Linguistic Determinism

Does our language determine how we can think, or can we think about things our language can't frame? In this week's episode, we talk about linguistic determinism: who came up with the hypothesis, what its implications are, and whether a stronger or weaker version best matches the facts.
This is Topic #22!
This week's tag language: Navajo!
Some further info about policies influenced by ideas linking language and thought:
www.culturalsurvival.org/news/...
www.anb.org/articles/14/14-006... (A biography of early linguist William Dwight Whitney, a strong proponent of such policies)
Or if you like Wikipedia, you can try en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguist...
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And at our website, www.thelingspace.com!
Our website also has extra content about this week's topic at www.thelingspace.com/episode-22/
We also have forums to discuss this episode, and linguistics more generally.
Looking forward to next week!

[@Jujuoak]

I’m a native English speaker and when I started learning Spanish I instantly noticed that I had to think slightly differently just to speak simple words. For example, when speaking Spanish I had to think of things in terms of feminine and masculine. Something that’s absent from English besides when we talk about living beings like animals and humans

[@powerexcel1326]

so funny the way his head moves from left to right and vice versa when he talks.. but good video keep it up

[@lonerider5933]

As someone who uses 5 languages frequently at almost native (C1 or C2) levels, to the point of really not being able to tell what my real mother language (out of the 4 I have used since I was a kid) is, I must say that mindset changes drastically. There are many things that can be approximated in translation, but definitely there are words like "Schadenfreude" "Saudade" or "Тоска", that are not that easy to convey, and it's something that goes across all languages. Also idioms and word combinations that make no sense in other languages have a meaning that simply can't be conveyed that easily. That's why humor is so different. Also, I'd like to add that just by speaking the same language but in a different accents and expressions already makes mindsets different.

[@TheMainTagonist]

Such untranslatable/difficult to explain words and concepts exist even without needing to speak a different language

[@ricardofigueira3139]

yeap I already expriment that with four languages, even with two.

[@RobertDeloyd]

I don't play video games and never heard the term "Level Up" but I could figure it out by the contents of the sentence just like when you're reading a novel and come across a word you don't recognize you can usually figure it out by the content... Content is King.

[@rosanaelizabetgalarza3030]

Amazing explanation and very useful for my linguistic test! Thanks a lot!

[@Poppop-xl1jl]

Wow, that fact about indigenous languages was really sad. ): hopefully people can be proud of their native language now and teach it to their children too.

[@pleinair6318]

Yeah

[@thelingspace]

Pop2323pop Yeah... there are a number of revitalization movements, and there's a lot of work being done to try to help out with this, but for many of these languages, it is probably too late. It's very unfortunate.

[@teacherdkennedy]

you know what this reminded me of, at least towards the end when you mentioned us talking to ourselves, is the research into behavioral problems with kids with language processing and the hypothesis that they don't have effective self-talk, and that teaching them effective self-talk can decrease their impulsivity and poor behavioral choices. Don't know if that is really linguistics, though. :-)

[@thelingspace]

Diana Kennedy I'd say that it's still linguistics in a broad sense, although I agree, it's a bit beyond the normal scope of what I'd think of. I wasn't aware of that research, but I'll have to take a look at that. Thanks for the idea! ^_^

[@robertandersson1128]

4:03 First of all, I was a little bit surprised regarding the spelling of the word ‘colour.’ I knew this is an American linguistic show, recorded in the USA and led by an American born person. This, I expected the preferred spelling to be ‘color.’ Second, I wanted to give some further examples of this. In English and Swedish, amongst other languages, blue and light blue (_blå_ and _ljusblå_ in Swedish) are regarded as two shades of the colour blue, but in Russian, they are regarded as different colours and thus, there are two names for them: си́ний [ˈsʲinʲɪj] for (deep) blue and голубо́й [ɡəlʊˈboj] for light blue. Sometimes, in English, we tend to think of the colour orange as the colour of oranges (because of the name similarities) but this is not true to the same extent in the other languages I speak: _apelsin_ (sv), _Apfelsine/Orange_ (de), _апельси́н_ [ɐpʲɪlʲˈsʲin] (ru), _portakal_ for the fruit orange and _orange/brandgul_ (sv), _orange_ (de), ора́нжевый [ɐˈranʐɨvɨj] (ru) and _turuncu_ (tr) for the colour. Also, the Turkish word for brown is _kahve|rengi_ which literally means ‘coffee colour’ (_kahve_ meaning ‘coffee’ and _renk_ meaning ‘colour’). By the way, which languages only distinguish between black and white? How do painters manage to have a conversation in between in such a language? Do they use other languages such as English and French as an axillary language to express such concepts? Thank you very much for making these video! They are really fun to watch and you really learn from them. You chose really interesting topics to talk about. ☺

[@mikespearwood3914]

Regarding the way he spells colour, I think he might be Canadian, and that's why he spells it that way instead of the US way.

[@christopherellis2663]

Mike Spearwood it might be because the rest of the English-speaking world uses Standard English Spelling. The US education system is not marked by its exceptionally good general outcomes, which is why it has not been adopted or adapted elsewhere

[@persomnus]

Forgive me for not having a source, but a while a go I read a paper about colors in different languages, and it said that when you need to specify a color that your language doesn't have a word for, people tend to say its the color of a common thing. Like leaf-color for green, or 'water color' for blue

[@lizmarle69]

@@persomnus or adding a kind of greenish as an example.

[@cerberaodollam]

Hmmm. Interesting. I can definitely attest to the fact that when I learned English, my thinking grew even more different from my parents'. But that might have been due to massively increased information access.

[@johnarbuckle2619]

CerberaOdollam Same here, learning English was a breaking point in my intelectual life.

[@sys3240]

emmmm

[@Luna-ol2lm]

Thank you

[@ryanbouziane3190]

Thank you so much sir

[@fatimaafroz2732]

Your video helped me. Thank you. ☺❤

[@12tone]

I'd read that native speakers of languages that preferred cardinal directionality ("The ball is north of the couch") to relative directionality ("The ball is behind the couch") had better internal compasses but worse spatial recollection. Then again, the sources weren't scholarly works or anything, so I was wondering if that was something you'd heard of, and if so if you knew whether or not it was actually true. If it is it would be a good piece of evidence in favor of linguistic relativism, but as you mentioned, being interesting isn't the same thing as being true.

[@richardgrant7023]

There's a good TED Talk on that by a linguist. It's a fascinating story. Here's the link: kzbin.info?search_query=ted+talks+lera+boroditsky+how+language+shapes+the+way+we+think+

[@lizmarle69]

Have you ever talk about how English works as a third language acquisition for native bilinguals? Paraguayans, for instance, Spanish as L1 and Guarani as L2. It's quite complex I supposed due to the transfers mistake we make.

[@professorsogol5824]

I've learned up talk is leveling up to become almost universal on KZbin

[@Amphibiot]

Interesting about the "level up"-part, seeing as the term "game over" started as a kind of broken english way of aying you lost the game, but in this day and age is used as just another expression with hardly anything to do with gaming.

[@Poppop-xl1jl]

Can you learn PIE? Do they have conventions where they speak it the way it was spoken in ancient times?

[@graceseybold2592]

I suspect any such gathering would swiftly break down into arguments about how it was actually spoken, since we can't really know for sure.

[@pleinair6318]

I notice you change the stuff on the shelves in each your videos

[@thelingspace]

Sai22 Yeah, we try to keep it lively. Thanks for noticing. ^_^

[@vblord]

No. Using "level up" in that way would just be different words to them but the idea would still exist as long as the scenarios or activity exists. That's why the human race keeps inventing words to accommodate new activities and ideas.

[@ernestamoore4385]

Great video! How about Chomsky' views on this topic?

[@burhanettinkeskin4295]

Good question!

[@TheDashingRogue]

So Words can Kill?

[@lowercaserho]

The idea that Klingons are aggressive because the Klingon language is aggressive is known as the Sapir-Worf hypothesis.

[@Sovairu]

It's also bunk in a strong interpretation.

[@nvdawahyaify]

there were way more than 300 native American languages. there were 250 in California alone.

[@hal1851]

i dont know, but this is sound so much like steven pinker

[@longjiang2005]

I think people determine language more than language determines people. If a people becomes rich and powerful, so does their language. If a people becomes weak and die off, so does their language. 😭

[@Pakanahymni]

You should get like two mattresses in a 90-degree angle behind the camera to eat the echoes your microphone is picking up. Image search "mattress vocal booth" on google for other people's makeshift mattress solutions. I really like the videos but it's hard to concentrate because of the room-noise, as somebody who knows anything (albeit, very very little) about sound.

[@thelingspace]

Pakanahymni Yeah, I understand. The audio for that one was a bit rougher than usual, even, although we did the best we could to make it come together okay. We're still trying to experiment with the best ways to manage the sound, so maybe we can give your suggestion a try, too. Glad you've been sticking around anyway, though! ^_^

[@Pakanahymni]

The Ling Space The content is really fun so I stick around, but the biggest reason channels stop growing and wither away is not the quality but because after a certain point, anything sub-par about the production quality starts curbing the potential viewers down.

[@thelingspace]

Pakanahymni Well, we're going to try out some new things, and look into some of the solutions we can for cutting that stuff down, so hopefully, it won't come to that. Thanks!

[@Pakanahymni]

The Ling Space The reason why I give advice is because I want to help creators of cool content, it's nice to be acknowledged every now and then!

[@christopherellis2663]

why don't they say uped a level, as "went up a level "? : "level up" to level up, as in to make something become level. This is where idioms become gibberish.

[@barty116]

Blaming the loss of Language on Science/Philosophy is insane. It's like blaming eugenics in it's many manifest forms on Charles Darwin. Or blaming Rutherford for the Nuclear Bomb or Tim Berners-Lee for 4chan. People make choices.

[@idromano]

"Tim Berners-Lee for 4chan" 😂😂😂 great and true

[@IMGO92]

Im sorry, i just started this video, (maybe like 1:20 in) with the complete intention of learning as much as i can from what he has to say but i cant get over the fact that his head tilts to his left and ends up tilting on his right before he decides to start another sentence... small thing but i couldn't stop staring...

[@__donez__]

hágoónee'

[@burakyesilovaresmi]

Weird gestures - but thanks.

[@lllCockroachlll]

I find the idea of linguistic determinism (and some strong versions of ling. relativity) quite dangerous. A linguist was teaching in class that the Hopi can't have abstract thoughts! That's insane, and a potential source of discrimination.