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The language you speak changes your perception of time
- readthenotes1 3y agoThis sounds like one of those TED talk sociology experiments that in the fullness of time will fail to be replicated. It's a cool idea though.
- Dr_Birdbrain 3y agoMy thinking exactly.
- ogurechny 3y agoThis “experiment” itself is a translation of an important philosophical topic to the language of “measurements”, which is the only one many people can speak. There are better works that describe the different cultural roots of “obvious” concepts, reflected or not reflected in language. “Time” can consist of point of «now» with axes to “past” and “future”. Or it can start at “now” and flow to the “past”. Or “now” can be a process instead of point, with both ends disappearing in the fog, so that tomorrow's “now” is also “now”, and the day after tomorrow, and so on. Time can be circular, with events kicking the needle out of the groove, or it can be linear. The “events” can be self-contained points in time, “facts”, or they can be processes, flows, in which you're either in or not. Even the distinction between “work time” (“doing something”) and “leisure time” (“doing nothing”, though not synonymous with lack of activity) depends on habit and technical ability to track time. All this defines how people leave their lives and reason about them.
- supportengineer 3y agoI've seen this movie! Arrival
- zetsurin 3y agoGreat movie, based on one of Ted Chaing's short stories -- highly recommended.
- stavros 3y agoI never understood why they changed that detail about the daughter in the movie. It really diminishes the meaning for no benefit at all.
- tiffanyh 3y agoWould you mind explaining, since I didn’t read the book but saw the movie. IIRC, the main character knew her future daughter would get sick and pass - and the conundrum was, does she tell her husband before the daughter is born (to potentially prevent pregnancy but doesn’t) … which after the daughter was born, the dad/husband learned she knew the future fate - led to their divorce. Was the book different?
- abound 3y agoI just re-read the short story after reading the GGP comment. In the written story, the daughter dies at 25 in a rock climbing accident. The written story makes no mention of Louise talking about her perception of consciousness with anyone, except to note that she assumes a colleague who has learned the alien language (Heptapod B) also experiences that mode of consciousness. Really beautiful and entertaining story, definitely worth the ~hour of reading. (Also, this isn't much of a spoiler, the daughter's death is mentioned very early in the story's non-linear narrative)
- chucksmash 3y agoIf perceiving the future laid out beforehand is just the same as reading the Book of Ages, then I take the italicized part below to mean not only that she wouldn't reveal what she'd seen in the future but she wouldn't even reveal she'd seen the future at all: > Similarly, knowledge of the future was incompatible with free will. What made it possible for me to exercise freedom of choice also made it impossible for me to know the future. Conversely, now that I know the future, I would never act contrary to that future, including telling others what I know: those who know the future don’t talk about it. Those who’ve read the Book of Ages never admit to it.
- gmuslera 3y agoDarmok, when the time comes in some way. It goes beyond English/Swedish vs Spanish. In Chinese you go down and up in time, like afternoon would be under noon.
- ngcc_hk 3y agoOr you do not so conscious of time due to lack of tense. Still remember spending 1 hour on one economist line on the English implied sense of time and event sequence. All just used a few grammar not really exist in Hans language until forced into it in the last 100 year. Still not in its native form. So is Japanese …
- cblum 3y agoChinese also describes time in terms of “in front” (前) and “behind” (后), and it’s the opposite of what you might expect: the past is “in front”, the future is “behind”. I find the concept fascinating. It makes sense: what’s in front of you can be directly seen, much like you can remember and “see” the past. But the future is unknown, like something behind you that you can’t see.
- stavros 3y ago> Spanish and Greek speakers, on the other hand, tend to think of time in terms of volume I've noticed that a surprising amount of idioms are the same between Spanish and Greek, to the point where I will translate a Greek idiom to Spanish and it will usually be intelligible to a Spanish speaker. The same doesn't happen with English, where most things are different.
- stavros 3y agoBy the way, a Greek "full day" isn't the same as the English "long day". "Long day" implies tiredness, whereas "full day" doesn't have a positive or a negative connection. It's simply a day in which lots of things happened.
- samatman 3y agoWe have an expression in English for a day in which lots of things happened as well! We call it a "full day".
- stavros 3y agoYep, exactly, I don't know what the article is on about.
- arachnid92 3y agoIt's the same in Spanish. As a native Spanish speaker (and a Swedish speaker too!), this really annoyed me about the first two paragraphs of the article. The authors clearly didn't speak the languages they were commenting on, as the expressions they compared are not analogous to each other!
- petemir 3y agoUnrelated to semantics, but whenever I hear people talking and my Spanish alarm goes off (I’m a native Spanish speaker), but I realize I don’t understand the words, it’s Greek most of the time. Italian and Spanish also share lots of idioms, too.
- grodriguez100 3y agoIn Spanish we say that a day is “largo” (long), not “full”, in the same sense as in English.
- jonstewart 3y agoWasn’t the Sapir-Whorf theory debunked?
- theaussiestew 3y agoCan you provide a reference? I wanna see this.
- mandmandam 3y agoSeems as if one guy wrote a book where he took down a straw man version of Sapir Whorf, and now a bunch of people who never fully grokked the idea are convinced it's wrong. I bet they're monolingual. Some people don't have good detection for bad logic and rhetoric, and yet are easily convinced they understand things they haven't fully understood. See: crypto, politics, economists, law, etc.
- HKH2 3y agoYou are talking about strawmanning. Do you not see the irony?
- mandmandam 3y agoNot really, no. The book in question has many, many reviews asserting that the author created a strawman of Sapir-Whorf to 'take down', that he doesn't really understand the hypothesis in the first place, and that the author struggles to even write well or do basic logic. > It feels as though this book were written in a weekend, one man's simmering grudge against his own imagination of pop-culture's neo-Whorfian enthusiasms. > It was very frustrating for me to get through the book as I had very high expectations for it. I had some problems with the tone (his use of rhetoric detracting from actual credible claims), but mostly with the lack of evidence to support his claims. He evokes intuition, but that made the argument very unscientific and uncredible. In the end, McWhorter's argument did not conflict with many proponents of the idea of linguistic relativity, and his actual argument against the strict interpretation of Sapir-Whorf is essentially a straw man. > He trots out a bunch of thought experiments to support his arguments, but these are always things he's made up and have no empirical backing beyond that they feel right -- and in many cases they feel right because the alternative would undermine certain assumptions that are the basis for modern liberal societies. For instance, Chinese is less grammatically complex than many other languages, therefore the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis would indicate that their cultural world-view is also less complex. [! wtf?] > Saw McWhorter give a talk, and thought this would be interesting. It isn’t. He’s an embarrassingly poor thinker, and this is a useless contribution to the language question. > In short, the guy is kind of a poor thinker, and the book is an embarrassing example of the worst kind of academic sophistry. Two stars only because it might provoke some discussion. > A dismally argued little book. > This author raises belaboring a point to an art form that I don't think I'd ever imagined. > Do you love horses? If so then I recommend avoiding this book, in which the author beats a dead one for 100+ pages. Etc. Again, all the people in this thread asserting that 'Sapir Whorf is debunked' are referring to this one book, by this one author, who plainly has misinterpreted the essence of the hypothesis and seems to have some kind of grudge about it for whatever reason.
- zetsurin 3y agoFirst thought was of John McWhorter's book [The Language Hoax](https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/18579574 https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/18579574), where he refutes Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I think in that book he talks about this phenomenon too.
- mistermann 3y agoRefute: - To prove to be false or erroneous; overthrow by argument or proof. "refute testimony." - To deny the accuracy or truth of. "refuted the results of the poll." - To repudiate. Oh, the irony (and also in the summary of the book).
- zetsurin 3y agoYou are saying he doesn't prove it false?
- mistermann 3y agoI'm saying: observe the broad range of epistemic territory covered by the word "refute" (the first definition is a blend of complete incorrectness and not absolutely perfect, the second is literally subjective opinion, ie: "at least one human holds this opinion"), something that seems rather untroubling to people (believing themselves to be) considering the truth of this theory. (See also if you can spot any other instances of this sort of thing in this thread, or all other threads). I wonder how Westerners would react to a new word being invented that directly references this phenomenon, and I also wonder whether doing that would have zero effect on people's cognition (which is essentially what is being claimed impossible), especially if they were reminded of its existence every time the common habit of speaking ambiguously/meaninglessly arose. Such a word would have to sustain substantial memetic attack though, cultural "truths" are usually defended passionately. I think the most that could be achieved in this culture and era is adoption in the counterculture scene. As for whether he doesn't "prove" it false: which of the many conflicting meanings of the word "prove" (or "doesn't" for that matter) would we be using, and would it even be possible to achieve a demonstration of it, that people who despise taking the meanings of words seriously could agree on?
- dfdz 3y ago> Participants were instructed in their respective native languages to estimate roughly how much time it took If they really want to claim that the “language you speak” changes your perception of time, then they should have avoided the confounding variable of translation discrepancies in experiment instruction. For example, design some simple UI which does not need to be explained.
- tap-snap-or-nap 3y agoIn Hindi, the word for yesterday and tomorrow is the same i.e "Kal" phonetically sounds like the word "Cull" in English.
- spoiler 3y agoHow is this ambiguity resolved?
- sudhirj 3y agoA postfix modifier at the end of the sentence. Roughly translates to “at kal I did” or “at kal I will do”.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- mock-possum 3y agoIt sounds like really that’s just a word for “the day adjacent to this one” then
- ketralnis 3y agoJohn McWhorter has a book about this called The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language in which he's extremely skeptical of Sapir-Worf, particularly the sort of stoner linguistics "what if we're all, like, made of language maaaaaan" as it's usually described in what seems to be the biannual Popular Science article. In fact, time perceived as volumetric rather than as a length is the specific example he uses and includes the actual research. There are extremely specific cases like this where it does in fact hold up but the effect is extremely minute, to the point that it's difficult to even measure properly. In most cases it doesn't hold up at all. But these very tiny barely measurable cases are often used as evidence for frankly nonsense claims so it's important not to extrapolate this to "Japanese blue and green are the same word so Japanese people must be colourblind", which is where people often take this.
- tomca32 3y agoThanks for this. It looks like a great read. As an immigrant I was always mildly annoyed by this idea. Like, yes, my language has a ton of words for all possible familial relationships, for example different words for maternal and paternal uncle, but that’s because familial relationships are important in my culture and that’s reflected in the language. Language is the reflection of culture, not the other way around
- wangii 3y agoI believe it's a co-evolving relationship, and it's extremely difficult to track the first/root cause.
- kibwen 3y agoThe strict interpretation of Sapir-Whorf, where language determines thought, is obviously nonsense. But the weak interpretation of Sapir-Whorf, where language merely influences thought to at least some degree, is obviously true (which is why Sapir-Whorf is pretty useless as a statement either way). The fact that there are minute differences between language speakers is because language is highly malleable and very difficult to police, so speakers tend to alter their language specifically to make it easier to think about things that are important to them (in the same way that we as programmers restructure code and rename variables to make the program easier to understand). In addition, global human societies are connected enough that useful linguistic concepts are rapidly disseminated into every language.
- brevitea 3y agoProfessor Rafael Núñez (UCSD) wrote a bit about this: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-we-make-sense-of-time/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-we-make-sense....
- jvanderbot 3y agoSemi related, if you haven't seen / read-arc for Arrival, I highly recommend it. It hints at TFA, as well as all kinds of computational challenges at decoding an alient written language. If you like reading between the lines, this movie is a lifetime of fun puzzles.
- briandw 3y agoPinker’s Stuff of Thought made a good case against this argument. https://stevenpinker.com/publications/stuff-thought-language-window-human-nature https://stevenpinker.com/publications/stuff-thought-language...
- mlinhares 3y agoNot exactly language but use of language, as someone that moved from the tropics (Brazil) into a temperate country (US) it was a bit shocking to have people talk about time in terms of seasons. People often talk about how they are going to do/did stuff in winter/spring/summer/fall and for someone from the tropics none of this makes any sense, as there's either a hot or a wet season with much intermingling between them all the time. When talking about the passing of time we'd usually go for the holidays instead (Carnaval, Lent/Easter, St John's/St Peter's, Christmas) and when we were in school we'd count it based on school quarters. The school year not starting and ending in the same year was also very surprising.
- croes 3y agoSome language have temporal forms that are missing in other languages
- resolutebat 3y agoMy head exploded the first time I saw an Australian kids book teaching the months and seasons. https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Months-of-the-Year-Australian-Seasons-2337405 https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Months-of-the-Ye...
- hotdailys 3y ago[flagged]
- ogurechny 3y agoThe ability to produce “digests” of articles, man. Totally worth all those jigawatts spent on all that neural network training. And in a totally different style, too!
- tlhighbaugh 3y agoSo now they are plagarizing concepts from chaos magick / neurolinguistic programming and presenting them as scientific breakthroughs they aren't. The methodology of this study is highly suspect, for the other Americans without a sense of another vernacular language than English, the truth is that translation is an art with large margins of imprecision & artistic license surrounding it to accurately convey nuanced meanings between languages even of the same family or subfamily. Due to the way words and concepts associate with the other in both languages, a direct translation at best strips out the nuanced meanings of the text/speech being translated rather rudely and comes off dry and at times as gibberish. Determining such a nuance as that of "relativism" in perception of time would take some real masters of translation which no automated process, and likely no one involved in this captain obvious stunt, could ever hope to be. Of course language shapes our perception of time, remember Karl Marx came up with the notion of historical materialism (his only worthy contribution) which says that our perception of reality is shaped by our material culture. It is hardly much extrapolation to extend that to appreciate that the way we interpret that material culture is shaped by the conceptual wrappers we use to describe it using whatever variant of monkey vocalizations we use to communicate with each other. This is also discussed in the Yoga Sutras of Patanjali (1200 years before Marx, why Indian philosophy gets no credit is beyond me but I appreciate it immensely thus credit it whenever I can), as is the next step that will take some other harebrained virtue signalling in the form of experiment to "prove" to the rest of society. That next step is that the word and the mental generalization (the world of forms the ancient Greeks obsessed absurdly about) are not reality, merely a flawed tool we use to address that reality and the object we intend and our own mind perceiving of that object and describing it in words exist independently of the word itself. As for time, remember what the Romans wrote even on the walls of Pompeii, "Eat, drink and be merry! For tomorrow we dine in Hades!" Indeed, see you there.