Wall Street Journal discovers linguistic relativism

[Rick Barr]

Sorry about double posting, but I just remembered that Malcolm Gladwell
makes a related point in his book Outliers. He describes how certain types
of cultural behavior, which were causing planes to crash, were remedied in
part by turning the cockpit language from Korean to a language less steeped
in formality: English. It's not linguistic determinism, but it does show an
interesting mixture of culture and language that can be transported to
people of another culture by inducing them to learn a language.

-- Rick


On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 11:39 AM, Rick Barr <rickbarremail at gmail.com> wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Rick Barr <rickbarremail at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Wall Street Journal discovers linguistic relativism
>
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>
> The Economist's Johnson blog tackled this very subject (briefly) a few days
> ago. Here is the second of two postings about it:
> http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2010/07/language_and_thought_0
>
> -- Rick
>
>
> On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 10:06 AM, Jonathan Lighter
> <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>wrote:
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> > Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> > Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> > Subject:      Re: Wall Street Journal discovers linguistic relativism
> >
> >
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> >
> > JHC!  Not Sapir-Whorf and linguistic determinism again!  (It's frequently
> > presented as "lexical determinism," which is even more bizarre.)
> >
> > The "strong interpretation" of S-W - that our understanding of reality is
> > in
> > thrall to and crippled by the syntax and lexicon of our language - is
> > almost
> > certainly nonsense. ( Of course, it's also very popular in postmodernist
> > circles (cf. recent thread on "transgendered").  If it were true, though,
> > accurate translation would be impossible. New "paradigms" (relativity,
> for
> > example, in the context of an Indo-European language like German) would
> be
> > virtually impossible as well. Moreover, it is difficult to imagine any
> > nonlinguistic behavior that is dictated by syntax. (It may be that the
> > strong interpretation does apply to infants, whose world is necesarily
> very
> > limited.)
> >
> > The "weak interpretation" is more credible and generally held by
> linguists:
> > the idea that syntax, plus the extent of our personal lexicon, *may*
> > influence our expectations and can encourage merely conventional patterns
> > of
> > thought. Some experimental evidence seems to support this hypothesis.
> >
> > An effective combination-of-ingredients remedy exists, though, for many
> of
> > the limitations language may impose. The ingredients are "logic " and
> > "interaction with other human beings because no two minds are identical."
> >
> > OTOH, my post of July 31, 2009, seems to show that lexicon alone
> > can dramatically determine behavior.
> >
> > JL
> >
>
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