I will waste everyone’s time contributing my two cents to this.
First, I think the famous Whorf hypothesis is just one position on a chicken-egg problem. How one views the world is a product of social background, education and experience. Language is intimately bound up with all of these, but not clearly fundamental to any of them. The ignorant insist on putting everything in their fixed set of experience boxes, for which they have words; primitive peoples have a “divinity” box for everything they don’t understand. The better educated usually recognize things and situations for which they don’t have an existing box. They still have to use existing language to explain the newly perceived phenomenon to others. So language limits your ability to express your mental take on your experiences, but that doesn’t mean that your “mental take” is what you are able to say.
It is my experience in speaking natural languages that the _expression_ of a thought comes out in a form suitable to the language I am speaking, and it may be very different from the _expression_ I would have used in English. Even worse, I have found myself coming to a stop when I don’t know the foreign word, and consciously shifting mental gears to think what the English word is. A professional simultaneous translator said what she does is repeat what she hears, and the skill is not allowing the incoming language to confuse her speech. So, I think the mind does some kind of translation from concept to _expression_ as needed, but the concept itself is separated from language, regardless of how the concept was originally formed. (Confirming Pat Hayes’ observations.)
Second, programming languages differ in the kinds of solution formulations they were intended to support, and in the underlying execution model. FORTRAN was intended to facilitate mathematical programming in a procedural way; APL was intended to facilitate mathematical programming in an applicative (functional) way. Those are different execution models. C was originally intended to be a language for less arcane _expression_ of a solution using the native capabilities of digital computers, which have always been inherently procedural. COBOL was intended to specify relatively simple processing of data records, also in a procedural way, because that is how business people describe processes. LISP is primarily a functional language, the execution model is not procedural; it is designed for more general information stream processing, and it is not very good for either mathematics or record processing. Other languages are event-driven (like finite-state automata languages) or data-driven (like XSLT or SNOBOL) or have some complex execution model (like rules engines and Prolog).
Engineers design solutions for a given problem using what education they have. A software engineer who has only seen procedural languages only has a set of screwdrivers in his toolbox. The language only affects his thinking in that it is a means of expressing the only execution models he understands, and the only data concepts he understands. He was only taught those concepts, and the language that goes with them. In a similar way, we have seen mechanical engineers design Rube Goldberg devices for problems that can be solved by simple electrical circuits. So please don’t blame the language for the lack of wider education and experience. “Thinking in FORTRAN” means “not understanding any more general engineering approaches”.
-Ed
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Edward J. Barkmeyer Email: edbark@xxxxxxxx
National Institute of Standards & Technology
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From: ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:ontolog-forum-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Rich Cooper
Sent: Saturday, February 23, 2013 4:40 PM
To: '[ontolog-forum] '
Subject: Re: [ontolog-forum] Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
Since the primary topic of this forum is ontology, I found a very relevant quote from Simon Spero’s link to SWH in Wikipedia:
The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way—an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language.
This seems related to the “engineering language” phenomenon noted by Steven Ericsson-Zenith regarding such languages as Lisp and C, and how their user communities differ.
So the proper conclusion, IMHO, is that the “categories and types” that Sapir noted as “staring each observer in the face” are subjected to the compression effects of each language as practiced. C emphasizes the procedural, but in fact any declarative structure in Lisp can also be represented in C, though less compactly. So in C it is easier, and more compressed, to write procedural code, while Lisp offers a more compact representation of declarations, and a somewhat foggier representation of procedures.
I suppose that early peoples would have placed a high value on compression of language, since speech during a hunt would have risked losing the hunted critter. The emphasis of compressed structures would have had evolutionary value, and hence would have affected the way we descended from the most cost-effective speakers rather than from the more prosaically inclined.
Personally, I prefer Delphi and Lisp to most others, such as Prolog or COBOL or FORTRAN. The elegance of my preferred two is what draws me; either Delphi (with its elaborate component set) or Lisp (with its flowery expressiveness) can support elegant programming.
Elegant programming can support discussions of the correctness of the program among programmers more easily than obfuscated programs in inelegant languages. Since this form of language is important to us in modern usage, more important than the deeper compression I suspect early peoples used, I prefer it.
-Rich
Sincerely,
Rich Cooper
EnglishLogicKernel.com
Rich AT EnglishLogicKernel DOT com
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http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/linguistics/#Who