Relatively interesting

[muckefuck]

There's a very accessible and reasonably well-written article by Guy Deutscher in the New York Times Magazine on the current state of knowledge vis-à-vis the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I haven't read much from Deutscher, but he is a bona-fide linguist, so for once my issues with an article in the popular press relate more to spin and emphasis than to glaring errors of fact. (In particular, I think he's harsher on old Ben Whorf than strictly necessary, but he's hardly alone in that.) Nothing in the article will comes as news to a well-informed layman, let alone someone actually in the field, but the rest of you may it interesting to read what he has to say about languages where directions are expressed purely geographically instead of primarily egocentrically and about recent findings on expressive dimensions of grammatical gender.

Comments

[pklexton.livejournal.com]

Actually this is fascinating. The mention of the lack of tenses in Chinese gave a small potential aha moment - I wonder whether that explains/is at all related to what I perceive to be a different cultural attitude toward contract law.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Plenty of languages lack tenses, including the ancient Semitic languages. Do you think the authors of the Talmud differed in their cultural attitude toward contract law in more or less the same way as you perceive the modern Chinese do?

[pklexton.livejournal.com]

I really have no idea. I just wonder, though, about the effect of what I perceive to be (rightly or wrongly) the level of precision that using English forces on the contracting parties. Chinese seems more context-dependent, or at least more context-dependent in some areas where we require more specific explicit-ness, and culturally Chinese seem to interpret contractual obligations and even contractual representations and warranties differently - usually it seems Chinese are more flexible, but sometimes they are more strict. I'm sure there is much more than language at work here. But I just started to thin about this when I read about the Peruvian culture where you need to articulate a fact differently depending on how you acquired knowledge of the fact (direct observation, second-hand hearsay, inference, etc.), and how a description of a fact that we may regard as true would be considered a misrepresentation to them if the epistemology was wrong.

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

I've written about evidentiality before (most likely before you began following my journal). I'm sceptical for some of the stronger claims about it; definitions of "lying" aren't universal, but ours seems to depend crucially on intent. So just using the wrong evidential is likely to be seen more as a sign of imperfect language mastery than "misrepresentation" as such. (Much as we regard use of the wrong tense-aspect combination.)

On the subject of Chinese, though, I've seen a lot of discussion of the fact that there's no elegant way to express counterfactuals in the language, and the problems this causes for discussion of hypothetical events. Though, as Deutscher says, it's still difficult to come up with experiments which reveal the concrete effects of such grammatical features on perceptions and expectations.

[tyrannio.livejournal.com]

Do you have any articles in other languages on the hypothesis?

[muckefuck.livejournal.com]

Ironically, the Hopi have no word for "Whorf".

[paulintoronto.livejournal.com]

I found the article interesting. Thanks for drawing it to the attention of your readers.