The relationships between language, thought, and ontology arise in
many debates in Ontolog Forum. They are related to the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis, which has been widely discussed, supported, criticized,
and condemned by linguists, psychologists, anthropologists, and
philosophers. (01)
The hypothesis comes in a strong form, which is probably false,
and a weak form, which is probably true with qualifications: (02)
1. Strong: The categories and structure of a language determine
and limit the thought and behavior of its native speakers. (03)
2. Weak: Language is a means of thought, and the patterns of
a language influence the thought and behavior of its speakers. (04)
The strong hypothesis implies that a person's native language makes
it difficult or impossible to think outside the constraints of that
language. The weak hypothesis implies that the language patterns
favor certain lines of thought, but it's possible to learn or invent
new patterns for "thinking outside the box". (05)
A research article by M. Keith Chen analyzes the effect of language
on economic behavior. His middle and last names suggest that he's
bilingual in English and Chinese and sensitive to the language
patterns of both. (06)
See the following abstract and excerpts from the article. The
article itself is 56 pages long, but it's possible to browse through
it for a quick view of his conclusions and his research methods. (07)
Table 5 at the end of the article lists the 126 languages, ranging
from Afrikaans to Zulu, which the author considered in the research. (08)
John Sowa
_____________________________________________________________________ (09)
http://faculty.som.yale.edu/keithchen/papers/LanguageWorkingPaper.pdf (010)
The Effect of Language on Economic Behavior: Evidence from Savings
Rates, Health Behaviors, and Retirement Assets (011)
M. Keith Chen (012)
Yale University, School of Management and Cowles Foundation (013)
Abstract: Languages differ widely in the ways they encode time.
I test the hypothesis that languages that grammatically associate
the future and the present foster future-oriented behavior. This
prediction arises naturally when well-documented effects of language
structure are merged with models of intertemporal choice. Empirically,
I find that speakers of such languages save more, retire with more
wealth, smoke less, practice safer sex, and are less obese. This
holds both across countries and within countries when comparing
demographically similar native households. The evidence does not
support the most obvious forms of common causation. I discuss
implications for theories of intertemporal choice. (014)
1 Introduction (015)
Languages differ in whether or not they require speakers to
grammatically mark future events. For example, a German speaker
predicting rain can naturally do so in the present tense, saying:
_Morgen regnet es_ which translates to 'It rains tomorrow'. In
contrast, English would require the use of a future marker like
'will' or 'is going to', as in: 'It will rain tomorrow'. (016)
In this way, English requires speakers to encode a distinction
between present and future events, while German does not. Could
this characteristic of language influence speakers’ intertemporal
choices? ... (017)
Specifically, I adopt a criterion which distinguishes between
languages which Dahl (2000) calls “futureless”, and those which are
not. Dahl defines “futureless” languages as those which do not require
“the obligatory use [of grammaticalized future-time reference] in
(main clause) prediction-based contexts”.... (018)
6.1.1 Skepticism of the Weak Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (019)
While many studies support at least a weak form of the SWH, there are
a number of scholars who argue that on balance, the idea that cognition
is shaped by language is misguided. Most prominently, in his seminal
work _Syntactic Structures_ (1957), Chomsky argues that humans have
an innate set of mechanisms for learning language, and that this
constrains all human languages to conform with a “universal grammar”. (020)
Taken in strong form, a universal grammar would largely eliminate the
scope for language to affect cognition. In _The Language Instinct_
(1994), Pinker argues exactly this: that humans do not think in the
language we speak in, but rather in an innate “mentalese” which
precedes natural language. He concludes that: “there is no scientific
evidence that languages dramatically shape their speakers’ ways of
thinking”. While a rich literature since 1994 has disputed this claim,
support for the SWH remains an hotly debated topic... (021)
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