John Bottoms wrote: (01)
> We know that the window for learning speech closes pretty tightly by 15
> years of age. (02)
This is a bit oversimplified. The window that closes in most
individuals is the ability to learn to hear, distinguish and create
language _sounds_. The Army Language School and diplomatic schools have
been quite successful teaching persons as old as 40 new languages -- to
read, hear, understand, and make themselves understood. In many cases,
this involves changes in speech organization, and conceptualization. In
Japanese, for example, there are different counting terms for different
kinds of things, and African languages often distinguish things
Americans don't usually distinguish and don't distinguish certain things
Americans commonly do. But the talented American student is able to
learn them and "instinctively" use them correctly. The problem that
these schools have is the elimination of the "American accent".
Learning to make the new sounds is very difficult for persons over 16,
and for some tongues learning to distinguish the foreign sounds is very
difficult as well. (Everett talks about Pirahã being particularly
difficult in this regard.) And yet, there are occasional persons over
40 who can still master the distinction and production of foreign sounds
so well as to pass as native speakers. (T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) is a
famous example.) (03)
> I'm a bit surprised that Everett had his own children in
> the class but made no mention of having Pirahã children in it. Did
> Everett not realize that he, himself, had learned to count as a child?
>
> Perhaps if they started teaching the children now they would have
> improved their trading capabilities in 5 years. (04)
Perhaps, but the problem is that language and culture reinforce one
another. (Swahili, for example, makes many distinctions in kinds of
"walking", precisely because they distinguish characteristics of
movement that have impact on success in hunting and other activities of
that society.) Teaching children to count supposes that their culture
will make that skill useful. We take it for granted that it would be,
because the idea is common to the vast majority of human languages, but
we are talking about a culture that is known to be a counterexample. If
they learned, the opportunity to use that knowledge would only exist in
interacting with others who have and use it, or possibly in acquiring
some advantage within their own culture over those who do not have that
knowledge. (And Everett makes a point of saying that the Pirahã think
of other cultures they encounter as inferior, Westerners in particular.) (05)
> One of my most
> memorable, and enjoyable experiences was haggling with an 8 year old
> Mayan boy for a belt. He did it very well. And it involved knowing the
> markup price and how to discount it after each offer.
> (06)
But his culture and circumstance made that a valuable skill. (07)
> "Finally, I agree that Piraha˜ and English are incommensurate
> in several ways and that numbers and counting are one very obvious
> manifestation of this incommensurability, but it is not clear that
> linguistic determinism provides the explanation we need. The reason
> is that the absence of counting is simply one unexpected absence in
> Piraha˜ language and culture." -Everett
> (08)
I don't think of myself as a Whorf-ian. I think the modern view is that
there is co-development of language and culture, and most societies now
find themselves regularly in contact with others, with the consequence
of continuing evolution of both language and culture. (09)
It seems to be characteristic of the Pirahã that they see themselves as
the superiors and look upon interaction with other societies as
situations in which they can take something of value, and provide some
bit of cultural enlightenment to their partners, but get little or no
cultural value from them. Thus the interactions have little
evolutionary impact on Pirahã, just as many "ignorant savage" cultures
had little evolutionary impact on European languages and cultures during
the Age of Exploration. (We have always thought of ourselves as the
windshield; to our surprise, they think of us as the bug. :-) ) (010)
-Ed (011)
"You think the only people who are people
Are the people all who look and think like you.
But if you walk the footsteps of a stranger
You'll learn things you never knew you never knew."
-- Stephen Schwartz, "Colors of the Wind" (012)
> -John Bottoms
> Firststar
> Concord, MA
> T: 978-505-9878
>
> On 8/30/2010 12:12 PM, John F. Sowa wrote:
>
>> Ferenc,
>>
>> Thanks for the reference:
>>
>> http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html
>>
>> The author makes some good points, but he's much too harsh
>> on Whorf in the opening paragraphs. Whorf actually had quite
>> a strong background for his observations, and linguists and
>> psychologists drew much finer distinctions about the Whorfian
>> hypothesis, which they were analyzing for years.
>>
>> Whorf himself never made the very strong claim that it's
>> impossible to learn new categories that go beyond what is
>> encoded in one's native language. In fact, he explored
>> ways of teaching people to think in categories beyond
>> the ones encoded in their habitual verbal patterns.
>>
>> At the end of this note are some excerpts -- the first two
>> are from the beginning of the article, and the last one is
>> from the conclusion. The concluding paragraph is very close
>> to what Whorf actually said.
>>
>> But I would also like to mention the following article
>> about the Pirahã language and culture:
>>
>> http://ldc.upenn.edu/myl/llog/EverettPiraha.pdf
>>
>> If the "strong Whorfian hypothesis" applies to anybody, the
>> Pirahã tribe would be prime candidates. As far as anybody
>> has been able to determine, none of the adults of that tribe
>> have ever been able to break out of the mind set imposed by
>> their language (which is extremely difficult for foreigners
>> to master, even for Everett who spent years living with them).
>>
>> In any case, Deutscher's article is interesting, but it would
>> have been better if he had presented a more balanced view of
>> Whorf in the opening paragraphs -- especially since he largely
>> agrees with Whorf in the conclusion.
>>
>> John
>>
>> _____________________________________________________________
>>
>> Does Your Language Shape How You Think?
>>
>> By GUY DEUTSCHER
>>
>> Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short
>> article that set in motion one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the
>> 20th century. At first glance, there seemed little about the article to
>> augur its subsequent celebrity. Neither the title, “Science and
>> Linguistics,” nor the magazine, M.I.T.’s Technology Review, was most
>> people’s idea of glamour. And the author, a chemical engineer who worked
>> for an insurance company and moonlighted as an anthropology lecturer at
>> Yale University, was an unlikely candidate for international
>> superstardom. And yet Benjamin Lee Whorf let loose an alluring idea
>> about language’s power over the mind, and his stirring prose seduced a
>> whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we
>> are able to think....
>>
>> Eventually, Whorf’s theory crash-landed on hard facts and solid common
>> sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any
>> evidence to support his fantastic claims. The reaction was so severe
>> that for decades, any attempts to explore the influence of the mother
>> tongue on our thoughts were relegated to the loony fringes of disrepute.
>> But 70 years on, it is surely time to put the trauma of Whorf behind us.
>> And in the last few years, new research has revealed that when we learn
>> our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought
>> that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways...
>>
>> The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy
>> shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the
>> objects we encounter, and their consequences probably go far beyond what
>> has been experimentally demonstrated so far; they may also have a marked
>> impact on our beliefs, values and ideologies. We may not know as yet how
>> to measure these consequences directly or how to assess their
>> contribution to cultural or political misunderstandings. But as a first
>> step toward understanding one another, we can do better than pretending
>> we all think the same.
>>
>>
>>
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>
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> (013)
--
Edward J. Barkmeyer Email: edbark@xxxxxxxx
National Institute of Standards & Technology
Manufacturing Systems Integration Division
100 Bureau Drive, Stop 8263 Tel: +1 301-975-3528
Gaithersburg, MD 20899-8263 FAX: +1 301-975-4694 (014)
"The opinions expressed above do not reflect consensus of NIST,
and have not been reviewed by any Government authority." (015)
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