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Comment by rossdavidh

3 years ago

I think the problem with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (aside from being poorly named) is that it seems to posit that the lack of a word for a thing, prevents you from perceiving that thing (as for example not having fifty words for snow means you cannot perceive different kinds of snow). This is pretty clearly incorrect, since it is the very lack of a word for a thing that you perceive (and want to talk about) that leads us to invent new words (or repurpose old ones). Thus, English-speaking skiers come up with a new use of the term "powder" to refer to a particular kind of snow, once they have a reason to care about it and want to discuss it with one another.

The more general idea that language and perception affect political culture is not as controversial, although the degree to which the tail wags the dog or vice versa is still debated.

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rossdavidh

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IIAOPSW  3 years ago

I thought the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis only predicted that the difficulty in understanding certain things would be language dependent, not that it would be impossible per se. To make an apt analogy, some languages force you to declare a whole bunch of factory methods and boilerplate bloat before you can express a program that prints "hello world", others simply let you write print("hello world").

  • ineedasername  3 years ago

    The strong version basically says that a person's worldview is just about completely determined by language.

    This was pretty much tossed in the trash bin, partly due to an interesting study into how a language's lexical entries for colors influences perceptions on color closeness and categorization.

    Instead of the strong version there's a reasonable consensus that language influenced things but does not wholely determine them.

    An interesting example is that speakers of tonal languages are more likely to exhibit perfect pitch.

    Source: my increasingly hazy recollections from a post-graduate comp ling program.

  • rossdavidh  3 years ago

    It's a bit tricky to say what the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" predicts, since apparently neither Sapir nor Whorf exactly formulated a clearly stated hypothesis on this topic. This means people write about "strong" or "weak" versions of it.

    I think, to use your analogy, any language that lets you write new libraries which can be imported, will tend to become pretty decent at anything which people programming in that language do a lot. Whatever problems there are in the language itself, tend to become ameliorated (though probably not entirely eliminated) by focused work, for example spinning up a neural net or scraping a website gets much easier once a lot of people have done it in your language of choice, and they have released a library that they use to do it.

    So, a language may not be good for speaking about a topic which the speakers of that language don't have much experience with, but if they come to have much experience with it, the language will quickly evolve to get better at it.