Linguistic relativism and determinism
There is an idea that the language a person speaks has an influence on their cognition. Known as Linguistic Relativism, Linguistic Determinism or The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, language and its structures limit and determine human knowledge or thought, controlling categorization memory and perception.
First explore definitions.
Think how you speak
In 1929, Edward Sapir theorized that:
Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society.
This hypothesis was further developed by Benjamin Whorf who claimed that:
We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages […] We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way — an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language.
Numerous studies have been conducted to investigate the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (SWH).
Colored discs
Memory for color (American spelling is most pleasant to read) was the first aspect of language that was investigated to find evidence in support of SWH. It was considered an ideal domain for study as color lies on a spectrum with ambiguous distinctions between lexemes (word or group of words) used to describe them.
Researchers hypothesized that the size of a language’s vocabulary list for color will create differences in a speaker’s memory of seeing those colors.
Rosch and the Dani
Focal colors are a shades of color that all cultures can recognize.
In 1969, anthropologist Brent Berlin and linguist Paul Kay narrowed the search down and in 1972, Eleanor Rosch proposed a list (which doesn’t match the textbook excerpt above):
- Red
- Orange
- Yellow
- Green
- Blue
- Purple
- Pink
- Gray
Rosch used this as a guideline for an experiment in 1977 conducted on the Dani tribe of New Guinea and a group of English speakers. Subjects were shown colored chips, either focal or nonfocal colors, to try to remember.
While English speakers had names for all eight categories, the Dani speakers only had two color terms (light and dark). Both groups found focal colors easier to remember than nonfocal. Although the Dani language did not differentiate the colors, they responded that they as if they did. Rosch’s results suggested that experiences of color are unaffected by language practices.
Lucy and Shweder
In 1979, John A. Lucy and Richard A. Shweder demonstrated a flaw in Rosch’s method. The array of colored chips appeared to be biased in a way that favored the identification of focal colors, these colors were more emphasized than the nonfocal ones. They conducted a new experiment with an array of unbiased color chips and found that language affected “referentially precise basic color description” rather than color focality. Discriminating similar colors from each other was where languages divided.
Kay and Kempton
Paul Kay and Willet Kempton furthered the work of Lucy and Shweder in 1984 with a method that eliminated all bias in array. The provided their subjects with triads of color chips from the blue green continuum. Subjects were tasked with identifying the hue that was most different to the other two.
Two subjects were English speakers, a language with lexical distinction between blue and green. The other subjects were speakers of Tarahumara, a language with only a single term “siyóname” that describes both greens and blues.
Kay and Kempton argued that if SWH was correct:
Colors near the green–blue boundary will be subjectively pushed apart by English speakers precisely because English has the words green and blue,while Tarahumara speakers, lacking the lexical distinction, will show no comparable distortion
The data collected strongly supported this prediction. English speakers chose the correct chip 29 in 30 instances while the Tarahumara speakers achieved 13 out of 24 which was close to the prediction of randm guessing (I don’t understand where they got these numbers from).
In a second experiment subjects were shown two colors of a triad at a time, and asked to label one chip as greener or bluer than the other. In these conditions, the performance of both English speakers and Tarahumara speakers was nearly the same. By asking describe colors relative to each other rather than identify them, language became irrelevant.
Kay and Kempton concluded that although language affected thought when it was relevant to the task, it did not place binding constraints on performance became irrelevant.
Temporal Tribal Tense
There are many differences in the way, if any, languages indicate time and temporal events. This took the interests of researchers to investigate whether there is a difference in the perception of time.
Whorf vs Malotki
In 1939, Whorf published a study on the Hopi People of northeastern Arizona, they had no grammatical distinctions for future and past. As they had no way to count lengths of time, he argued that they would have been less capable of conceptualizing chronology, unable to recall the past or predict the future.
In response, researcher Ekkehart Malotki published Hopi Time, which dismantled Whorf’s data. In his 1983 study, he demonstrated that Hopi grammar indicated a distinction between future and non-future tenses rather than past and non-past as is English.
The Trobriand Islands
Maurice Bloch studied the Trobriand Islanders of Papua New Guinea in 1976.
He found that Trobrianders have a conception of time:
where the present and the past are so fused that the present is a mere manifestation of the past
They are unable to discuss and conceptualize linear, chronological sequences of events. Each event is considered as isolated, they have no words to indicate causal links. These self-contained events are:
a series of beings but not becoming
This study strongly supports SWH.
Overall, there seems to be a consensus in the scientific community that language does indeed play some role in cognitive processes but what does this mean?
Various media have depicted the possible consequences of SWH
Language Giveth and Language Taketh Away
Arrival (2016)
As a short summary of this movie, Aliens plant their ships on random parts of the globe and make no effort to communicate (the groans are revealed to have no semantic value) until someone decided to scribble on a whiteboard for them.
The aliens have a circular writing system without start nor beginning and are able to start writing from different directions at the same time as if they always knew what to say and what to do. This implied that they have a non-linear perception of time. Time is like another dimension for them, a path they can choose to walk up and down.
When a linguist assigned to communicate with the aliens learns their language, she begins experiencing her life all at once. She sees her future, and presumably her past as well.
The power of language, depicted in Arrival, suggests the ability to cause extreme cognitive changes in humans that enables them to defy the laws of physics (information, as far as physicists have found, cannot travel backwards in time).
Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)
In this dystopian science fiction novel, George Orwell imagined a society where the government created a language, “Newspeak”, which is essentially a censored version of the English language.
The language was designed by the English Socialist Party “Ingsoc”, to express the ideas in favor of the party and nothing else. The idea of freedom is abolished. “Free” only denotes the absence or lack of something, not the concept of free will. With this word gone, communicating, let alone conceptualizing rebellion is close to impossible. Citizens would not have a goal to seek nor oppression to end because they never able to grasp the concept of the free will that was stripped from them.
The power of Newspeak allows a fascist regime to rule over an entire country’s inhabitants with little to no resistance. As a contrapositive (If “A therefore B” is true, then “not B therefore not A” is true) to Arrival, 1984 suggests that a lack of language can reduce cognitive functions people already possess.
Although both examples take linguistic relativity and determinism to extreme levels, there have been real-world attempts to use the power of language.
Language for the Subconscious
Chaos magic
This article will only discuss use of sigils to channel human will. The art of chaos magick is too complex for the scope of this article.
Sigils are a symbol or glyph that represents a particular desire or intention. The process of designing a sigil is to condense a thought into a single symbol. Wording of an idea or goal is important. They should be:
- Concise, so as to reduce error
- Clear so that the measure of success cannot be altered
- In the present tense as if one has already achieved it
Negative words are avoided as they can be lost in during activation. The message is then condensed into a shape that represents the idea, warping letters until they cannot be recognized (by the conscious mind)sigils are believed to appeal to the subconscious so that the ideas contained will be accepted internally until success is achieved externally.
The graphic representation of ideas can be interpreted as a different language which has different cognitive effects on users (or speakers) of sigils.
TD;LR
Linguistic Relativism, Linguistic Determinism or The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis are, to a certain extent, supported by linguistic experiments on speakers of different languages. It is an idea romanticized in popular culture and it is made use of in magic.
Conclusion
Personally, I support linguistic relativism and determinism but don’t see it as a reason to view some languages as inferior or inaccurate compared to others. Rather, learning a new language is an invitation to an opportunity to view the world from a different perspective.
Bibliography
I apologize for not formatting this to standard.
Google has a built-in dictionary that is often overlooked as a source.
