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Comment by jgg | Hacker News Reader

What? What about the studies that show that reading Arabic literally uses different parts of your brain than when reading other languages, or even the evidence presented in the article?

Even intuitively, it would make sense that different languages/cultures might distinguish or understand different concepts differently...since this is HN, imagine asking a trial of 100 people who have programmed in nothing but COBOL their whole life to explain monads or continuations intuitively, and how they'd use them in practice, compared to a trial of 100 who understood Scheme and Haskell. I think the results would be pretty obvious. Why would structures and concepts in human language be any different?

I really don't understand the political posturing behind denying linguistic relativism (not that you're necessarily doing that, of course).

src: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-11181457

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Reading and language are not the same thing, e.g. you can speak a language without being literate. You might therefore expect different writing systems to use different capabilities. Of course, "different parts of your brain" does not mean different capabilities. They could be the same capabilities instantiated differently in the brain.

It may very well be that speakers of a language with feature A can perform some task better than speakers of a language without feature A. However, it does not meant that the speakers have different cognitive capabilities (e.g. you can provide sufficient task training), which is the ultimate argument of people supporting linguistic relativity.

I cannot comment on the political motivations to deny linguistic relativism. I am just a linguist.

If a writing system doesn't count (it's a fair point, and I understand what you're saying), then how does one counter the evidence in the article that one speaker of one language does a task better than speakers of a different language?

If my language is, for example, French or (older) Welsh, and my counting system is vigesimal (base 20), why is it wrong to claim that a person who speaks French would have an easier time with the basic idea of base 20 math, or just counting in terms of 20's, than a native English speaker, assuming no extra training on the part of either? Why is it wrong to assume that a language with a case system would yield native speakers who were better at explicitly identifying the subject and object of a sentence than speakers of languages that don't have a case system?

I just have a hard time grasping how people conditioned to think a certain way via their (or, a) language couldn't have a better understanding of some concepts than others.

>I cannot comment on the political motivations to deny linguistic relativism. I am just a linguist.

Sorry if you felt that I was pigeonholing you, thanks for your input.

How does French qualify as using a base-20 counting system? Intuitively, I'd expect that to mean

- special words for the numbers 1-19

- special words for 20, 40, 60, 80, 100, 120, ..., 380

- special words for 400, 8000, 160,000, etc.

Instead, what we actually see in French is

- special words for the numbers 1-16

- special words for 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, and 80

- special words for 100, 1000, 1,000,000, etc.

This is a base-10 system (with the odd quirk), as far as I can see.

It is actually referred to as a "base 20" counting system, although I agree that it isn't a very good one. It's definitely not a "pure" base-20 system, but many numbers are expressed of a multiple of twenty + remainder.

Perhaps a better example of a feature in a language that would provide more prominent cognitive differences would be one of the languages that requires users to mark a statement based on how they know the fact (witness, second-hand account, etc.), whose names escape me. Ah well.

> Even intuitively, it would make sense that different languages/cultures might distinguish or understand different concepts differently...since this is HN, imagine asking a trial of 100 people who have programmed in nothing but COBOL their whole life to explain monads or continuations intuitively, and how they'd use them in practice, compared to a trial of 100 who understood Scheme and Haskell. I think the results would be pretty obvious. Why would structures and concepts in human language be any different?

I'm not a linguist, but have recently started to become familiar with parts of it. I don't think you can reasonably make the comparison between engineered computer languages and our innate language abilities. There's ample evidence for a universal grammar, and that languages are not engineered so much as match patterns we're wired to recognize and be able to manipulate. I can stretch your analogy only as far as recognizing the different grammatical constructs that different languages employ (eg English is subject-verb-object and native English speakers first have trouble understanding and reproducing object-subject-verb constructions but eventually get it).

Human languages have nothing truly comparable to the situation you describe. Just because computer languages are called "languages" doesn't mean that it can actually map to a human language.

I was using the computer languages as a facetious example to illustrate a point, the idea being that a context one is immersed in colors perceptions, and I was simply stating that applied to a human language, I don't see why that wouldn't be the case.

There is actually quite a lot of evidence against a universal grammar (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar#Criticisms), and I don't understand how one could even begin to say that everyone necessarily develops the same grammatical concepts at any useful degree of practicality. The idea of a subjunctive tense only exists implicitly in English, yet is prevalent in many Romance languages (and others). In Ancient Greek, the concept of singular and plural were joined distinctly by the concept of pair, which exists currently in no language that I can think of (and certainly isn't popular if it exists). In English, nouns are not explicitly marked to indicate role in the sentence (left up to ordering and ultimately subjective, implicit interpretation), which is easily taken care of in other languages like German, Russian and Hungarian with a case system. Hell, English doesn't even have a stand-alone future tense (i.e., a verb conjugation) ...how exactly can we make any argument for a universal grammar, when there exists so many grammatical concepts in other languages that aren't actually possible in any explicit sense even in English? If I've misunderstood your usage of the phrase "Universal Grammar", I apologize for my ignorance.

A common paradigm in the 1990s version of universal grammar (I have not kept up) is the principles and parameters framework. In this framework, the universal grammar consists of a collection of principles (such as "syntactic movement is always sensitive to hierarchical structure") that can be configured via a collection of parameters (traditionally, these were thought of as binary or ternary switches). A summary of this framework is available at http://web.uconn.edu/snyder/papers/CELS.pdf .

The theory is that the principles of universal grammar arise directly from the structure of the brain, while the parameters are set during language acquisition.

From the perspective of an adherent of the principles and parameters variety of universal grammar, the examples of cross-linguistic variation you mention are not all that radical. A much stronger challenge to universal grammar is the existence of the Pirahã language, which (it has been argued) cannot express recursion, which would otherwise be a linguistic universal.

I'm a guy who likes abstract stuff, and that definition seems extraordinarily abstract to me, to the point of obfuscating the actual meaning of what we're talking about. Am I right that seems that the definition of grammar there is an almost-meta abstraction of structure?

I still can't help but believe that, in practice the 'less radical' points I mentioned, like tense, mood and case (which I think would be switches, right?) arise differently in different contexts, if at all, owing to differences in cognition in various groups, and thus reinforces that mode of cognition in someone who learns the language.

The difference in morphology between, say, Ancient Greek and Modern English is pretty drastic, so what gives? In fact, I don't think English has ever been as morphologically-complex as Ancient Greek, and yet some hypothesize that they even descended from the same Indo-European language...if both languages start out from the same point, but evolve with a completely-different grammatical structure that makes different concepts explicit or notable, why would that happen in light of a true universal grammar that is inherent to everyone?

It's one thing to say that everyone at a certain intellectual level have a capacity to understand and use certain grammatical constructs, but to claim them as inherent to all people seems sketchy...

>The theory is that the principles of universal grammar arise directly from the structure of the brain, while the parameters are set during language acquisition.

Wouldn't that prove that language inherently affects cognition, and thus proves linguistic relativism? I don't think you actually made a point in favor of linguistic relativism, but that was the theme of this whole discussion thread.

English and the protolanguages preceding it certainly were morphologically complex. English, though, has gone through a couple-three near-pidginizing events along the way that have made it a much simpler, more telegraphic language than it, in most ways, should be. Some aspects of the Celtic languages that were on the ground before English hit Great Britain have worked their way into the grammar (present progressive and do-support). The evidence seems to show that much of the inflective complexity was on its way out after the Vikings made the scene (the languages, Old Norse and Old English, were close enough to allow a degree of mutual comprehension, but differences in case markings, verb endings and the always-arbitrary grammatical gender made a hard-enough task more difficult than it needed to be). And one can hardly say that the influence of Norman French on the language was slight. Remember that the purpose of language is to communicate, so the long-term linguistic homogeneity of the group largely controls how complex the language can become. "City" languages tend to be much simpler (on average) than "forest" languages because outsiders rarely have to learn that 700-speaker language.

The surface grammar — what actually comes out of the speaker's mouth — doesn't directly reflect the underlying grammar/syntax, though. The 25-syllable Cree word will tree in pretty much the same way as the 18-word English sentence it replaces. The tonal variations a native English speaker uses convey the same information as the pragmatic particles a Mandarin speaker has to include at the end of every utterance. (We literates are often prone to forgetting that these squiggly marks are to language what choreographic notation is to dance or staff notation is to music.) We might not always be aware of the mechanics of including things like evidential marking, ergativity or pragmatics, but we do it nonetheless. And we've replaced (for the moment, at least) most of our tense and case markings with entire words. The syntax is structurally the same, we just add the word "from" instead of adding the ablative case ending. And really, does anybody actually need grammatical gender? (See Twain's The Awful German language for a reductio ad absurdum.)

Well, I was making the point that, at some point, Ancient Greek was more morphologically complex than any variation of English (which is true to my knowledge).

I agree that we can accomplish specific meanings without explicit grammatical structure, but the rabbit hole we were tumbling down was the simple idea that the prominence of a grammatical construct might facilitate a different kind of thinking than in a language that doesn't contain said construct.

Grammatical gender is a rarely-useful concept, I agree.

> Wouldn't that prove that language inherently affects cognition, and thus proves linguistic relativism?

No, it wouldn't. It's not the language that is affecting how the brain works here; it's the other way around. The theory of universal grammar can be viewed in part as an explicit rejection of linguistic relativity.

> I don't think you actually made a point in favor of linguistic relativism, but that was the theme of this whole discussion thread.

I was responding to your comment:

> If I've misunderstood your usage of the phrase "Universal Grammar", I apologize for my ignorance.

I had thought you might be interested in more information on what "universal grammar" is supposed to mean. I was not attempting to take a position on linguistic relativism.

> No, it wouldn't. It's not the language that is affecting how the brain works here; it's the other way around. The theory of universal grammar can be viewed in part as an explicit rejection of linguistic relativity.

I thought you said certain parameters were set during language acquisition, which would mean that the language inherently modifies how you think.

> I had thought you might be interested in more information on what "universal grammar" is supposed to mean. I was not attempting to take a position on linguistic relativism.

I understand, thank you.

> The idea of a subjunctive tense only exists implicitly in English

I can't say I understand what you mean by implicit, but this is a very strange thing to say. The following sentences use a subjunctive verb:

1. I demand that you return my saw.

2. I will ask that he not show overt disrespect in my class.

As you can see, the english subjunctive form (subjunctive is not a tense; it is a mood) is productive and applies to any verb in the language (and is different from the present tense for every verb in the language), which places it on roughly the same level of existence as, say, the past tense.

English has a subjunctive, but it's only ever visible in the 3rd person singular.

While English may not have a dual number, a case system (anymore, though it's still seen vestigially in the pronouns), or a verb conjugation expressing the future tense, the point is that English speakers are not constrained in what they are capable of expressing.

For the dual number, we simply say "two cows" or "both cows". To express the future, we have "will", "be going to", or a present (progressive) future construction like:

"We play tennis on Saturday" / "We are playing tennis on Saturday"

Whereas other languages use case to express certain semantic/grammatical relationships, English fills this void with word order and a slew of prepositions.

So at worst English speakers expend a few extra syllables on certain ideas. But there is no limitation on expression or cognition, which is the claim made by a strong version Sapir-Whorf.

I definitely do not buy the strong Sapir-Whorf at all.

I do not believe someone is explicitly constrained by the language, but I do believe that the explicit existence of certain concepts can facilitate a different kind of thinking more naturally than in other languages, which is the only real point I'm trying to back up.

There are vestiges of dual case in many Slavic languages, and it's alive and well in Slovenian.

I had no idea it was actively used in Slovenian...I think even Modern Greek has "vestiges" of the dual, though.

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