The relationship between language and thought is unclear. To be polarising, psychologists believe that language influences thought/culture and linguists believe that thought/culture influences language. There are evidence to support both conclusions, but most of the debate in popular media focuses on examples that are severely misinterpreted. For example, if Language A does not distinguish green and blue, it does not necessarily mean that the speakers of Language A cannot distinguish them, but only that Language A does not distinguish them linguistically. A more concrete example: many languages, such as Chinese, lack linguistic tense (e.g. past, present, future)—using instead aspectual markers (e.g. perfective, imperfective)—, but this does not mean that Chinese speakers cannot understand temporal relations (nor that they could not still express such notions linguistically). Similarly, Russian has separate words for light blue and dark blue, but English speakers can still express these two distinct shades despite not having two separate, distinct words. In short, one has to be extremely cautious about making such broad generalisations without fully understanding the empirical data and, ideally, linguistic theory. See the debate in the Economist between Boroditsky and Liberman for more on this topic: http://www.economist.com/debate/overview/190
Exactly. Just as I used to hear people say "Eskimos" have (some double digit number) of words to describe different "snow". Which makes sense if you realize they live in snow. On the other hand, for many purposes, English, as well as other languages, have ways to describe that snow --they just don't have one word nouns fot that. It's not as though we'd be dumfounded finding a way to describe this snow. Now, since it's not everyday we see snow, yeah, we might not at first glance have it apparent that there is a difference between fresh snow and day-old snow (bit of melting, evaporation) snow drift, snowpack, falling snow, fallen snow, etc.
With regard to grammatical gender, w/re German, I was told that it was futile to try to derive grammatical gender from the attributes of objects --that it was pretty random, for the most part. Mark Twain once remarked "In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has"
The Inuit snow thing is actually a common misconception and like you mention it comes from a difference in our understanding of what a 'word' is. The Inuit language typically uses suffixes to modify nouns. Also, the Inuit language can use one 'word' for what otherwise would be a phrase in English.
Reading Chaucer is a good exercise for looking at how words are used, in "The Canterbury Tales" the word Horse is rarely (if ever, I'm not sure) used, instead very specific words are used to describe the type of horse in question Palfrey, Charger, etc.
In the modern world, we are the same with motorized vehicles, I drive what my wife likes to call a junker, beater, jalopy, hoopty car,
We make the distinctions that are important to us, that doesn't meant that we aren't capable of making finer distinctions if we need to
> To be polarising, psychologists believe that language influences thought/culture and linguists believe that thought/culture influences language. There are evidence to support both conclusions(...)
I sometimes get the feeling that people in such debates don't understand the concept of feedback loops. It is entirely all right for language to influence culture and to be influenced by it at the same time. And it's not even that mind-blowing or difficult to reason about, one just needs to step one level higher on the ladder of abstraction.
I completely agree. For the most part, people do accept the bilateral influence between culture and language. However, the debate generally focuses on the relationship between language and thought/cognition/mind (with culture mistakenly lumped in there) where bilateral influence doesn't make as much sense, at least intuitively. Consequently, the language-culture and language-thought relationships should be analysed separately, although not in isolation of course.
If you casually asked a native Chinese speaker "are leaves and the sky the same color?" would they answer differently than if you asked a native English speaker? If so (i.e. if Chinese speakers tend to say Yes while English speakers tend to say No), then I would argue that there's something more going on than simple hue labels, since the labels themselves aren't being asked for or provided.
Chinese don't use 青qing(blue/green) in daily speech, only 蓝lan(blue) and 绿lu(green). The crossover where blue becomes green is different with Chinese than English-speakers, though.
If I see a Chinese wearing what I call "aqua-green" clothing, I often ask them "What color sweater are you wearing, blue or green?" They always answer "blue".
Even if a Chinese speaker casually considers the leaves and the sky to be the same colour, it does not meant that s/he could not make the distinction if prompted. It would be similar to asking an English speaker to distinguish different shades of the same colour. For example, historically, English lacked a word for "orange" (which was borrowed from French) such that "red" and "yellow" covered greater spectrums respectively. Clearly, it wasn't that English speakers couldn't distinguish red, yellow, and orange because modern-day English speakers can do so perfectly.
The problem with that test is that the notion of "same" is too fuzzy. If you asked me "are leaves and traffic lights the same color?", I might answer yes. After all, they're both green. On the other hand, I might say no, since one is dark green and the other is bright green. To test if something is going on mentally, it'd be better to take my personal opinions out of the equation. For instance, show a traffic light colored square on a leaf colored background, followed by a sky colored circle on a leaf colored background.
Absolutely. That's why I mentioned that it was a casual question. Since everyone presumably has similar hue thresholds regardless of language, I was wondering if language would effect their answer, according to whatever definitions of "color" and "sameness" they themselves use.
In English, if you casually ask the color of the sky or the color you would use for water on a map, most people will simply say "blue" even though they could probably detect hue difference if presented printed samples of the two. Accordingly, I think most English speakers would say Yes if casually asked whether the sky is the same color as water on a map. But is that the same response and reasoning you would get if you asked a speaker of a language that doesn't distinguish between blue and green whether the sky and leaves are the same color?
I don't think so. I think it would be similar to asking someone if the sky was the same color as the blue angel planes flying around the same sky (on a regularly blue-skies day).
> if Language A does not distinguish green and blue, it does not necessarily mean that the speakers of Language A cannot distinguish them, but only that Language A does not distinguish them linguistically.
True, but just to be clear: In the first link in the article it's shown how people speaking languages with no blue/green distinction are significantly slower at selecting the 'odd one out' when given a set of blue shapes and one green shape. Furthermore, this effect is only significant in their right visual field, whose images are processed by the left (more language adept) part of the brain.
Yes, but this evidence does not necessarily say very much about language and the relationship between language and thought. For example, if a culture does not teach their children to swim and therefore the culture at large does not know how to swim, those people could still swim, albeit slowly. Does this say anything about their bodies? No. If some sort of conditioning by one's culture is required to distinguish colours (which seems to be the case), this is very interesting, but it says very little about language.
