long it takes to get to the Salon, nor information on other stops that Mom might’ve been planning. No information was given about Mom herself, her manner of getting to the salon, or what else was said before she left. Although you could argue that some of that information might’ve been shared knowledge or knowledge easily assumed by Kim, the fact remains that there is always more that one could say about a subject.

Is our thought the TIFF file of conversation, the singular idea which contains all the detail which we discard when formulating speech? If that’s the case, would it be possible to find or create a “lossless” language? Perhaps this idea of lossless language is what I’m referring to with “High Precision language”.

Maybe it’s even one step further. Maybe the entire sum of our experiences and knowledge formulate one massive TIFF file, and all we do in conversation is crop and JPEG it as is fitting for the context. I kinda hope not, though. A file that big would take forever to open in Photoshop.

Tagged with Conventional Linguistics, High Precision Language, Language Usage, Language and Thought | 1 Comment

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