interesting

[magicicada]

cislyn pointed me towards a very useful article on the Piraha indians.

Under Whorf's theory, people are only capable of constructing thoughts for which they possess actual words. In other words: Because they have no words for numbers, they can't even begin to understand the concept of numbers and arithmetic.

if there was ever a way to describe why everyone should learn a second language, this is it. this is why i study french. this is why my daughter will be learning spanish. learning a new language enables new thoughts which would be difficult or impossible to form without the words to express them.

Discuss.

Comments

[sensational.livejournal.com]

Whorf has, at this point, been pretty much thoroughly debunked. There have been several experiments that prove that people can actually have concepts in their heads for which they don't have words, that words don't define how we think.

I don't have references handy and I'm far too lazy to look them up right now, but if you're curious, there are some experiments having to do with color and the whole Sapir-Whorf thing. Be careful when looking, though--there are some early color word experiments that seem to support S-W, but later on they're redone correctly to show that S-W is mostly crap.

Really, it's kind of unfortunate the way that the S-W hypothesis is used to demonstrate just HOW DIFFERENTLY some cultures THINK, by GOLLY, when really? We're all the same everywhere.

Also, if that kind of thing interests you, there's this great, funny collection of essays by Geoffrey Pullum called The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language that touches on this and other things in a very entertaining way. :)

[knobody.livejournal.com]

but english has more words than any other language. that's why we amerkins are all so smart! we have the most thoughts!

[cislyn.livejournal.com]

What I find most fascinating about the Piraha is the lack of subordinate clauses - for some reason the loose vocabulary of numbers seems to captivate more people. I guess it's easier to simply say "they don't count" than "they don't reference things in relation to other things" (yeah, that even sounds clunky to me) and so it stands out more as an easy point of reference for how they're different.

My take on the whole thing is that it's terribly curious and interesting. I think that language and thought and culture are all wound up in a big, tangled ball. How the separate threads of each merge and interact is what gets me - as far as I know, nowhere else in the world do people not use subordinate clauses in their grammar. That's ... really neat. And yes, learning a new language helps to put a new perspective on the world. But then, I'm the chick who believes that in order to understand the ancient Greeks well you ought to read ancient Greek, so that's no surprising sentiment coming from me.

[eugie.livejournal.com]

On a related but not-at-all-the-same note, babies are able to hear and distinguish between every single intonation that humans make in our myriad languages, but we lose that ability and become only able to distinguish the ones in the language(s) we're exposed to growing up.

I've noticed there are some tonal differences that I can hear--having grown up around both English and Chinese speakers--that the hubby can't.

Another argument for having kids be exposed to as many languages as possible.