“language determines cognition”
what they think it means:
- if you don't have a word for green you don't know what colour grass is
what it actually means:
- if your language is SVO you will prefer pictures which place the agent of the action first, the instrument of the action in the middle, and the target of the action at the end
- “first”, “middle”, and “end” are determined by the writing direction of your written language if you have one
- if you don't have a word for green you can just say “the colour of grass”
@Lady the next time I see someone say "the wine-dark sea" means the Greeks couldn't see blue I am going to come through the screen and bite them
🐊
@Lady I read once about a speech community, I believe Australian Aborigines, whose direction words were all related to north or to the ocean which was to the north or something of that nature. They did an exercise where they sat some of them down at a table with like 5 items in a row and then had them turn 180 degrees to another table behind them and line those items up in the same order.
For most people, they would put the leftmost on the first table leftmost on the second table and so on, but people from this community did the opposite. They treated the order of the objects as absolute rather than relative. So the leftmost object on the first table was the rightmost on the second table etc. The theory is that this is related to the absolutist nature of their direction words.
I read this story like 5 years ago so I probably got some of the details wrong but it's in The Language Hoax if you want to try and find it.
@coriander yeah i would just say “ordering information relatively or absolutely is an aesthetic preference” though, with the understanding that:
1. if you asked specifically for a relative or absolute ordering, both communities (English and that studied) could produce both, and
2. aesthetic preferences DO influence information storage and retrieval in the brain (it is easier to remember things we find aesthetically pleasing than things we do not)
this is tied into an underlying belief of mine that aesthetics is actually way more important than most scientists think it is, so when i say language determines aesthetics i’m not at all trying to diminish the power of language
@Lady Oh yeah I feel you. I haven't read the study itself, just the summary of it in that book, so I don't know all the conclusions it came to, but I did think it was an interesting instance of language probably having an actual effect on things.
And yes absolutely any speech group could do either absolute or relative ordering, but it's interesting to see which way different groups Default to.
@coriander you may be interested in this open-access article which prompted these thoughts but is way more well-reasoned about it than my posts on mastodon https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2022.09.015
@Lady I am incredibly too sleepy to read something like this today but I am gonna keep this tab open because I am very interested!
it would be more accurate to say language determines aesthetics