Call me paranoid, but the biggest source of worry for me involving language and thought (Linguistic Relativity) research is that the research and the ideas it creates will fall into the wrong hands. Given, it’s nowhere near as dangerous as the atomic bomb or gunpowder, but it still has some potential for abuse, on a number of fronts.

Perhaps the most likely form of abuse would come from the corporate world. Marketing and advertising are a multi-billion dollar industry in the United States alone, and with a highly competitive market for many common goods, every company would like an “edge” that would bring the hearts and minds of the people over to their brand.

With enough money, any company can flood the airwaves, streets and billboards with their name and message. If Megacorp A wants you to buy from them, they can advertise as loudly, cleverly, or frequently as they like, but there’s still nothing keeping Megacorp B’s Ads from being just as loud, clever or frequent. New marketing techniques (such as Viral Marketing and new advertising media (internet ads, product placement, adware) can briefly give one company the edge, but the public will quickly move on and the technique may fade away. Right now, ads are only as effective as their exposure and presentation.

There have been efforts to gain the upper hand through other, less obvious (and more devious) means. One such effort is that of Subliminal Advertising. Designed to pass a message by our normal, everyday perception and straight into the mind, Subliminal messages are frequently used in Propaganda, but can occasionally be found in advertising. Take this example:

During the 2000 U.S. presidential campaign, a television ad campaigning for Republican candidate George W. Bush showed words (and parts thereof) scaling from the foreground to the background on a television screen. When the word BUREAUCRATS flashed on the screen, one frame showed only the last part, RATS. Democrats promptly asked the FCC to look into the matter, but no penalties were ever assessed in the case. The effect this had on the overall presidential race was unclear.

(From the Wikipedia site on Subliminal Messages)

Subliminal messages are discouraged in advertising, and the FCC and National Association of Broadcasting have both banned the use of Subliminal messages in programming or advertising (More information…), even without conclusive evidence of their effectiveness. Subliminal messages are relatively easy to find and demonstrate, and they are rare enough that having one found and exposed can be a public relations disaster for advertisers.

So what does language and thought have to do with it?

If language used does in fact affect our thoughts (both consciously and unconsciously), then a whole new avenue of research is open to exploitation by those few whose greed may outweigh their ethical standards.

Already, there have been innocuous forays into subtly structuring language to slip a message, feeling or idea by the listener. There are firms who exist solely to advise marketers about potential product names based on their “sound symbolism”. According to these people, certain language sounds denote slowness, daring, or pleasant feelings. Thus, through some strange combination of aesthetics and subliminal suggestion, they claim to be able to design a product name which helps to place your product above the competition’s in the mind of the customer.

As research into the interaction of language and thought continues, more and more techniques will arise to help get Megacorp A’s message into your head more quickly, efficiently, and powerfully than Megacorp B’s. Now more than ever, linguists and psychologists are being snatched up into the corporate world with the goal of learning how to better influence people. Ph.D’s are pitted against preteens in a battle for their purchasing power, and with the advancement of research, there are more and more tantalizing techniques for them to try each day.

Just like fire, gunpowder or dynamite, psychological and linguistic research in this field can be used both for and against the good of the everyday person. I do believe that the increased understanding that can be found through this research will be of benefit to psychology, linguistics, and our understanding of the human mind. However, we must always be on the lookout for the few bad eggs who might want to use these ideas for less-than-ethical purposes.

If all words hypnotize, then it’s vital to not only recognize who your hypnotists are, but also how they do what they do.

As you may have guessed from the Photoblog in the sidebar, one of my (non-language related) hobbies is photography. Just today, I was reading an article on photographic composition, when a passage jumped out at me:

Counter culture placement of the subject is another way of increasing tension in a photo. In western culture, movement is generally left to right. That’s how you’re reading this page. If the movement in the scene is from right to left (even though it’s moving toward the center), it can create negative tension for western viewers.

I may be crazy (or just obsessed), but I’m seeing some hinting at Linguistic Relativity (the idea that your language affects your thought, also known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) in that line of reasoning. He seems to be imply that the direction of the writing system you use (and thus, the language you speak) affects your processing of images and your aesthetic sense. Given, it’s one of the more concrete and common-sense arguments I’ve heard for language affecting perception, but I’m still slightly skeptical. This just begs for some sort of study.

If Mr. Altengarten’s assertion is true, then an Arabic or Hebrew speaker (who read from right to left) might not find an image with left-to-right movement as appealing as a English speaker would. This raises a few term-paper worthy questions for me. Do Arabic or Hebrew speaking composition teachers give their students the opposite advice? Is this tendency mirrored in art in Right-to-left cultures? How would such images be seen by a bilingual speaker raised speaking (and reading) both Arabic (Right-to-left) and Farsi (Left-to-right)? What about to illiterate speakers of any language?

Given, evaluating this would be very subjective (”Which of these pictures is prettier?”), but I suspect that by asking enough people using similar enough photographs (differing only in composition), the presence or absence of a pattern might be detected.

So, if you’ve got lots of free time (and easy access to native speakers of both sorts of languages), I’d be fascinated to see such a study carried out on this. Although I can’t offer funding, advice, help, or pictures, rest assured that, if the study finds anything cool, you would be my personal hero for at least an hour. That’s gotta be worth something, right?

For today, I’ve decided to discuss E-Prime, a language created by D. David Bourland Jr.

Proponents of E-Prime maintain that the English verb ‘to be’ in all of its forms has no place in discourse. Thus, words like “be, being, been, am, is, isn’t, are, aren’t, was, wasn’t, were, weren’t” are strictly forbidden. However, no ban has been placed on words like “has, become, will, would, do, shall, ought”. Two wonderful poems have been placed on the Wikipedia site, one in E-Prime, and one in Conventional English.

Conventional English
Roses are red;
Violets are blue.
Honey is sweet,
And so are you.

E-Prime
Roses seem red;
Violets seem blue.
Honey pleases me,
And so do you.

E-Prime’s creator felt that these rules “reduce the possibility for misunderstanding and for conflict”. The reasoning for this seems firmly rooted in the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, as they argue that the use of ‘to be’ can create false security in characteristics (when we say “the coat is red”, we only know that “the coat looks red to me”). They also seem to feel that the elimination of ‘to be’ leads to a language based less on an objective view of reality. Thus, eliminating statements of reality which include no epistemic information (information about how we know what we know) forces us to concentrate on the subjective nature of our interpretations. By adopting this language change, the creators of e-prime seem to feel that our perceptions would gradually shift as well, and eventually, so might our thoughts.

My primary skepticism involves the benefits of adopting such a change. Even if the elimination of ‘to be’ in written and spoken discourse could actually affect our perceptions of the world, I wonder whether the resulting change would really reduce the possibility for conflict and misunderstanding. Sure, false objectivity and lack of epistemic information in language could disappear (at least partially), but I question whether the awkwardness caused by eliminating ‘to be’ might outweigh the benefits and create additional sources of confusion. However, the awkwardness would vary from person to person. I composed this entire post in a basic form of E-Prime (excepting examples), and I did not find it overwhelmingly difficult, but I also cannot imagine it working well in spoken discouse.

E-prime seems quite innovative to me, and although I cannot see it catching on in everyday use, the mere idea provides a great example of thinking outside of the linguistic box in language creation/expansion. It seems like a good step towards precision language, and the idea of eliminating words for higher precision fascinates me. Thus, like many created languages, E-Prime seems destined to a gradual journey down the river to obscurity. However, like all created languages, it offers a new perspective and a new way to view the world.

I’ll end with a great quote from one of the E-Prime sites:

“You don’t need to take drugs to hallucinate; improper language can fill your world with phantoms and spooks of many kinds.”