Orwell, Newspeak, and Sapir-Whorf
Commenter “Philip Sells” asks a good question:
Does not Orwell’s concept of Newspeak presuppose something like Sapir-Whorf?
And commenter “Frederick” responds this way:
Yeah, it did, which lessened the book a bit for me…Reading it now is a little jarring…
For those of you unfamiliar with Sapir-Whorf, it’s a theory of linguistics. Here’s what’s now known as the strong version:
The strong version, or linguistic determinism, says that language determines thought and that linguistic categories limit and determine cognitive categories. This version is generally agreed to be false by modern linguists.
And here’s what’s known as the weak version:
The weak version says that linguistic categories and usage only influence thought and decisions.
The article also points out that the strong version was popular prior to WWII, and the weak version is held by most linguists today. I believe that, when I went to college and learned about the theory, it was during a period of transition from strong version to weak version.
So what of Orwell? The article also states:
In Orwell’s 1984 the authoritarian state created the language Newspeak to make it impossible for people to think critically about the government, or even to contemplate that they might be impoverished or oppressed, by reducing the number of words to reduce the thought of the locutor.
Orwell described Newspeak in an Appendix to the book Nineteen Eighty-four that can be found here [emphasis mine]:
The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought — that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc — should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words. Its vocabulary was so constructed as to give exact and often very subtle expression to every meaning that a Party member could properly wish to express, while excluding all other meanings and also the possibility of arriving at them by indirect methods. This was done partly by the invention of new words, but chiefly by eliminating undesirable words and by stripping such words as remained of unorthodox meanings, and so far as possible of all secondary meanings whatever…
…Quite apart from the suppression of definitely heretical words, reduction of vocabulary was regarded as an end in itself, and no word that could be dispensed with was allowed to survive. Newspeak was designed not to extend but to diminish the range of thought, and this purpose was indirectly assisted by cutting the choice of words down to a minimum…
Ultimately it was hoped to make articulate speech issue from the larynx without involving the higher brain centres at all. This aim was frankly admitted in the Newspeak word duckspeak, meaning “to quack like a duck”…
…A person growing up with Newspeak as his sole language would no more know that equal had once had the secondary meaning of ‘politically equal’, or that free had once meant ‘intellectually free’, than for instance, a person who had never heard of chess would be aware of the secondary meanings attaching to queen and rook…
When Oldspeak had been once and for all superseded, the last link with the past would have been severed. History had already been rewritten, but fragments of the literature of the past survived here and there, imperfectly censored, and so long as one retained one’s knowledge of Oldspeak it was possible to read them. In the future such fragments, even if they chanced to survive, would be unintelligible and untranslatable…
…Various writers, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, Byron, Dickens, and some others were therefore in process of translation: when the task had been completed, their original writings, with all else that survived of the literature of the past, would be destroyed.
I think that in the novel Orwell was holding forth on two simultaneous views of Sapir-Whorf, both the strong version and the weak. The leaders of the dystopia portrayed in the book obviously had a belief in the strong version, and they expected (or fervently hoped) that many thoughts could be eliminated by getting rid of the words for them.
But note that, at the same time, the book makes clear that it hasn’t happened yet. The novel’s Appendix states that Oldspeak is usually still being spoken in 1984 and that only Party members are using Newspeak very much. So the Appendix is describing a plan, a scheme for the future rather than a fait accompli. And in the world of the book, Winston and Julia are still able to talk about, and to believe in, concepts that Newpeak is some day supposed to eliminate.
Orwell also doesn’t explain how the Newspeak rules will be enforced on an entire populace. We know about the telescreens and the social controls in which every person is spied upon. But even in such a totalitarian state it’s hard to believe that so very many words could successfully be eliminated and others replaced, so that even in casual conversations language changes could be imposed from above so successfully and new words would not crop up spontaneously. Difficult, but not impossible – although I think the reader is left to ponder whether such an effort could ultimately work.
I also believe that Orwell leaves open the question of whether the planners of Newspeak are correct about the strong Sapir-Whorf version, or whether only the weak version could ever be operative in the vast general population. That is, it seems obvious that the control of language can help to shape thought – much as our propaganda does today, with its purposefully morphing of terms like “illegal alien” to “undocumented immigrant” and “migrant.” Orwell is creating a vision of a world in which the strong version holds sway, and his novel is highly pessimistic. But I don’t think he eliminates all hope that the drive towards universal Newspeak will be at least somewhat unsuccessful. In the novel that effort is a work in progress, and the jury is still out.
Our own experiments in leftist Newspeak are obvious, and the political success of such efforts is obvious too. But we’re talking about the weak version here, not the strong. The passage at the end of that last quote from Orwell is chilling and relevant as well, when Orwell speaks of the transformation or banning of the classics. We see that already in our society, and we also see that the language in which those classics are written has become less and less intelligible to more recent generations. At some point Shakespeare may be abandoned, not just through normal attrition but as a result of an effort to cancel his works.
I personally don’t believe that the strong version of Sapir-Whorf is possible. That is, I don’t believe that replacing words with other words could change the perceptions of the underlying concepts. But I could be wrong.
And I’m skeptical of the notion that replacing “illegal alien” with “undocumented migrant” in political speech is really that effective in the “soft version” in a culture with a fairly unrestricted flow of communication and information. I think the vast majority of people our pretty aware of the replacement itself occuring and why it’s happening. I don’t think a large number of people are being fooled.
Nonapod:
I agree that the strong version doesn’t seem to be true.
But I disagree with your second point. The change in language doesn’t stand alone in changing points of view, but it is definitely part of the program and is influential and effective in that regard. The only people who see through it are already on the right. It moves the Overton Window quite effectively for much of the rest of the population, from what I’ve observed.
Jonathan Turley has just commented (on his interesting blog) about the latest absurd attempt to remove Shakespeare (guilty of “white supremacy” and colonization, amongst other crimes) from the curriculum, while the indispensable Chris Rufo has just posted on Twitter the latest insanity from a school in NYC incorporating (via the incendiary academic nonsense of an unhinged black “professor” at Northwestern) the so-called “eight white identities” which define our “racist” republic. As many have written in the past, the current iteration of radicalism (“woke” racialized insanity) cannot possibly produce anything but division, as well as hatred and rancor from those who are demonized.
Semantics can be emotionally or rationally appealing, which can influence or steer perception.
I take the weak form of Sapir-Whorf practically for granted. As I said in “Trump Acquitted” which sparked this topic.
_______________________________________
I don’t see how one’s language wouldn’t have *some* influence over one’s thoughts and decisions.
For instance, microaggression wasn’t a word until a black Harvard psychiatrist, Chester Pierce, made it up in 1970. It’s gradually come into common usage. Now laws and lives are changed because of it.
What has happened more frequently is that a word will be used as a cover some something that it is not, for one take the word “liberal” as applied to politics, and then that word’s meaning twists over time to mean the thing which used it as a cover.
This leaves a hole in the language for the concept that “liberal” once meant. It gets filled by a multi-word phrases like “classical-liberal” which is clunky. And also the true meaning of works written with the original meaning become harder and harder to easily read and understand as one has to translate the meaning back to the old one each time the word is encountered.
The other thing to be remembered is that they are counting on the impact of time. The terms that are learned in youth will become the predominate ones as the population ages, until at last only those terms are known and used. That’s why they have to get to the children and indoctrinate them. Change the language of the young and eventually you will change the language of the world. Only a matter of time.
From reading Tom Wolfe’s last book, “The Kingdom of Speech,” it’s clear that linguistics has been dominated and distorted by Chomsky’s personality cult. His Universal Grammar theories have relegated linguistic field studies to the back of the bus and thrown Sapir-Whorf under that conveyance.
So I don’t hold current linguist opinion on Sapir-Whorf too highly. Pushback against Chomsky is already under way and the man is 92. When Chomsky retires or dies, I suspect linguistics will renew itself — unless strangled by the academia cancel culture.
My belief is that the strong version is the more correct but because it gives away the game too much it has been replaced by the weak version so that those being retrained in thought don’t have anything science based that might awaken them to what is being done to them.
I stumbled onto a personal theory a few decades ago, when studying languages, that seems to be Sapir-Whorf’ish. Latin and German are languages with cases. Like English pronouns, where the word changes based on its use in a sentence (“I” = nominative, “my” = genitive, “me” = dative, “me” = accusative), all German and Latin nouns and adjectives do this. It’s a difficult thing for most native English speakers to wrap their heads around. Thinking in advance of how one is going to use a noun in the sentence one is about to speak, and then sussing out the appropriate ending (which also varies based on gender) (oh, and any articles preceding the noun or adjective also change) prior to speaking was very tricky for me. In English it’s typically the placement of nouns in a sentence that tip us off to their use.
As I tried to build proficiency with this skill it seemed like the act of building, or constructing. And then it occurred to me that the Romans and Germans had/have a reputation for engineering. Could it be that this trait of grammar in their languages stimulates their minds to think more along engineering constructs?
English is very unique among modern languages for not having noun gender. This is also a very odd thing for native speakers to wrap their heads around when learning a foreign language. For example, “dog” in german is a masculine noun and “cat” is a feminine noun. It doesn’t matter what a specific pet’s actual gender is, if you refer to a cat you use feminine articles and modifiers. However, if you refer to a male cat by name (and they’ll typically have male names) you use masculine articles. Most all languages do the same with nouns. I understand this means something to the native speakers of those languages, and I can mimic the process, but I cannot grasp the intrinsic meaning.
And, possibly the most famous oddity of English; the simultaneous singularity and plurality and formality and informality of the second person: “you.” It’s very difficult for non-native speakers to grasp. Is this part of the reason that native English speakers are typically viewed as gregarious and friendly by foreigners? Does the lack of a formal verb tense in English “make” us more informal?
There’s no reason to believe the ‘weak’ version is impossible, but I don’t think it’s dominant. I don’t believe the ‘strong’ version is completely impossible either. If fact, I see no reason to endorse either end point, when I think of it – and it’s obvious that it exists, to me.
The really sinister part of the practice of changing the meaning of words, is that it depends on its prey having a working but imprecise understanding of the chosen words to begin with. Most people, if pressed, would struggle to articulate a clear and concise definition of a word, which of course is purely intellectual. Even people who work with the written word might struggle. But we understand the meaning of words in conceptual and emotional ways. If someone says, ‘friendship’ we would all understand its meaning conceptually.
The sinister part of our modern ‘woke’ environment isn’t just that it seeks to install new definitions to words. It wants to drive a new literal meaning to overlay the conceptual one in your head, keeping the emotional context but substituting a different application. For example: “Privilege” used to be something that was gifted, sought after, prized. One would want to have this to make life enjoyable, they would even work hard attain it – to make oneself satisfied with their lot.
Now look at its new meaning: it’s a curse. Someone who is driven to be accepted socially must deal with this cognitive dissonance when considering the word’s meaning. To be accepted in the ‘woke’ world, one now has to loathe themselves a little bit and publicly display self-abasement, for secretly having their internal desire for conceptual privilege.
It’s a process of introducing internal conflict to beat down and weaken a subject. It’s insidious and evil, and should be fought tooth and nail.
Rufus T. Firefly:
I used to be impressed by people who could string clauses together without ending in a preposition.
Modern languages, of which we will speak more later, …
You do have to think ahead a bit to pull that off. (Woops! But do I really want to say “pull off that”?)
The informality of English — the lack of noun declensions, the simpler verb structures, and, most of all, the loose word ordering make English a relatively easy language for non-speakers to begin communicating.
However, mastering English with all its irregularities and massive vocabulary is something else.
In Gene Wolfe’s science fiction series The Book of the New Sun there is a totalitarian nation where the adult inhabitants have to speak in quotations from a book that defines the nations ideology. Think Das Capital or Mein Kampf. He then has a scene where one of it’s inhabitants tells a story that is uncomplimentary of said totalitarian government with quotes from said book.
Personally, I think it depends on the person whether strong or weak sapir-whorf is true. A lot of liberals seem to think in buzz words: Woke, social justice, et cetera. Yet, these words don’t actually mean anything.
Academic theories of linguistic determinism are mainly descriptive. They don’t address situations in which extirpation and redefinition of words is deliberate, and being undertaken with strong rewards for going with the plan and strong punishments for disobedience.
One dilemma is that some members of the elite must read badthink to successfully suppress it, which means they risk falling victim to badthink themselves. This can be alleviated with artificial intelligence and close surveillance of and corrective struggle sessions on those elites tasked with manual oversight of censorship. Another safety valve is to permit access to samizdat but impose particularly harsh penalties for politically deviant behavior.
The readership for samizdat was quite small in the FSU, and the necessity of manually comparing the typeface of a given samizdat document with the registry of typewriters sold was cumbersome.
As Scharansky has recently written,
“To preserve our integrity and our souls, the quality of our political debate and the creativity so essential to our cultural life, we need a Twitter Test challenging bottom-up cultural totalitarianism that is spreading throughout free societies. That test asks: In the democratic society in which you live, can you express your individual views loudly, in public and in private, on social media and at rallies, without fear of being shamed, excommunicated, or cancelled? Ultimately, whether you will live as a democratic doublethinker doesn’t depend on the authorities or on the corporations that run social media platforms: it depends on you. Each of us individually decides whether we want to submit to the crippling indignity of doublethink, or break the chains that keep us from expressing our own thoughts, and becoming whole.”
https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/natan-sharansky-doublethink
Nature, more generally speaking, is that which must be eliminated in the world of 1984, no? (I mean, that’s what Marx aimed to do.)
Take “eros” for instance, as observed between Winston and Julia: eros has to go so that the substitute of ones’ beloved can “become” the Party. Terror is the tool to drive eros away, as the Pavlovian dinner bell is the tool to drive canine salivary production: mechanically, so to speak.
Can nature be eliminated? Is nature something? Something apart from convention, something apart from language as conceived in Sapir-Whorf? Does nature drive men and women? Or does it not?
It seems that if we can answer that question on one side or the other we’ll have an answer whether the totalitarian project is possible, or is merely a ghastly folly.
There is a fundamental nihilism at work here in the Party, as indeed there is in the Sapir-Whorf theoretic. Killing nature seems to me to be the point.
Ahhhh… something I said has inspired a Neo post! At last! I feel fulfilled. 🙂 Although I didn’t expect it to arise from such a subject at all.
Re: Newspeak, I guess I understood Orwell’s idea of it as a thought experiment, essentially. Perhaps, being a writer and concerned about fascism and so on, it was a natural thing for him to attempt. Kind of like a dark analogue of how Tolkien arrived at the whole Middle-earth scenario via the invention first of Quenya, then in a sense extrapolating the story from the language.
A word not in common usage but must be eliminated “ niggardly.” Educated people who should understand are offended by it. I us it as often as possible to flush out the idiots in my circle.
I do not use liberal or democrat any more to refer to “ leftist” they are neither liberal nor democratic.
My wife a teacher of Spanish and Latin was accosted one day for discussing the color wheel. She should not use the Spanish word for black.” Negro” was unacceptable. She asked what word would be acceptable . No answer. She told her principle that day she was not renewing her contact for th next year.
Back in the day, late Sixties, S-W was said to be so strong that the Hopi language’s treatment of time enabled even a Hopi fourth grader to understand Einstein’s Theory of Relativity. This was generally said by those from a large group–most of us–who don’t get Relativity in English. So….who knows?
I do see some indications. For example, insisting a word with an objectively valid fact is in some way offensive limits its use in pretty much any discussion. And so some other word has to be found and it will be one which is far less useful, having a broader definition. If the original word is now missing….
The switch from AGW to climate change is a good example. The failure of AGW to happen no longer affects the debate.
sdferr said.
“Can nature be eliminated? Is nature something? Something apart from convention, something apart from language as conceived in Sapir-Whorf? Does nature drive men and women? Or does it not? ”
My view still, from long ago, is that nature is at the base of all human, and animal too, societies but…
[substituting the ‘s’ word for the original ‘c’.]
Successful, functional societies build in concert with human nature. Dysfunctional societies build in conflict with human nature. The conflicts make for the dysfunction. They inflict costs on the society that lower it’s utility to most of the humans living under it. Most, but not all, there will always be some that benefit and will try to keep the even the most dysfunctional society from changing.
Weak Form Adherent here; although I know some retards who are good advertisements for the Strong Form.
@Huxley: Tom Wolfe’s “Kingdom of Speech” is going down like a treat. Thx again for the recommendation.
There’s an old but good essay by Paul Graham about how various programming languages constrain their users’ approaches to problem solving.
http://paulgraham.com/icad.html
I’m also reading a book by Foster & Handley right now called “Don’t Teach Coding (Until You Read this Book)” — mucho Sapir-Whorf contained within.
It begins with the story of American Sign Language and how the ‘Experts’ spent a century up until the 1960s trying to shut it down for being Unscientific.
The field of Linguistics does seem to be one of those little specs of grit around which any super-saturated socio-political solution goes into full aggro mode.
re Sapir-Whorf, there may be some useful analogies to be found in computer science. Turing demonstrated that a computer with a certain level of capabilities (which are actually pretty minimal) can, in principal, computer anything that can be computed…BUT, this doesn’t foreclose the possibility/reality that certain architectures are much faster and more effective for certain classes of problems that for others.
And certainly, at the level of programming languages, there is benefit in fitting the tool to the class of problem.
Language is a potent weapon.
NYT did a take down piece on some famous ‘Rationalists’ the other day.
One of them in his self-defence wrote roughly something like “I have always been an *Ally* of Women in Tech… blah blah bah”
Once you start using the Enemy’s Weaponised Rhetorical Terms of Art, you’ve already surrendered and you’re just signaling your submission.. no matter how much word salad you emit.
At base, all totalitarian ideologies reject basic aspects of human nature and certain fundamental operative principles that govern the external reality within which we all exist.
Which is why they are ultimately unsustainable.
The oldest totalitarian ideology in existence is Islam. What has it independently accomplished in its existence?
What noteworthy societal accomplishments could the Soviets tout? What new and noteworthy societal accomplishments can the CCP brag about?
That would be the eventual result of a world-wide totalitarian ideology.
There is only stagnation when individual initiative is crushed.
Eventually, that defunct stagnation lacks the ability to successfully supress rebellion.
And the cycle begins all over again.
1. From bondage to spiritual growth
2. From spiritual growth to great courage
3. From courage to liberty
4. From liberty to abundance
5. From abundance to complacency
6. From complacency to apathy
7. From apathy to dependence
8. From dependence back to bondage
http://blog.adw.org/2016/10/eight-stages-rise-fall-civilizations/
@David+Foster:
Yep. Graham points out in an essay that programmers who don’t know Lisp literally don’t know what they don’t know; i.e. they cannot conceive of one or two extra levels of expressivity which only the Lisp family of languages permit through making recursion and macros so fundamental to everything one does in them.
One could make weaker arguments for this being true of OCaml and Haskell.
Confounding factor is that OCaml and Haskell are both Bridge of Asses languages. Dummies and Midwits simply can’t function (pun intended) in them. So you get powerful terse expressivity performed by smarter folk —> quality of production *ought* to be better. Some years back Jane Street Capital (proprietary trading fund) was hiring only OCaml programmers for precisely this reason.
I’m totally with Huxley on Chomsky and Sapir-Whorf.
I have only actually studied landsides that are really not that different from English (German, French, Yiddish, and to a degree, Hebrew.) But thanks to linguistic courses, I’ve been introduced at a basic level to very different languages. I had a hell of a time wrapping my brain around ergative-absolutive argument; while I love the idea of polysynthetic and agglutinative languages, I think they’d be extremely difficult to learn.
Here is Wikipedia on Navajo:
“In Navajo, verbs are the main elements of their sentences, imparting a large amount of information. The verb is based on a stem, which is made of a root to identify the action and the semblance of a suffix to convey mode and aspect; however, this suffix is fused beyond separability. The stem is given somewhat more transparent prefixes to indicate, in this order, the following information: postpositional object, postposition, adverb-state, iterativity, number, direct object, deictic information, another adverb-state, mode and aspect, subject, classifier, mirativity and two-tier evidentiality.”
After you read the description of that long list, tell me that a native speaker of Navajo doesn’t think differently. It’s not enough for someone to “move” from point a to point be…. “Move” describes a hell of a lot. It mattress how is moving, what shape it is, how fast, etc., etc., etc.
To use a simple example from French and English: I’m convinced a native speaker of French thinks about “stained glass windows” differently from native speakers of English. For us it’s three things: a window, made of glass, that’s colored. For the French, it’s a single word: vitraux
It would be a very interesting to translate something into Navajo.
@Lee+Also:
Sounds like a language perfectly suited to nomad hunters.
And now for a language perfectly suited to C21 Meme Lords:
“Gattling Gun go BRRRRRR…”
Must read a book on the Code Talkers one day. Have visions of some moldy old German or Japanese professor of Anthropology in his study being woken up in middle of the night, slapped in a uniform and dragged off to the front to figure out just WTFF these guys were saying.
@Lee+Also:
The French may well think differently, helped along by their language.
To make life even more bonkers, we Anglos give added credence to Bog French Loan Words because they’re well ‘French’.
When I first hit East Asia in the early 90s, I was stunned by how intellectual the garbage men in Hong Kong looked because half of them were wearing spectacles. Of course they may not have been bookish at all — just that myopia is more common amongst the Chinese.
The most banal French utterance or pop-philosophizing has been like that in the Anglosphere these last hundred years. We suck it up because we don’t intuitively grok that the French don’t have all the down-to-earth ur-English Germanic synonyms we have for our French Loan Words. French is just French to them.. although they *do* get a bit carried away with themselves at times.
Many years ago, I read “The Stories of English”. Heavens, what a complicated road to today’s English. And the obscure citations citing even more obscure linguistic research into half-millennium old ag terms in some unobtrusive shire or something….
I have heard that half the Frenchmen who showed up for WW I spoke French as a second language. That is, they learned it in school on top of their provincial dialect. Or their this-end-of-the-valley dialect.
There’s no reason to think the same was not true of many other countries.
When there is news from the UK and it’s not about an urban type, there is frequently a screen crawl so we can understand the language.
In the US, it’s mostly a treatment of vowels. As “Fred” is two syllables, “Freyud”. The cute southern terms for…some cooking item or another…don’t amount to separate dialects.
Perhaps the idea of many folks over the last couple of centuries being monolingual is incorrect. You have to talk to the guy from the next valley….
So if you’re thinking in, at least, two languages….where’s S-W?
Putting English together from pre-Roman Celtic, Roman Latin, various kinds of Germanic languages from Frisian to Swedish, Norman French, standard French, some Gaelic, seems like a lot of work. Is it possible that any unifying theme related to thought patterns in a given language disappeared when mashed up in the British isles, without generating another?
I believe that Solzhenitsyn has written about the impoverishment of the Russian language during the Soviet years, as opposed to the time of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy.
Soviet Union during the 20s and Indonesia under Sukarno both went through a mania for extreme acronymization of terms as ideologies and reach of the States’ tentacles morphed and multiplied. Unstable and chaotic periods in both cases.
Don’t know much about much at all, but suspect that massive proliferation of acronyms during a historical period is a Bad Sign.
Rufus T. Firefly on February 16, 2021 at 4:59 pm: “Could it be that this trait of grammar in their languages stimulates their minds to think more along engineering constructs?”
One of my fellow students in grad school was studying German for his technical language requirement. He said his instructor explained that the structure of putting the verb at/near the end of the sentence meant Germans had to “suspend judgement” until the sentence was completed. This seems to support a thought process that would be more strongly analytical.
I have generally thought of intelligence as the ability to recognize patterns and relationships; and creativity as the ability to recognize new patterns. We all have some range of capabilities in both areas, although exactly what triggers a given recognition may not yet be understood, and also changes with age or situation or experience or ???
The fact that we have multiple languages to describe (sound out) a given idea or perception seems to lean towards a weak S-F at best. But whether via formal education or informal learning, we are given or exposed to a given word/phrase to represent a new (to us) idea. We did not need to invent those words since they were already present in our language of use. But if we create some new idea then we need a way to express it for others to understand and select a combination of existing words or make one up, using some rationale that makes sense to us (e.g., Linnaeus’s scientific naming process or whatever).
A further angle is that until you evolve a voice box suitable for providing a wider range of sounds (and also have the ears to hear them) you don’t need a brain with the frontal lobe or other structures/ elements needed to process sophisticated meaning and language. Thus probably language and brain capability evolved in tandem. A parallel question would then be why did it take us so long to develop and master written languages if we already had decent vision and an idea processing engine in place to handle voice communications.
R2L:
Written language evolved in city states Between the Rivers to facilitate temple taxation-record keeping, no?
And this required agriculture as pre-requisite.
In the earliest Chinese civilisations there was also an element of pyromantic divination — see Oracle Bone Script, but bet it still started with accounting and taxing.
What literate culture has subsequently done to our neuro-development is another story again for sure.
I’d thought of the weak form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as saying that the language reflects what its speakers think. For example, people studying proto-indo-european make inferences on where the language originated based on things like the lack of words for “ocean” and “island”. And the presence of words for “mouse” and “louse” but not “rat” indicates which pests flourished in that culture.
And Newspeak definitely was still a work in progress in 1984. There’s a passage where someone working on the revisions of the Newspeak dictionary described the work he was doing eliminating adjectives.
Suddenly had idle query as to nature of divination back in Cuneiform Times. Would have been cute if they had tossed sticks and tried to puzzle out cuneiform letters. But nope: livers, guts, the usual stuff.
https://www.thetorah.com/article/the-practice-of-divination-in-the-ancient-near-east
Two words: “toxic masculinity”
Matthew @ 5:36pm,
Speaking of Shakespeare, “The devil can cite scripture to suit his purpose.”
R2L @5:35pm,
That verb placement at the end thing was very difficult for me at first, but at some point became normal. I no longer had to think about it, it just happened. I actually kind of like it, as it does seem to give the verb more emphasis. Mark Twain wrote about it quite extensively (and humorously). It also seems to support my “engineering” theory. One has to construct the entire thought in one’s mind, specifically and accurately, before speaking.
R2L,
I have developed a similar theory on intelligence and creativity based on a lifetime of observation. My wife and I are good examples that seem to reinforce your hypothesis. We both can be rather clever and glib when speaking, and to an outsider it likely appears we are “thinking” similarly, but having known myself for over 5 decades, and her for over 3, I am quite certain we often get to similar results using very different methods. I fit your definition of “intelligent” whereas she fits your definition of “creative.” If we both say something clever in response to an input, a news story, perhaps. I am getting to clever linearly. Quickly making linear associations in my brain from A to B to C to D to E. I hear “A” and speak “E,” but I’ve gotten to E by following a systematic pattern. I am quite certain my wife does not follow a line from A to B to C to D to E. She jumps from A to E without the intermediate steps. And I agree, that seems “creative.”
I have long been fascinated by comedians and have listened to HOURS of interviews of comedians. My favorites are when two or more professional comedians discuss their methods and how they develop jokes and comedic bits. I have always had a sense that very good comedians often have very impressive brains. Yet, many of them struggle mightily in school.
It seems like many of them are like my wife (and my wife is very funny), in that they are great at intuitive leaps in association. Some also seem like me, where they think more linearly. It seems that those who have the most successful careers (longevity, earnings) either naturally have a combination of both skills, or force themselves to learn the latter skill. Jerry Seinfeld and Jay Leno are two comedians who spent years (especially in the beginning, when they were hardly eking out a living), studying what seemed to work, and what didn’t, and developing systems and rules to improve their skills. They were very systematic about it. I think Leno, as a child, was more of the creative type, but through determination also developed his systemic processes. Robin Williams would be an example of an almost purely creative type. It’s interesting that Leno loves automobiles, auto mechanics and auto repair. Jeff Foxworthy was a system engineer for IBM before going into comedy. My guess is Foxworthy, Leno and Seinfeld have been the three highest earners of any living comedians.
Karl Lembke, (and, I suppose Zaphod)
I read a history of the English language and after a few chapters decided on a Reader’s Digest version of how new vocabulary was being added to the language:
Why were the folks on the British isles butting up against a foreign culture at this point in history? War or trade? When it was war, invariably martial terms would enter English from the foreign culture. Words for weapons, fortifications, strategies. When it was trade commercial words would be infused from the foreign peoples the Anglos traded with.
In High School, when I started paying more attention to foreign languages, I noticed English is often divided among Germanic influenced words for common usage and Romance influenced words for elite use.
Cry out loud. Rush has died.
To give people a better idea of the current state of Sapir-Whorf, here’s the quote I replied with, when Frederick criticized Robert Pirsig’s books as being Sapir-Whorf thinking, based on a study of an Amazon tribe’s language, Piraha.
As you can see Piraha is radically different from most languages we know.
__________________________________________________
Pirahã doesn’t have words for number or color. Counting is so unnecessary in tribal Amazonian life that the words used to count never evolved. Color words haven’t evolved either, although the Pirahã do describe color using analogy: instead of the bird’s tail was red, they say, the bird’s tail was like blood.
One must wonder if these limits on language produce limits on thought. Can the Pirahã truly see red, in the abstract? Or do they simply see a color that resembles blood? Perception of color is difficult to measure empirically, but numbers aren’t as difficult. Research has shown that, if given a pile of ten pebbles to the left, and eleven to the right, the Pirahã can tell you which pile has more pebbles. However, if the pebbles are removed, they are not able to recall which side had more pebbles before they were removed. The words ten and eleven serve as semantic placeholders in our memory; it’s much easier to remember the word “ten” than to remember the appearance of ten pebbles. Without these placeholders, the Pirahã struggle to generalize the concept of number.
This observation provides strong evidence for the concept of linguistic relativity, often known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This hypothesis states that language shapes or even confines thought, and therefore, the lack of a word might result in the inability to grasp the concept denoted by that word. The Pirahã certainly seem to have trouble grasping the concept of number. They requested that they be taught to count, since they feared they were being cheated in trade with other tribes. However, after eight months of lessons with linguist Daniel Everett, the Pirahã discontinued their instruction, since they felt that they were incapable of learning numbers. Not a single student had learned to count to 10, or even to add 1+1 (Source 2).
https://rostovreview.wordpress.com/2013/09/05/piraha-linguistic-anomaly/
The Piraha language poses an even greater threat to Chomsky’s Universal Grammar because it is non-recursive. In Piraha there are no constructions like:
This is the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built.
Which can be continued ad infinitum, as the nursery rhyme demonostrates.
The Piraha could only say,
This is the cat.
The cat killed the rat.
The rat ate the malt.
Etc.
Chomsky posits that human language is supported by deep structures in the brain, so therefore all languages are basically the same deep down, however dissimilar they may seem on the surface.
In Chomsky’s view recursion is built-in to human language as well, so Piraha presents a serious challenge to Chomskyism.
Zaphod – good point about the appearance of agriculture and settlements (now debatable as to which came first?) as the impetus for creating written records. No point in writing the Cro-Magnon version of the Iliad if only your band is conversing around the fire at night, with no need to impress the band in the neighboring valley.
Rufus – my Myers-Briggs preference assessment (taken twice 15 years apart) is INTJ. The N indicates “intuitive”, where I may sometimes make the A to E jump your wife does, while the T for “thinking” or being analytical or logical forces me to go thru the ABCDE steps you sometimes follow. I sometimes have to put my J preference for Judgement or Closure on hold because my desire to find a logical answer is not yet available.
In the context of thought vs. language, humor does seem to be an especially rich vein for analysis, with a wide variety of capabilities and appreciations. And English does seem to be pretty rich in same word/same sound/different meanings (e.g., double entendre, which suggests French must be too?). My humor is most tickled when something comes out of left field, or an uncommon juxtaposition occurs, relating two different ideas. I also appreciate it when someone builds on previous memes, such as those advertisers who latched unto and expanded the “where’s the beef” Burger King ads. Even more bang for your ad bucks.
huxley on February 17, 2021 at 1:00 pm
If the Piraha are an isolated smallish group and have been so for 6000 to 12000 years, is it reasonable that genetic drift might have caused some change in their “deep brain structure” to account for their difficulties with numeracy and/or non-recursiveness? Are they the only group observed to deviate from Chomsky’s Universal Grammar thesis?
Another thought: we are engaged in thinking about thinking. We all seem to “kind of know” what that means and seem to observe something the same/similar going on with those around us. But we (at least I) struggle with explaining it in any great detail. Perhaps we still simply lack the concepts, ideas, and thus language to describe it properly and deeply. And so we have to wait until the neuroscientists and/or some other disciplines gain an improved understanding of brain structure, response networks, superior and inferior capabilities associated with selected brain areas, etc. Untangling the contributions of, and interactions between, 100 trillion synapses is no small task.
If all anyone means by the weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is that it is harder to express your meaning if you don’t have the right words then it is so trivial as to not be worth bothering about, and we run the risk of talking past one another motte-bailey style (sorry I can’t link to Slate Star Codex). I think clearly something much more must be meant in order for that hypothesis to be of any use.
I do not believe thought is fundamentally constrained by language for the following reasons:
1. Mathematicians and physicists routinely deal with concepts which no human language was ever set up to address. Consequently they continually invent and adapt words to express these concepts. It was easier for everyone else when they stuck to Greek; while describing a property of a quark as “color” is fun for physicists it confuses people who use the word “color” very differently, and if physicists had called it “chroma” then non-physicists would treat the word as an exotic concept, which it is, and not a familiar concept which it is not.
2. A lot of our thinking is not verbal. To steal an example from Dick Feynman, when someone says “crankshaft” to you, what words do you use mentally to describe the shape to yourself? Or do you just picture the shape? The same can be said of the human hipbone, the medical name “innominate” means “nameless”, because you can’t easily describe its shape. But you have no problem PICTURING its shape.
3. A lot of what humans do is based in pre-language biology anyway. A people without a word for “run” could still run. Now a population entirely and congenitally legless might not need a word for “run” and might not have it, but that is backward from what people usually mean by Sapir-Whorf.
4. The history of language is continually stretching existing words into new meanings and new concepts. (A “computer” used to be a profession, not a machine.) How are we able to do that, if the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has any meaning more than the trivial one of “it could be harder to do it if you didn’t have enough words”.
Those of you with access to YouTube (unfortunately the other platforms have not caught up yet) search , Movie, “One of our Aircraft is Missing” and go to approximately 1:04:00 for a pretty well done delivery along those lines; as a British airman [ the captain of a fugitive downed bomber crew] supposedly recites a literal translation of a German directive which has been delivered to a Dutch soccer match crowd via loudspeaker.
Going off topic: Given the era, the movie deserves points for relative restraint, and in that sense appears like high art in comparison with the buffoonish plot contrivances of say, a similarly plotted Errol Flynn vehicle of these same wartime years. In this respect, being relatively low key, it resembles “The Way Ahead”, another Brit WW2 film found on YouTube in variously edited versions. Looking at the credits of these films is a kick, David Lean, Carrol Reed, Stanley Holloway, Peter Ustinov … who could have predicted ? ….
Look up the etymology of the word “red”. It appears there was a similar process it work. Apparently the PIE speakers didn’t need to refer to spilled blood, having the general coloring they did.
The impression, was abstraced or lifted from the specific original context, reconceived of as an attribute of a substance, and then used to cover a variety of assign-ments. Or something like that.
huxley:
If you took a Piraha child away at birth and reared it in Western culture, would it learn to count? If the answer is “yes,” then I don’t think it’s a brain structure problem but rather a cultural problem. If it’s “no,” then there is something about their brains that means they don’t understand math.
I have read that the Piraha non-infants resist all cultural appropriation of any kind. I wonder whether they really wanted to learn to count.
At any rate, other tribes that can’t count can learn to count rather easily, so it seems there is something about the Piriha that’s different.
The guy who studied them thinks it’s cultural – that certain concepts and ways of thinking are forbidden by their culture and that their language and learning patterns reflect that rather than language determining it. At least, that was the case 15 years ago, when that article was written.
According to this there’s a school now, and “observations involving concepts like the notion of quantity…became impossible, because of the influence of the new knowledge on the results.” There’s a lot more at that link, explaining some of the arguments about the language’s characteristics.
R2L, Frederick, neo:
I’m not presenting the Piraha as proof of anything, but an interesting case which tests the Sapir-Whorf and Chomsky debates.
R2L: I doubt 6,000 – 12,000 of isolated evolution is enough the change human brain structure in such a fundamental way. I’m sure Chomsky would agree.
neo: I believe that a Piraha child raised in the West would learn to count easily. I’m not sure what it means that Everett’s attempts to teach counting to the Piraha failed.
I agree that the Piraha resistance to Western civilization in general is extraordinary and must be considered in Sapir-Whorf discussions about the Piraha language and its influence.
Frederick: I see Sapir-Whorf as a continuum from weak to strong. The question is where one lands and with what support. Even weak S-W is interesting in my opinion.
To summarize: Human language, its evolution and how it interacts with human speakers is a wickedly complex set of questions. IMO we are nowhere near definitive answers.
R2L @1:16pm,
Pretty sure it was Wendy’s.
Artificial attempts to change language and therefore the humans who speak it is a relatively new idea. It’s also not settled how well that works or which aspects are important.
Clearly, if one lacks a word for microaggressions, the example I brought up earlier, there is a range of thinking and behaviors which would not otherwise be as available. It’s a difference which makes a difference.
On a more wholesome note, “human rights” as a term only goes back to post-WWII. The concept of human rights arguably goes further back, but practically speaking, kings had rights, nobles had rights but everyone else could be a slave or a serf and that’s just the way it was. It didn’t occur to anyone, certainly not St. Paul for example, to question it.
The fictional Newspeak and the all-too-real SocialJusticeSpeak are not the only attempts to change language and therefore human beings.
General Semantics, many forms of psychotherapy, and various self-help movements all involve language retraining to improve one’s life.
R2L @ 1:32pm,
I thought the same thing. If there’s no advantage in their environment to having the ability to count, why would it evolve?
It seems reasonable that there are a lot of such things in human brains; but due to the fluidity at which we mate across borders and cultures uncontacted tribes are probably the only research areas where such things surface.
For example (prior to the 19th century); if one lives in Finland and does not have a well developed concept of delayed gratification one will not survive to Spring. If one lives on Taliabu island, where the climate is the same year round, and one is always within walking distance of fresh fish and vegetation, stockpiling is a waste of time and energy and an evolutionary detriment.
R2L @ 1:40pm,
We are also engaged in extracting O2 from air we suck into our lungs and attaching it to red blood cells that take oxygen to the cells in our bodies and…
Like thinking, just because our bodies do it doesn’t mean we understand it! 🙂
DNW @1:56pm,
Thanks for the heads up. I just watched it. Quite funny. I do that often as a joke when folks ask me to translate German, since I know it sounds funny to English speakers. However, it doesn’t appear to be meant as a joke in the movie, and if not, it’s strange that the translator, who obviously has great facility with the German language, would not properly translate it into English.
Folks who can translate long passages, in real time (like U.N. translators) amaze me! The levels that they are able to think at*, while performing at such a high standard… Very gifted people.
*Especially to a guy who can’t remember to alter a clause so that it does not end in a preposition, as huxley pointed out!
DNW @2:18pm,
Great point on colors. The words for many colors in many languages are an exact word borrowed from nature; “violet,” “orange,” for examples. Stands to reason many others began that way and evolved to altered forms. It’s likely at some point our English speaking ancestors, like the Piraha, would say, “Her dress was the color of violets,” until eventually removing the words introducing the simile.
huxley @ 3:14pm,
English doesn’t have a word to explain “schadenfreude.” It’s even tough to explain using any number of English words, but English speakers have no trouble grasping it. And I think we grasp it as a single, specific emotion. In other words, even though our language does not appear to have ever dealt with it, we all know what it is, and experience it, and can recall those experiences, even without knowing of a way to communicate it. Whether one knows the word, “schadenfreude” or not, one will often laugh or feel pleasure when tragedy befalls someone else, especially if one has enmity for that person.
Ok. This is not a challenge to justify yourself, but a mooting of the question: “Why should we think so?”
Placing aside the issue of what is meant by brain structure, or the matter of the extension of the predicate class “human” – must we stipulate each and every instantiation of? Or may we speak of idenifiable populations and traceable lineages? – it does not seem that significant human “evolution” takes hundreds of millenia.
Because, it is considered more or less settled now that significant metabolic and phenotypical evolution has occurred within populations which subsume under the general category of “humanity”, in the last 10 or 12 thousand years.
Yes, so far as I know anyway, no “named” structure in the brains of various populations found around the world, appear either novelly, or uniquely fail to appear in every other human population.
But that said, lactase persistance, for example, entails the appearance of no unique “organ” in the bodies of those adults now able to digest cow’s milk. Yet, the presence of this recently evolved ability can be a literal matter of life and death in certain circumstances in particular environments.
Tetrachromant females, ( at least the one identified as having the ability to actually perceive more colors ) have so far as reported no unique brain features to accompany their extra color cone. It’s obvious, although seemingly unlikely, that should some catastrophic short term event bathe the earth in a fatally damaging type of radiation that only they could detect and thus avoid, that if such a mutation gave them a survival advantage, and if it could be inherited normally ( rather than produced one off as a random mutational byproduct of having a color blind sire) , then non-distributive “evolution” of almost exactly the kind you are talking about, would have taken place.
It’s supposed to be slyly amusing; mocking the oppressor Germans’ officiousness and back-firing punctilio by way of an exaggeratedly convoluted and comically pompous rendition of their command and counter-command.
And, yes, as bad as my HS German is, and as unclean as the soundtrack is, I agree: he does not appear to actually be producing a faithful literal translation. I doubt if many British moviegoers in the war years knew enough German to wonder where some of the comical word arrangements the translator was introducing came from. It was all Greek to them.
(Geez. Now I’ll have to listen carefully again to see if there is a mention of “ears” in the German original)
Regarding the film and its translation, it amazes me how often movies do not do proper translations when German is spoken, and I assume the same is true when any of the other 7,116 other languages I do not speak appear in a film and are translated.
It’s genuinely odd. Odd enough that it has made me try to figure out a reason. They’ll twist really basic things. Just a bit. And the twist is almost always less spot on than had they gone with a more obvious translation. Maybe the folks who do the translation do this as a bit of an inside joke?
Regarding your question about the German language knowledge of mid-20th century, British movie audiences, I think that involves historical knowledge you know much better than I, but my assumption would have been that some familiarity and facility with German would not have been that rare. I would assume most educated Brits knew a fair amount of French and German; likely fluent in one or both, and the less educated classes would consist of a lot of folks familiar with both languages.
Ok. This is not a challenge to justify yourself, but a mooting of the question: “Why should we think so?”
DNW: As I said, I *doubt* such a fundamental change could occur in 6-12K years. But I claim no certainty. How fundamental a change is it? How fast could such evolution occur? Brain structure to support counting strikes me as somewhat more complicated than tetrachromatic females.
Australian aborigines have been isolated from the rest of homo sapiens for ~60K years as I recall. They have had no brain deficits preventing them from learning English, arithmetic and becoming auto mechanics.
Conceivably there is a developmental window for learning to count. We know that children who by freakish circumstances don’t learn language in their first few years, usually don’t catch up.
I find the Piraha fascinating. I hope we can learn from them without killing their unique culture. However, as I also said, I believe a Piraha child raised in civilization would have no trouble learning to count.
“I hope we can learn from them without killing their unique culture.”
North Sentinel Island go BRRRRRRRR.
🙂
Re Chomsky and Recursion:
He grew up in a world where a lot of the Big Brains were into Recursion in a Big Way.
The Lambda Calculus –> bonkers stuff like Y-Combinators, the early MIT School AI Orthodoxy. These were all very fresh and exciting at the time.
Whether or not such structures are baked into us at the evolutionary level, they were certainly baked into Chomsky and a lot of other precocious smartypants types in the Academy. And who can blame them for that? There’s a beautiful seductiveness and elegance and one *wants* it to apply everywhere.
The Recursive Holy Rollers took one cursory look at the nascent field of neural networks and decided Can’t XOR, you’re fired. And that was all she wrote in that field for a generation.
Waiting for Stephen Wolfram to pop up next and tell us that Language is generated by cellular automata. Who look like turtles. And go all the way down.
He grew up in a world where a lot of the Big Brains were into Recursion in a Big Way.
The Lambda Calculus –> bonkers stuff like Y-Combinators, the early MIT School AI Orthodoxy. These were all very fresh and exciting at the time.
Zaphod:
I noticed that too when I, as a self-taught guy, started running into MIT programmers. Recursion is neat and sometimes necessary but for most ordinary programming is overkill that makes code harder to maintain. Or at least harder to maintain for programmers who do maintenance.
That said, I felt a pang of disappointment when I read that MIT switched from Scheme to Python for its intro to programming.
The Recursive Holy Rollers took one cursory look at the nascent field of neural networks and decided Can’t XOR, you’re fired and that was all she wrote in that field for a generation.
I heard it was a funding squeeze in which Minsky prevailed to keep his brand of AI going.
At this point, the conversation is over, but…
Why can’t the brain change depending on language? We are all born with the same pallette, vocal cords, neck, but as we grow into adulthood, those are shaped by the Lanie we primarily speak.
The only way you could really investigate Saphir-whorf is to perform extensive functional MRI tests on people, and you can’t stick a person in an MRI for as long as you would need to for the investigation to be valid.
Lee+Also,
It often does. The brains of people who suffer injuries in their youth often adapt to perform functions in different neural areas. For example, someone who loses their sight (I think that’s mainly the occipital lobe?) may have their occipital lobe develop to do other processes, including augmented hearing, or smell. This ability to transform typically diminishes with age. Human brains are incredibly plastic in youth.
When you think about it, except for animals with a pupal or larval stage, no other species is born as helpless as we, poor humans. I think it is accepted science that this has to do with our head size and the difficulty of biped hips in bearing offspring. Probably not coincidence that another large biped, the kangaroo, also bears blind, helpless young, and evolved a manner to keep their Joey’s safe until they can fend for themselves. Our brains also come much less “hard-wired” than other animals. We seem to learn more by monkey-see, monkey do than pre-structured behaviors and routines built into our brains.