The entire experimental literature on linguistic relativity is characterized by tiny effects and failures to replicate.
Maybe the tiny, inconsistent effects do add up to something. Maybe there are hugely important global effects. But no one has ever identified them in a reproducible way.
To be fair, there have been >some< replications. My favourite is Gilbert et al, PNAS, 2006 where they more or less replicate the same effect with a different colour set in English speakers >AND< show that it is stronger in the left hemisphere (consistent with it being linked to language). http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/pubs/ai/whorfhypothesis06.pdf
So is it your opinion that Sapir Whorf is fundamentally just not true? What is happening when we learn a new concept or new word and start seeing things differently or noticing something more often? In your opinion what is the correct way to think about that if it's not language influencing thought/perception?
I do think language has a dramatic effect on thought, with the caveat that most human languages are pretty much similar in what they are capable of expressing, because all human languages serve basically the same purposes.
So when you learn a new concept via language, it can have a dramatic effect on your life. But whether you learn it in English or Russian isn't going to make a huge difference, because they aren't that different in terms of what they can express easily.
For example, if you take examples of so-called "untranslateable" words, usually you can translate them pretty easily. German has the word "Fernweh" which means longing for a distant place in the same way that nostalgia means longing for home. No direct English equivalent, yet I was able to express it in English in a few words with no trouble. We have yet to find a word which is completely untranslateable, or a word in one language which could only be translated into another language by means of hundreds and hundreds of words.
So language can have a big effect without the differences between human languages being so important.
Similar logic to the Invariance Theorem for Kolmogorov complexity[0], which essentially states that the programming language you use to calculate the complexity (description length) of an object doesn't matter much, because Turing-complete languages can all simulate each other. Human languages are capable of simulating each other very well.
> German has the word "Fernweh" which means longing for a distant place in the same way that nostalgia means longing for home.
While I agree almost any concept can be translated in a phrase or sentence, I do still wonder if the difference between a single word and a phrase can be substantial. In the sense that you are more likely to use and think of a single word that really nails the description of a feeling or situation.
To take the canonical example of schadenfreude, I definitely "saw" that situation more often after learning the word, even though the concept, expressed less succinctly, wasn't novel to me. Poetic or catchy phrases can have the same effect. Or an undue persuasive effect: "If the gloves don't fit, you must acquit."
There are also some words that are thoroughly embedded in your culture and yet you still don't really see what they're referencing, which can be quite confusing.
For me it's "homesickness." People might ask me if I'm feeling homesick, but the concept just doesn't click for me. I can use the word in a sentence but it somehow feels made up.
> So when you learn a new concept via language, it can have a dramatic effect on your life. But whether you learn it in English or Russian isn't going to make a huge difference, because they aren't that different in terms of what they can express easily.
But what if it's between very different languages like English and Hopi, or some tribal tongue from the depths of the Amazon?
Russian and English have quite a lot of cultural mixing. The strong claims I or hear are that some tribe has no concept of time or counting, or that the Ancient Greeks didn't have a word for blue, and thus Homer talked about the sea being the color of blood wine, or whatever it was.
A really interesting one that I only vaguely recall is a tribe that always specified the direction they were coming from when meeting someone. An anthropologist studying them had to learn to be able to always know what direction, and she claimed that eventually she acquired something like a bird's eye view in her mind of the area in order to accomplish that. Which was second nature to the natives. Not that it was mystical, but just some mental ability to conceptualize direction from a different perspective.
> But what if it's between very different languages like English and Hopi, or some tribal tongue from the depths of the Amazon?
No need to go that far. How many people know the difference between machine code and assembly? Between an interpreter and a compiler? Between iteration and recursion? All of those are English words, and yet you'd see a stark difference between the ability of a programmer and a layperson to make use of these concepts.
The problem with theories of linguistic relativism is that they tend to ignore that humans will create new words for themselves when they really need to. When a group of people performs badly at a task they don't have the words to describe, it's more likely that the task hasn't been important enough for them to come up with the words, than that they're actually limited by their current vocabulary.
This would be the case where you'd find the strongest effects.
Talk of tribes not having words for time has not been substantiated. Time is a very useful concept no matter how you are living.
It is true that there are tribes without number words, and indeed they don't know how to count and have trouble differentiating quantities above like 5. This is the most dramatic Whorfian effect I know of. Paper: http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Mail/xmcamail.2014-12.dir/pdf2Yb7JA...
(But if you put Westerners through verbal interference, so they can't count sub-vocally, their behavior patterns look similar!)
And there are languages where direction is always expressed in terms of an absolute north-south-east-west grid rather than relative left-right: the Whorfian effects from these languages are more controversial.
> a tribe that always specified the direction [...] eventually she acquired something like a bird's eye view in her mind
Even when the language you speak doesn't have this requirement, you can still pick up this skill. When you live for a few years in a cold square-grid city like those of northern China, you learn to always know which way is north so you don't lose direction walking around connector overpasses and subway tunnels in the winter.
>>Similar logic to the Invariance Theorem for Kolmogorov complexity[0], which essentially states that the programming language you use to calculate the complexity (description length) of an object doesn't matter much, because Turing-complete languages can all simulate each other.
"Beware of the Turing tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy."
Alan Perlis [1]
>> We have yet to find a word which is completely untranslateable, or a word in one language which could only be translated into another language by means of hundreds and hundreds of words.
Do we? How do you explain the existance of words like "get", "fuck", "buffalo", "dharma", "karma", "tao", "таковам"?
Each of these have numerous meanings, which could individually be translatable in another language with very short phrases, but if you want to translate the general cluster you will need pages and pages in a dictionary I think ...
The only time you need more than one of the possible meanings at a time is when you want to make a pun. When translating, you'd have to explain both meanings, ruining the fun, but it's not a real barrier to expressing the content.
Poetry is so often cultural, and deals why certain things like rhyme and meter which influences that. It can be translated easily - the hard part is trying to keep all the cultural connotations of a word and the structure of the poem.
> German has the word "Fernweh" which means longing for a distant place in the same way that nostalgia means longing for home. No direct English equivalent, yet I was able to express it in English in a few words with no trouble.
With no trouble, or with a single word? In a way you didn't translate the word, you translated the definition, but even apart from mixing up nostalgia and homesickness, it's still far from making the meaing clear IMO. I would describe Fernweh more for longing for not being where you are, wanting to be where it's very different (you wouldn't have Fernweh for an exact clone of your current surroundings no matter how far away it is).. I can't define it well, but I know it's not longing for some specific distant place, and the way you phrased it, it could be understood that way. Some interwebs use "wanderlust" as the English translation for Fernweh, but in German, at least to me, Wanderlust and Fernweh don't mean quite the same thing, though even that would be better than leaving it at "longing for a distant place".
Sure, you can explain every word with hundreds of words if need be, but even then that's not the same.
Ich hab Heimweh / Fernweh? / Sehnsucht / Ich weiß nicht, was es ist
Replacing words with elaborate versions of them doesn't have quite the same effect. FWIW I'm saying this as a German who uses English as the primary language for most things that don't outright require German, because it's shorter... I would go crazy programming with German variable names, I would be so busy translating words I wouldn't ever get in the zone. German isn't functionally equivalent there, for me, it's just additional inefficiency and indirection.
And how can you ever know for sure you grok it all, and not just what fits into the toolset you have? I'm not even sure two random people can necessarily meaningfully communicate about the actual depths of their experiences, even if it's in their native language.
> How could the idea come up that humans can communicate with each other through letters! One can think of a person that is far away, or touch a person that is close by, everything else is above the power of humans.
-- Franz Kafka
Nevermind letters and the other technology he was on about there, are even spoken words really that different? How can language achieve what even science can't?
> The modern astrophysical world view, which began with Galileo, and its challenge to the adequacy of the senses to reveal reality, have left us a universe of whose qualities we know no more than the way they affect our measuring instruments, and — in the words of Eddington — "the former have as much resemblance to the latter as a telephone number has to a subscriber." Instead of objective qualities, in other words, we find instruments, and instead of nature or the universe — in the words of Heisenberg — man encounters only himself.
-- Hannah Arendt, "Vita Activa"
> If I express a feeling with a word, let us say, if I say "I love you," the word is meant to be an indication of the reality which exists within myself, the power of my loving. The word "love" is meant to be a symbol of the fact love, but as soon as it is spoken it tends to assume a life of its own, it becomes a reality. I am under the illusion that the saying of the word is the equivalent of the experience, and soon I say the word and feel nothing, except the thought of love which the word expresses.
-- Erich Fromm
Even if you add body language to it, pheromones, so-called shared experiences (you can't share experiences, nothing can occupy the same space at the same time), and so on, I don't think it fundamentally changes. With good friends, people who spend a lot of time in physical vicinity, it quickly approaches something that feels very intimate, where you can communicate a LOT with just a nod or a grunt and actually know how it will be understood. But "a lot" isn't "everything". Simulating "very well" isn't actually "being interchangeable".
I think there is no harm in accepting that. There is a lot of demonstrable harm of confusing symbols and things, on the other hand. That's why, even though as usual I don't really understand what Kafka is talking about (at least I would never be sure I do), I think he is on to something here:
> When you stand before me and look at me, what do you know of the pain in me, and what I do I know of yours. And if I threw myself to the ground before you and cried and told you, what would you know more of me than of hell, if somebody told you that it is hot and terrible. For that reason alone we humans should should face each other so reverend, so thoughtful, so loving as if facing the gates of hell.
It's true you can't translate words between languages exactly. Nor can you translate any individual's meaning of a word exactly into another individual's meaning of the word within a language! When I think of "nostalgia" I get a very particular sequence of mental images and emotions, tied in with my particular life experiences, doubtless different from yours.
But it is not hard to translate between languages within the same epsilon of error that holds for translation between speakers within a language.
Maybe the tiny, inconsistent effects do add up to something. Maybe there are hugely important global effects. But no one has ever identified them in a reproducible way.