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I get quite suspicious when a linguist claims that there's some language where you can't possibly give directions by reference to your body orientation. What's
by quant18 16y ago
I get quite suspicious when a linguist claims that there's some language where you can't possibly give directions by reference to your body orientation. What's more likely is that giving directions that way is stigmatised very strongly, so that the linguist never hears anyone do it, and if he accidentally did it himself, it would confuse his interlocutor.
To give an analogy: if a linguist from Mars gathered a corpus of business English conversation, he'd notice that men refer to something 36 inches off the ground as "desk height" rather than "penis height", and call a sphere an inch or so in diameter "ping pong ball size" rather than "testicle size". Similarly a small discus is "penny sized" (adjusting for your local currency) rather than "anus sized", a small stone is "fist-sized" rather than "ballsack-sized", etc. Is this because in English it's linguistically impossible to make comparisons to your genital or excretory organs? No, it's because it's socially unacceptable at work; someone may complain to HR and get you fired if you make that comparison.
Similarly, the reason the egocentric direction system is so dominant in Western (and Chinese, Japanese, etc.) culture is because of habit and custom --- urban civilians don't usually see sunrise or sunset from inside the office buildings and malls in which they're most likely to give these kinds of directions, so they never get instinctively oriented and the habit of giving directions by compass points never takes off. It has nothing to do with linguistics.
And in the right situation, giving east-west-north-south style directions actually can take hold (which is helpful when you've got two sets of elevators and telling someone to "turn left" after getting off will send them walking in a fairly random direction). At certain times in my life, all my colleagues knew their north from their south. Were we all members of a sensitive indigenous tribe with a deep connection to nature due to our special mother tongue? No, we were stock traders; we knew which way was east in the building because our asses were in our seats before dawn and we watched the sun rise through the same window every day and set through the opposite one. Put us in a different building (e.g. due to switching jobs) and we'd be confused for a few days, just like the Bali kid who tried to get dance lessons from a teacher in another village.
- felxh 16y agoYour reasoning doesn't work if the language in question really doesn't have a word for 'left' or 'right'. Whether this is the case because they never though of it or because it was strongly stigmatized in the past and as a result these words came out of use and eventually were forgotten, the result is the same: Present day speakers truly have no possible way to say 'left' or 'right' without making up new words or describing it in some way.
- ithkuil 16y agoI was always intrigued by the fact that some languages (especially ancient ones) appear to miss the word for "yes" and "no". I've heard that gaelic and latin for example don't have a real word for "yes", but instead the answer repeated the affirmative form of the verb or similar. Many argue that latin did indeed have the word for yes, namely "ita", but all the dictionaries I looked at translate it as "so; thus; indeed; ..." Other languages like japanese rely much on repetition of the verb but do have words for yes and no (hai to iie). I wonder if it really makes a difference to think in a language which doesn't have a word for yes and no (for whatever reasons is not present in the language, historical stigma etc). I see how it can change your way to discuss with people: "don't be tricky! answer simply, ehm uhm" but I feel this doesn't count as a major mind shaping issue. Don't get me wrong, I was intrigued as anyone with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis but I'm aware that sometimes some intriguing memes get more resonance than they deserve.
- cynicalkane 16y agoI can understand lack of "yes", but lack of "no" seems pretty strange. What do babies in these cultures shout when they don't want something? The idea of "do not want" seems to be one of the most basic things a human will want to express, starting from a very early age.
- mahmud 16y agoClassic Arabic has few words for "no", each expressing refusal/denial/rejection of a different sort: la, kalaa, balaa, lam, laysa, lan, etc. la no kalaa definitely not balaa but not lam did not laysa is not lan will not However, colloquial arabic just uses the ma- prefix and collapses all those different words into one: maa/mish/mush/makoo, depending on the dialect. E.g. "I will not try": mish hagarrab (Egyptian) maa `amjarab (Levantian) makoo nijarib (Iraqi/Kuwaiti) maabaa nijarib/nigarib (Yemeni, North/South)
- RyanMcGreal 16y ago>I've heard that gaelic and latin for example don't have a real word for "yes", but instead the answer repeated the affirmative form of the verb or similar. Then they have a way to express affirmation.
- yequalsx 16y agoI'm not a linguist but it does seem like they would have taken this into account. Maybe they haven't thought about this but I find that rather unlikely. Perhaps the New York Times isn't the place to delve into the finer details and thus they don't explain the reasoning in its entirety. I tend to give the benefit of the doubt to people who spend their lives studying an issue. They've probably thought of the obvious possible counterexamples and have a valid reason for discounting them. That doesn't make their theory correct but surely their reasoning isn't so easily foiled. Well, one hopes. Do you know whether or not they've accounted for this possibility? The topic interests me and I really would like to know if their reasoning is so shallow.
- alsomike 16y agoThe claim that language shapes our thinking is consistent with the claim that language is itself shaped, by environmental factors, customs, etc. Also, I think the effect of language on our thinking is not so simple as "We give directions from an egocentric perspective, so this makes us more selfish," as if we are naive and unaware of how our own language works. It's possible that it works in the opposite way: because we think of direction egocentrically, in order to give directions, you have to imagine yourself in someone else's shoes. You also end up with phrases like "Who's 'left'? My left or your left?" which draws attention to the fact that two people see the world differently. Really, our idea of direction promotes the Western cultural idea of individuals as different from each other, and also the idea of equality between individuals. I can't force you to adopt my directions because you are facing a different way; literally, you have a different viewpoint. Geographic directions transcend my own personal viewpoint, but they also transcend everyone else's viewpoint as well. Arguably, this would make people less sensitive to the issue of selfishness vs unselfishness, which is only a moral consideration when you assume individualism.