[Warning : this is long.]
An email exchange with Kevin Marks a few weeks ago got me thinking more about one of the theories of linguistics that I’ve always taken for granted as a given. Only now as I am about to begin graduate level work in the subject am I realizing the degree to which various researchers in the field disagree about it. Of course, as is undoubtedly the case in most academic fields, there is disagreement about pretty much everything.
The following is probably of little interest to those not interested in linguistics (although may be of some small interest to those curious about the Korean language), and may best be skipped entirely. I am, however, keen to hear what people think, if they are interested in this field at all, so rather than keep my response restricted to email, I’ve decided to post it here. I suspect that it doesn’t even answer the question that Kevin put to me, which was ‘I’d like to hear a cogent argument for (the validity of linguistic relativism),’ if I understood it correctly. More of a wee survey for my own interest. Ah, well.
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which is variously referred to as the ‘Whorfian Hypothesis,’ ‘linguistic relativism,’ and ‘linguistic determinism’ (a description of the strong formulation meant by implication to be a bad thing, I think) concerns the relationship between language and thought, and suggests in its strongest form that the structure of a language determines the way in which speakers of that language perceive and understand the external world. This formulation is generally understood by many to be untenable, but the hypothesis also exists in a weaker form : that language structure and content does not determine a view of the world, but that it shapes thought to some degree, and is therefore a powerful impetus in influencing speakers of a given language to adopt a certain world-view.
A possible opposite claim, from a sociolinguistic viewpoint, is that the thought (and thus culture) of a linguistic group is mirrored in the structure and content of their language, that because they behave and understand things in a certain way, their language reflects those behaviours and understandings – the idea that language is molded, if not determined, by culture.
Two quotes from the linguists whose names are most closely associated with this idea, the first from Edward Sapir (Language, 1929b, p. 207) :
Benjamin Lee Whorf, who was a student of Sapir, went further than the ‘predisposition’ suggested by his teacher, and proposed that the relationship was a more deterministic one :
(Whorf, Benjamin, (1956). In J, Carroll (Ed.), Language, Thought and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf.
Whorf does not go so far as to say that language structure totally determines the world-view of a speaker here. He does add, though :
This last is where the argument runs off the rails for me, at least the argument in which I have any interest. It is also the portion of the idea upon which most critics focus, and which was fueled by the Great Eskimo Snow Silliness set off in great part by this :
(Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1940. Science and linguistics, Technology Review (MIT) 42, 6 (April))
and which has been discussed at length in many places, including, cogently here, for example.
To most people, particularly those with little knowledge of Hardcore Linguistics, including myself, the weaker form of Sapir-Whorf seems self-evident. Of course the words we use, the words we know, have some influence on the way we think! The very fabric of our cognition is language, it might well be claimed (but of course that would be a claim that would meet great opposition as well). There is, predictably, great argument about what constitutes ‘mentalese,’ the native language of our minds, as it were). Do words determine the shape of our thoughts? Well, it seems equally clear that that’s nonsense, and though it may and can be argued, it must be said most people don’t bother to try.
Steven Pinker, who was the entry point to the brief exchange between Kevin and I a few weeks ago, calls the idea ‘linguistic determinism,’ and argues as most do that the strong version is nonsense. A student of Noam Chomsky, he works from Chomsky’s idea of ‘Cartesian linguistics,’ that the brain has a ‘hard-wired’ built-in language acquisition device with an understanding of ‘universal grammar’, and suggests that language acquisition is an instinct. If we accept that language is an instinct, as Pinker and his mentor Unca Noam argue, it seems as if we must reject the proposition that language shapes thought. Some consequences of this :
[…] Once you begin to look at language not as the ineffable essence of human uniqueness but as a biological adaptation to communicate information, it is no longer tempting to see language as an insidious shaper of thought, and, we shall see, it is not.
(Pinker, S (1994). The Language Instinct New York: William Morrow and Company Inc.)
In this, Pinker seems to be arguing not only against the idea that culture shapes language, but also the against idea that language shapes culture (by shaping thought). The use of the pejorative ‘insidious’ is a little unnecessary, but I’m not one who should poke people with sticks for using flowery language.
In his discussion of the idea, Pinker suggests three possibilities for interpretation:
(a) identicality: that language determines thought precisely, word-for-word;
(b) concept determinism: language determines (to an unspecified degree) what we
can think (doubleplus ungood!);
(c) linguistic relativity: that the form of our language (merely) influences what we tend to believe.
In Chapter 12 of The Language Instinct (quoted to me by Kevin), it seems that Pinker does concede the weak form :
Some commentators apparently do not take this as evidence that Pinker is admitting the weak formulation (c, above) of Sapir-Whorf. As I do not have access to a copy of The Language Instinct (no English language libraries and no damn money!), I’ll have to take their word for it.
The amount of time and energy that’s been expended on arguing about how vocabulary effects cognition surprises me, frankly. I think there’s a much more interesting discussion about grammar and deeper structures here that often seems ignored, at least in what reading I’ve managed to do.
The effect of such things on language users seems to me to be more pervasive and more subtle than simple differences in richness or breadth of vocabulary, on which most work and thought has seemed to focus.
One reason I believe this to be so is as a result of some of the fundamental differences in language structure between Korean and English (and to a great extent, the other European languages with which I have some familiarity). Please note that I neither claim to be a expert in Korean language (more of a lazy amateur), nor have I conducted any experiments or formal observations. First, some background. There are three ideas with some circulation about the earliest genetic relationship of Korean with other language families : 1) the traditional view that Korean is an Altaic language, sharing its origins with Manchu, Mongolian, and Turkish, amongst others; 2) the proposition that Korean has its origin in two language families, Altaic and Polynesian; and 3) the view that because of insufficient evidence to support a definitive relationship with other languages, Korean is a language isolate.
Regardless of its origins, Korean does share a number of features common to Altaic languages : words are built by agglutinating affixes, vowels within words follow certain rules of harmony, and articles, relative pronouns, explicit gender markers, and auxiliaries are not found.
Although Korean is not related to Chinese, as a result of history and geography more than 50 percent of the words in the Korean dictionary are of Chinese origin. Most legal, political, scientific, religious and academic vocabularies, as well as Korean surnames, and increasingly at present given names, are based on Chinese borrowings and can be written with Chinese characters, although meanings and pronuciations have often shifted as they have been adopted.
Although some basic words for body parts, clothing and agriculture are shared between Korean and Japanese, and other similarities exist, including grammatical structures similar enough that word-for-word translations between the languages is relatively easy, it is still uncertain whether the similarities are genetic or come as a result of historical borrowing between the two. Many features of Korean separate it from English and other Indo-European languages. Some of the most important of these (for my discussion here, at least) are the use of honorifics, relationship words, and different levels of speech (others include articles, plural markers, pronouns, adjectives, verb forms, demonstratives and so on).
Honorifics are markings for nouns and verbs that express the speaker’s attitude toward the addressee and the person who is being spoken of. Relationship words are blanket nouns denoting relationships between people that are commonly used in informal conversation between people, rather than given names – older brother, younger sister, uncle, auntie, grandmother and so on. (In the slummy, thin-walled building I used to live in in Busan, it was de rigeur on Saturday nights to hear sounds of passion and female cries of ‘Opa! Oh, opa! (older brother)’ from the playboy-next-door’s apartment.) These extend to the common practice of referring to a woman as ‘so-and-so’s mother,’ rather than using her given name.
There are four main levels of speech – polite-formal, polite-informal, plain, and intimate style – from which a speaker chooses, generally unconsciously, in everyday speech. The rules which determine the appropriate choice in conversation derive from the arcane art of knowing the ins and outs of the complex sociocultural fabric of Korean. It is equally inappropriate (in general) to address an older non-relative informally as it is to address a child with the polite-formal style, and mistakes like this may constitute a social breach (although it is generally understood that non-native speakers might make such mistakes). Depending on the relative status of the speaker, the person spoken to, and the person or thing that may be spoken about, the speaker can choose different words and forms to express intended meaning. For many basic verbs like eat, sleep, or give, at least two Korean words are available, each reflecting a different status of the subject or object of the verb. Each verb in Korean is further altered by a choice of grammatical affixes, adding not only grammatical information (such as tense), but carrying different levels of respect, deference, or politeness. Many nouns that refer to kinship or the household alsohave plain and honorific versions, the latter of which are used speak of another’s house or relatives, and the former of one’s own.
How does all of this relate to my earlier discussion of Sapir-Whorf, and considerations of how much and in what manner language may shape thought, and whether culture (loosely) determines language stucture, or vice versa? Don’t worry, I’m getting to that.
Korea is widely acknowledged to be the most Confucian nation in the world technically neo-Confucian, but there’s no need to split that particular hair here). Confucius focused on the need to maintain social order though willing or unwilling submission to the five primary relationships :
1) Ruler and subject
2) Parent and child (teacher and student)
3) Husband and wife
4) Older and younger person
5) Friend and friend
All of these relationships are explicity hierarchical, excepting, significantly perhaps, the last, although friendship of a Confucian bent is a considerably more meaningful proposition, it may be argued, than ‘buddies’ in North America might be.
Appropriate behaviour is expected for participants in each of these relationships, and the language used must be similarly hierarchical :
Although as in many nations, the strength of these traditional beliefs is fading, Confucian tenets still underly a great deal of the conscious and unconscious expectations of social behaviour, and deeply influence the relationships between the sexes and the generations.
The question that interests me, then, is this : do structures and forms like these in the Korea language shape the way in which Koreans think, particularly in terms of their relationships not so much to the world but to the people in it, to such a degree that we can say that language has given them a world-view substantially different than, for example, my own, as an English native speaker? It certainly seems so, to me.
Language is a tool for communication, a social construct, and it seems somewhat pointless to argue about what nouns one uses, and whether the presence or absence of a given bit of vocabulary in one language or another either permits and limits one’s ability to think about it. This may be so, but I don’t think it’s very interesting, except in the abstract.
More interesting to me is the idea that the structures of a language – in this case Korean – may expand or limit the way in which one thinks about something much more important than snow (for example) : how one fits into society, and how one interacts with other humans. That Koreans really do think differently about these things, and that this may spring (entirely, partially, as much or less so?) from their language.
Is this a valid argument for a weak form of lingustic relativism? Is it even something that comes under the Sapir-Whorf rubric? I’m not sure. An opposite, equally important question is this : is it the case that the language has come to have the form it does as result of culture and belief, rather than the opposite? Confucius was Chinese, after all, and from an entirely different language group!
Again, I’m not sure. The correct answer is usually ‘a little from column A, a little from column B’, I know. Like I said, though, I’m an amateur who hasn’t taken a single course in this stuff (yet!). So I’m curious about what you might think, dear reader, whether you’re a full-fledged linguist (like languagehat) or just, like me, an enthusiastic dabbler.
Thank you. I don’t think Korean is alone in having varying usage for different people though. See my blog for more
You’re certainly correct there, Kevin. English does too, even ‘standard’ English. But Korean is an extreme example (in a sense) and is one I’m reasonably familiar with, and one that raises some interesting questions to which I don’t know the answers….
*puff, puff*
Did… did I see the Languagehat beacon? Ah, just in time to save the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis from that gang of villains!
Actually, I agree that the strong version is pretty silly on the face of it. The weak version is both plausible and unproven. Chris, I could swear we had an e-mail exchange in which I described an experiment I tried to do in college that might have provided some actual data if I had had more time, money, and sense, but I’m unable to locate it. If I can’t find it in the next day or so, I guess I’ll try to reconstitute it and post a comment here. God, I hate working.
Gotta go — a prescriptivist is causing trouble in downtown Gotham!
[Note — I tried posting this and it didn’t show up, so I’m going to hit Post again. If it then shows up twice, as it probably will, damn these computers to hell, you can just delete this one, Chris. Aargh.]
Linguistic Relativism and Korean
check out the big brain on Stavros!
Perhaps the most appropriate question is: Where do customs and social mores come from? Do they antedate the language or are they shaped by the common language that binds the community together?
I think the problem is that language is not the only medium of transmission for a given set of traditions/customs. Mimetic (I think that’s the correct word) behaviour, copying the actions of the old, also serves to transmit customs.
In the light of that, maybe the appropriate way of viewing it is that even language is not something rigid, unchanging. The space it provides for discourse is vitally important, of course, and the grammatical and conceptual boundaries created by that language do circumscribe–to a certain extent–what can be discussed. (I’m thinking of how Chinese had to create entirely new words to describe electrical appliances, and also of the number of loan-words I’ve seen in the materials used in my first-year Korean class.) But those boundaries are not fixed, they are fluid because it is possible to alter them by the creation of new words or the borrowing (and transliteration) of words from other languages. Languages, thus, from my point of view, are constantly evolving (we rarely see it happen in a significant way because the process of change probably takes longer than our anticipated lifespan) and adapting to outside stimuli, internal pressures, and just plain linguistic drift.
And that, I guess, is my incoherent addition to this discussion. Any errors of thought should be considered to be the fact that yours truly is just a 1st year uni student.
Very coherent, and sensible besides, lashlar.
Steve, that’d be great, if you could describe the data you gathered…
before you start into Whorf, read
“Writing Systems” by Florian Coulmas.
Stu Savory
As I have explained before, Stu, my access to English language books is limited by a) the complete absence of libraries in Korea which carry such materials and a) the almost complete absence of extra cash to buy lots of delightful books.
Care to explain why the Coulmas book would be essential reading (you know, in 2000 words or less)?
OK, I’ve written a post in which I describe the experiment as best I remember it. Here ’tis.
Don’t neglect to read the appendix of “1984” about Newspeak. I see a straight line from its ideas to Sapir-Whorf.
Consider freedom of expression, and then drop down a couple of levels further. What happens to people when they do not have the linguistic tools to express their needs? What happens to a polity that has neither the channels nor the vocabulary to express its political needs?
That 1984 point (I did make a reference to that in passing above, in talking about Pinker’s arguments) is an interesting one, I think, F Baube.
Weasel-words like ‘collateral damage’ and ‘ethnic cleansing’ and so on, fed to the media by the Pentagon and fed to us by the media, words that have become so much part of the lingua franca that people don’t even think about them anymore – I think they do an effective job of changing how we think about the events they describe, from heaps of bloody corpses to something much less visceral, and contribute a growing disconnect between speech and reality that does nothing but help those who would profit from it.
ole chicken and egg problem mate!!
the only way out is to transcend it……!!!!!!
( it cuts deeper than it seems )
You answered:
Stu, my access to English language books is limited by …the almost complete absence of extra cash to buy lots of delightful books.
So I offer:)
send me your snail mail address and I’ll lend you my copy, subject to the agreement that you snailmail it back after a month.
Relatively speaking
Like Stavros, I’m not "a full-fledged linguist (like languagehat)" but rather "an enthusiastic dabbler." And a linguistic relativist it seems, in the sense that Stavros explains in his essay, Linguistic Relativism and Korean: The S…
Although Korean is not related to Chinese, as a result of history and geography more than 50 percent of the words in the Korean dictionary are of Chinese origin. Most legal, political, scientific, religious and academic vocabularies, as well as Korean surnames, and increasingly at present given names, are based on Chinese borrowings and can be written with Chinese characters, although meanings and pronuciations have often shifted as they have been adopted.
A few imprecisions here.
a. The percentage of Sino-Korean words is closer to 75% — although many words are deprecated or have been replaced by konglish, especially with the young generation.
2. Korean given names (which, as you know, come last, after the family name), are not increasingly […] based on Chinese borrowings. They have always (always being relative, of course, but at least for a millenium) been made of two chinese characters, one of which is supposed to be common to all family members of the same generation (the tollim cha). If there is anything increasing, it’s the modern tendency to give “pure” Korean names (or to change one’s name), like aram, gosuran, and so forth…
Regarding pronounciation of Sino-Korean, the very fact that it was becoming distancing itself from Chinese was one of the triggers that decided the creation of han’gul (at that time Hunmin chong’um). It is interesting to note that people with a good knowledge of Sino-Korean have a much easier time learning Cantonese or Vietnamese than speakers of Mandarin or Japanese, for instance. Sino-Korean has, like Cantonese and Vietnamese, preserved, in a slightly distorted form, more sounds of Middle Chinese than Mandarin.
Thank you for the clarifications, dda.
It seems to me that I’ve been told a few times that it is less fashionable currently than it has been in the recent past to use ‘pure’ Korean names, but it’s possible that I heard that bass-ackwards, as I sometimes do.
The café universe
Stavros’s Linguistic Relativism and Korean essay continues to resonate, giving rise to some
Blogged a rant about THAT hypothesis for you today 🙂
On a side note, the pronounciation of some of the Korean words I’ve encountered resembles, to a certain extent, Hakka (another dialect of Chinese–which my parents speak, so I’m aware of how it sounds) which is also considered to be closer to the pure Chinese of the Middle Kingdom than Mandarin (which if I recall rightly is more of a northern dialect.
Hardcore Linguistics
Hardcore Linguistics I’m too busy to say too much about it, but I was happy to see Tom defend Chomsky….
Sappy Woof!
I am more than a little fuzzy tonight — way too much technology. However, in between tarring, gzipping, ftping, installing, testing, breaking, and re-installing, I’ve had time to keep up with all the linguistics discussions and I have to say how much …
With chest-thumping at its highest (but is there a limit to that..?) you can expect more “pure” Korean names in the coming years, although THAT conflicts with Confucianism and stuff…
As for Hakka, lashlar, you’re right. Although I am not much acquainted with Hakka (not more than being able to regurgiate some of what one of my PhD supervisors wrote in his own PhD), it is similar in its phonological structure to Cantonese (actually purer, I think, but that is just a half-assed opinion, at best). Commonly, southern dialects and languages preserved more tones (yuck!) and more sounds from Middle Chinese than Northern dialects.
Kindling in a Blaze
A couple of friends have prodded me about my absence from the Great Online Sapir-Whorf debate ongoing at Emptybottle and Chez Delacour and IMprOpRieTiEs and birdLand and Caveat and Wealth Bondage and, well, pretty much the whole of this nexus of Blogar…
The Language Thing (Or: Heidegger Made Dense)
I’ve been a bad bad boy. It’s been a busy few weeks and I haven’t kept up with the blogiverse as closely as I’d like. So I’m late in coming to the quite wonderful thread on “language determinism” started by Stavros the Wonder Chicken with a brilliant p…
Language and World Views
Some people are having a discussion about whether and how language shapes how we experience the world. Stavros the Wonder Chicken has a very long post examining different academic models, and using Korean as an example. And David Weinberger has an exce…
Linguistic imperialism?
In 1972, after teaching science in a private high school for a couple of years, I wangled a job as a chemistry teacher in the state technical education system (TAFE), which was a far more congenial environment since the students were older and highly m…
Language Determinism Exampled
Continuing the thread on language determinism, Flemming Funch writes: I’ve noticed how Chinese or Japanese speakers often will make certain consistent mistakes in English. Like mixing up singular and plural. Some people figure it out eventually, but so…
My brain hurts
Anyone who thinks blogging is just about a whole load of people writing up inane boring stuff that’s happened to
Thanks for this STWC, my wife is a linguist and I am an enthusiastic dabbler. We have interesting conversations.
What interests me most about this is whether, in a language as highly structured for social relations as Korean and in one where those structures are much less evident such as English, the ability of a society to adapt to changing circumstances is enhanced or retarded.
I’m not proselytising one way or the other but it seems that a structured social language like Korean might actually offer a much stronger foundation for accepting and absorbing change than English where each relation has to be negotiated individually.
There would naturally be differences again depending on whether the change was generated from within or without, but in a time of ever more radical change, those societies and languages that can evaluate and adapt fastest with the least energy consumption, will almost certainly be the survivors.
Incidentally, what do you think the effect on this process in English has been with the introduction of the honorific Ms?
On a related point, there is now some discussion on various blogs, (too lazy to find the referenmces right now) about the all-or-nothing status of a hyperlink on the web. Some are wanting to be able to say “I think this is important to the discussion but I strongly disagree” for example, and encode that into the hyperlink so that Google will account for the opinion of the linker as well as the density of the links. Maybe we should ask the Koreans to come up with the taxonomy for us.
While linguists pretend this idea is new, of course, media studies folks know that the issue was raised in the turn of the last century by Ong, decided in the 1970s by Harold Innis as used by Mcluhan and, later, pursued by everyone from Postman to Paglia.
To Media Studies, in other words, most of this dialectical verbiage is totally moot. The proof is much simpler and requires no philosophy, either:
1. Language is THE medium, the ubermedium in which the primary media in culture encode themselves.
2. The medium is the message. The medium is the culture. The medium is the mind.
When McLuhan said “The medium is the message” after Harols Innis before him said “the medium is the culture”…and then Henri Bergson said that the medium was the mind…verb sap; ibid.; QED. No more is really needed, nor warranted, than that to make the point that this “big discussion” seems to be wandering around, so why make it such a big deal?
Although I am equally attracted to pat simplifications of this kind, I do tend to be wary of them, boyhowdy. Quoting McLuhan, Bergson and Innis, then proclaiming QED! isn’t much of an argument, to be honest. More like hagiography.
“…whether, in a language as highly structured for social relations as Korean and in one where those structures are much less evident such as English, the ability of a society to adapt to changing circumstances is enhanced or retarded.”
This is a very interesting question, Earl, but I’m not sure one that could be tested experimentally. I’ll think about that one…certainly the incredible, proven ability of Koreans to adapt to changing circumstance (as shown by the changes in the place in the lat few decades (and even the last few years)) comes from somewhere, although I’d opine that it’s more from getting invaded 900 times in the last couple of millenia than anything else :-).
Yes, boyhowdy, “media studies” is so much older and wiser than linguistics and has contributed so much more to the fund of human knowledge, I bow humbly before your ex cathedra pronouncement.
From one enthusiastic dabbler to another
Stavros admits: I’ve been promising for over a year now to write a piece about the Korean language and alphabet, and this may have me riled enough to actually do it. Time to shit or get off the pot, my Canadian friend. I’ve been waiting for over a year…
I suppose different countries or cultures have formed different traditions and conventions for how they encode linguistic politeness into their language. Pragmatics is the discipline to look into for all that stuff. Actually, I think Pragmatics makes the whole Sapir-Whorf debate quite irrelevant and very out-dated. (Sorry.)
Lojban and Sapir-Whorf
A very long but interesting post at EmptyBottle thinking all about languages (esp. Korean) and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Pinker, etc. I actually subscribe to what he calls the “weak formulation”
This sequence was somewhat flattering
This sequence was somewhat flattering to me: My brain hurts Anyone who thinks blogging is just about a whole load of people writing up inane boring stuff that’s happened to them today should follow the conversation going on here, here,…
i love these discussions even
though they never decide anything!
ya’ll might want to look at an
artificial language called “Lojban”
(http://www.lojban.org) which was
explicitly created to test SWH–
it hasn’t decided anything either,
of course, but i did write some
poetry in that “logical” language.
PS i have been posting some
interesting semi-bad translations
from an anthology of Korean poems
in English i picked up–if anyone
wants to comment on the originals
i’d be glad to post their remarks
The Happy Tutor Hypothesis
“H” Repitition of Brand Names and Buzzwords Determines Perception Sapir Whorf ! Please kids.
The Happy Tutor Hypothesis
“H” Repitition of Brand Names and Buzzwords Determines Perception Sapir Whorf ! Please kids.