If we don’t speak the same language, will our thinking also be different?

If we don’t speak the same language, will our thinking also be different?

Author: Mao Ning Science Popularization

There are many jokes circulating on the Internet, and the jokes are all about the differences between different ethnic groups. For example, Chinese people are much better at mental arithmetic than Americans. Just try the American multiplication table and you will know that it is too long and difficult to pronounce compared to our one plus one equals one. As soon as the French come out, we lose. It turns out that their weird way of expressing numbers has become their powerful weapon for mental arithmetic. These statements may not be confirmed by experiments, but they are consistent with the experiences of many people. Maybe our language really affects our mental arithmetic ability?

How do we perceive the things around us every day? Soft, wet, big, long... We perceive the world and divide it with various attributes. Left, right, east, south, west, north, we use different directions to indicate the location of things. Today, tomorrow, before, after, location is also reflected in the flow of time. Now the question is: if a language changes the root word according to softness and hardness when describing objects; if a language expresses directions as the sea side and the land side; if a language expresses the order of time from left to right, then do people who speak these languages ​​see the world differently from us?

These questions became important issues at the end of the 19th century. European scholars separated the nations and languages ​​of each continent and began to think seriously about such questions. After examining various languages, the great scholar Wilhelm von Humboldt began to claim that German, English and other Indo-European languages ​​were more perfect. Later, many scholars found that there were too many seemingly irregular things in the indigenous languages ​​compared to their mother tongues when studying indigenous peoples. Some people simply believed that these were all manifestations of the inferiority of indigenous languages. Fortunately, another scholar did not think so. Franz Boas, a German-American anthropologist, pointed out through his study of the Inuit language that those seemingly different pronunciations were not dialects or irregular changes. The perception of these changes by the locals when communicating was different from that of the scholars who went to investigate. Rather than saying that this difference in perception was a difference in phonetics, it was better to say that it was a cultural difference. The meaning of this phonetic feature to the Inuit may be completely different from that to scholars in another culture.

Boas's student Edward Sapir was deeply influenced by his thinking. He was fascinated by the study of Native American languages, and together with his student Benjamin Lee Whorf, they gave a lot of examples to illustrate the theory of linguistic relativity. For example, Whorf believed that Hopi, an Indian language, was different from English and had no ability to express continuous time units, so their perception of time was completely different from that of English speakers. For another example, they pointed out that many experimenters smoked in dangerous environments because they were affected by the language used to describe the environment. The most famous one is probably the assertion about the Inuit language: For the Inuit, there are a lot of words to express "snow". They believe that language determines thinking, and people with different languages ​​have different ways of thinking. And people summarize this view as the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis."

What happened next was somewhat unexpected. Their hypothesis was both mythologized and criticized. Take the myth, for example. The number of words used to describe snow in the Inuit language went from a dozen to dozens, hundreds, and finally a thousand. The differences between languages ​​were also used as evidence that "Germans are rigorous, French are romantic, Chinese are good at math, and Japanese have a strong sense of collectivism," regardless of how many of them were simply conjectures due to language barriers and how many were circular arguments. In short, language differences, ethnic differences, and differences in thinking are entangled for many people, and sometimes even contribute to stereotypes about other cultures. It is ironic that the prejudice that Boas opposed back then has become an intensified version of prejudice.

In contrast to the myth, criticism of Sapir and Whorf's research has become the mainstream in the academic community. Many of the examples they cited about the languages ​​of indigenous peoples are actually untenable after detailed investigation. From Chomsky to the famous neuroscientist Steven Pinker in recent years, they advocate theories such as universal grammar and believe that the rigor of those studies is really worrying. Linguists have also proposed two versions of the hypothesis, strong and weak; the weak version weakens the language determining thinking to language affecting thinking. Even so, many studies have been criticized.

Despite the guidance of "big cows", there are always people in the scientific community who are willing to argue and go against the current to continue exploring. For example, the method used by Lera Boroditsky, a rising academic star in recent years and a psychology professor at Stanford University, is familiar: by studying the cognitive differences between people of different languages ​​and nationalities, she tries to find the influence of language on thinking. For example, she and her colleagues studied the Pormpuraawa people, an aboriginal Australian people. There is no concept of left and right in the language of these people. In any case, they can only deal with spatial position relationships according to the east, south, west and north. You can't say, the person standing on my left, but the person standing on my south. It is really a special training to learn this language since childhood. A local little girl can distinguish the east, south, west and north with her eyes closed. And their perception of time is different from that of people in other places. Take out a set of story photos and ask people to arrange them from front to back. English speakers are used to going from left to right, while Hebrew speakers go from right to left. For the Pormpuraawa, there is trouble - when sitting south facing north or sitting north facing south, they arrange in the opposite way, because they can only rely on absolute direction. Boroditsky inferred that most time adverbials in Chinese are related to up and down, and maybe the most comfortable way for Chinese people is from top to bottom.

We all know that many nations have different ways of dividing colors. Some nations do not distinguish between blue and green, while others divide the spectrum from red to yellow. How does this division affect people's thinking? In Russian, dark blue and light blue are two different words. Boroditsky found that Russian native speakers were significantly faster and more accurate than English native speakers in distinguishing the blue spectrum. Different languages ​​also have different ways of saying active and passive voices. A broken cup is an event. If it is intentional, English speakers and Japanese speakers have the same memory of who broke it, but if it is accidentally broken, Japanese native speakers often cannot remember who broke it. Because for accidental events, Japanese does not need to prompt the agent. In Chinese, words such as eleven, twelve, and thirteen clearly indicate the decimal system, while English words such as eleven and twelve are not clear. As a result, Chinese children will master the decimal system earlier than English native speakers. In short, unlike Sapir's experience and description back then, today's scholars use experimental methods to try to find real evidence that language affects thinking.

If cultural psychology takes the route of cross-cultural research, cognitive linguistics has long begun to react against Chomsky's theory. What they are most concerned about is not the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but the more fundamental issues of language research. Scholars such as George Lakoff responded tit for tat, taking cognition as the key to language research. Regardless of those complex linguistic issues, let's take a look at how Lakoff himself gave advice. This scholar actively participated in public life and wrote works such as "Political Mind" and "Don't Think of the Elephant", bringing his research on cognitive linguistics to the political field. He pointed out that politicians who are good at using language are creating one language framework after another, and these frameworks influence the thinking of the interlocutors.

Remember how Bush described the war against Iraq in his State of the Union address: "Hands raised for approval" through the United Nations? This phrase reminds people of a primary school student reporting to a teacher, which makes the audience disgusted with this behavior. As for the tax cut policy, the words used by his government imply that he is stopping the losses of the wrong policy. For the Democratic Party, once these words are used in the debate, they have actually entered the language framework preset by the other party. Not only are they led by the nose, but they also help emphasize the values ​​of their political opponents to voters. This set of games is very clever, and there is a whole set of values ​​behind it. Lakoff pointed out that the attitudes towards abortion, gun control, foreign policy and tax policies seem to be unrelated, but the left and right factions in the United States can confront each of these issues. This is because there are two sets of values ​​behind these policies, one is strict father-like and the other is nurturing. Strict morality, emphasis on masculine qualities, tyranny and advocacy of self-management are deeply hidden behind the discourse of American conservatives, connecting a series of irrational cognitions of voters, and are also the basis of many speech language frameworks of the Republican right. In view of this kind of value, pleasing it or being rational is often not the best choice. In order to gain recognition, you need to have your own language framework and firm your own values. This is also an aspect of the interaction between language and thinking.

The research of Boroditsky and others continues to be criticized by linguists, who believe that their experimental design is not rigorous enough. As for Lakoff's theory, I wonder what inspiration it can give to American politicians. But one thing is certain - there are many people around us who have different ideas. Before emphasizing that we can't agree, maybe we can first listen to how they perceive the world.

This article is produced by Science Popularization China-Starry Sky Project (Creation and Cultivation). Please indicate the source when reprinting.