Sapir-Whorf in the news
Mirabilis points at an
Ananova story that is very closely related to the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but of course it doesn't mention
the latter anywhere.
I first learned about that hypothesis
in the 1970's, when I was involved with the constructed
language Loglan and then its successor
lojban.
See
this Sapir-Whorf page for the gory details, but in
short, the hypothesis says
-
The language we use to some extent determines the way
in which we view and think about the world around us.
(aka Linguistic Determinism); and
- Distinctions encoded in one language are unique to
that language. The language we use divides reality
into completely arbitrary compartments. (Linguistic
Relativism).
One goal of Loglan was to serve as a sort of example/test
of that hypothesis: by creating a language based on logic,
and by attempting to minimize syntactic ambiguities in the
language, J. C. Brown thought Loglan speakers might be
influenced toward more logical thought.
I always thought this was an interesting though somewhat
inadequate experiment. To test this hypothesis scientifically
would be IMHO outrageously expensive and difficult. The best
we're likely to be able to do is get some hints at how
important a factor it is for natural languages.
A more promising line of research (though still
expensive and difficult) would be to study an
analogous Linguistic Determinism principle in the
context of programming languages. Anyone know of any
work going on in that area?
11:42:57 AM
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