102: The science and fiction of Sapir-Whorf

[Music] Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics. I'm Gretchen McCulloch. And I'm Lauren Gorn, and today we're getting enthusiastic about the complexity of the relationship between the language you speak and the way that you perceive reality. But first, our most recent bonus episode was the results of our 2024 listener survey. We learned which one of us was more kiki and which one of us was more boopa. And we discussed the highly competitive hand gesture game of Paper Scissors Rock. You mean rock, paper, scissors? And more things that people call it cross-linguistically. Go to patreon.com/lingthusiasm for this and almost 100 other bonus episodes. Ooh, 97. We're almost at 100. Should we do something special for our 100s? Stay tuned to see if we do. Mmm. [Music] So I recently read the classic science fiction book, "Babel 17," by Samuel R. Delaney. Ooh. Which people have been asking me to read for a long time. It's from, like, the mid-60s. So for basically much longer than you've been a linguist or alive, it's been a staple of linguistic sci-fi reading. Yes, this book is older than I am. You know, you have to come to classics when you come to them and there is no wrong time to do something like that. And it sure does have a lot of linguistic elements. Mm-hmm. There's this very cute bit where – so the characters have a lot of these interesting sort of body modifications and this character has fangs and so can't make a "P" sound. Oh yeah, because I guess if you have teeth sticking out over your lips, you can't close your lips to make a "P." But the thing that gets me is it is explicitly said that he can't make the "P" but he can make a "B" and, like, those are – those are done with the same movement of the lips. It's just the vocal cords that are different, which has nothing to do with where your fangs are. Hmm. I absolutely love the linguist brain with which you write these books. Well, and so this was my experience of reading. A lot of "Babel 17" is that there's a lot of linguistic elements that are almost doing it for me. Right. And the biggest of those is "Babel 17" itself, which in the book refers to this mysterious alien language that our sort of poet-linguist character – like, more poet-linguist, that's great – is assigned to interpret, decipher, translate, figure out from recording. So classic linguist sci-fi storyline, but Samuel Delaney is one of the first people doing it. I was very invested in this character when I read this book ages ago. And the basic summary of what happens with "Babel 17" – the language – is that it's one of these languages that has this very dense relationship of form to meaning. So the word for great circle, which is spelled capital O, capital X – I don't know if it's intended to be pronounced "oaks" – contains in its parts the specific meanings being assigned. I think possibly in this case because the word is composed of like a circle and an X, and maybe that sort of refers to it, but the implication is that other types of words also do this. And the analogy given is that bus stop is more transparent in terms of its meanings, because it's composed of bus plus stop, than the French word ga, which also means bus stop or train station, but isn't like clearly composed of things that mean bus and things that mean stop. "Babel 17" does this to an extreme extent beyond what any human language does. Yeah, exactly. "Babel 17" is turtles all the way down, so not just bus plus stop, but also the part that means bus contains all of these different parts about what a bus is, and the part that means stop contains all these parts about, I guess, what stopping – kind it is. And as a result – and here I quote – "Babel 17" is such an exact analytical language, it almost assures you technical mastery of any situation you look at. This reminds me a little bit of those constructed languages like Lodgeban, which are framed as being exceedingly logical. And again, it's kind of outside the joy of human language is that messiness and that slippage that allows them to function the way they do. But certainly it's a fun intellectual exercise to come up with a language where you have, say, this little bit refers to how many people are involved, instead of just having singular and plural. You can have one, two, three, four, five minutes all the way up to the numbers. This little bit refers to the exact time that it's happening in, so not just past and present, but a very precise notion of time, et cetera, et cetera, so you can have all of these different meanings stacked together in a single word. This is still – you know, human languages do have ambiguity, but you can make up conlangs that have this level of technical precision, even if they're a bit hard to speak actually at speed because of how human memory works. It's certainly within the realm of possibility. But then you get to the bit where, and here I quote, "Babble 17 is such an exact analytical language. It almost assures you technical mastery of any situation you look at." Cool. So in practice, what this means is like, oh, there's these spaceships in a space battle with each other. And if you think about the space battle, our linguist character, she thinks about the space battle in "Babble 17," and suddenly she knows exactly what her side of the spaceships have to do to win. So learning the language basically unlocks galaxy brain superpowers. Right. Like, it unlocks knowledge of how to do space battles, among other things. Cool. Which is – yeah, cool if it works. This is why it's science fiction and not science fact. But very much not how we know any – yeah, human language works. Exactly. This is science fiction. It's not science fact. And, you know, there's this character who doesn't know the word for "I" or "me" or "my" because these don't exist in "Babble 17" because they're not precise enough. I'm not quite sure why this super logical language doesn't have this because it seems like it'd be handy. But instead, he banks his fish on his chest to convey that meaning. Look, I'm going to be the gesture studies soils for it here and say that that is the person's word for "I" as with many other nonverbal languages. Right. Right. And sure enough that he does pick up the word for "I" quite quickly once it's explained to him, which is perhaps because he literally has a gesture for this exact same concept. So, maybe he does already know it, but he doesn't know it. This unpacking of language and acquiring all this extra knowledge by acquiring words is a really great sci-fi trope play on that classic linguistic thought experiment that the language you speak affects your worldview. Right. And in this case, it's very much got that stronger form of the language you speak shapes your reality. It reminds me a lot of Arrival and Embassy Town as a trope where the language you speak lets you see truth or reality in a different way and learning a new language unlocks some new truth or new way of seeing reality. Right. Exactly. It's one of the ways that fiction can use sort of scienciness to give someone powers. You know, it's like learn a new language and you get these following powers. It's like being bitten by a radioactive spider gives you the following powers or somehow quantum entanglement gives you the following powers. And much like being able to leap tall buildings in a single bound or telepathy or invisibility or faster than light travel, this is a really fun thing to experiment with in fiction. But it's also been a real topic of philosophical conversation, especially across the 20th century. And it's not surprising given it's at this really interesting nexus of language and culture and philosophy and hard science. And there's lots of different angles you can come at this with. Right. And there's a few different angles on it. There's the strong version of language makes you perceive reality differently. And so if you somehow know all these words about spaceships, it automatically entails that you also know how the spaceships themselves work. Which like, you know, as someone who's sometimes acquired new skills, like just because I learned a bunch of words associated with rock climbing does not actually make me a better rock climber, you know? Alas, wouldn't it be great if we had Babel 17 style unlock achievement? Right. Exactly. But certainly if I do decide to learn how to do rock climbing, I will end up learning some words along the way because any sort of technical skill or hobby or job or activity ends up involving some of its own vocabulary to talk about the things that are relevant for that particular thing. And that gets us to something closer to the weak version, which is something more like language is one of many factors that can nudge you into the habit of thinking a particular way. And it's worth pointing out that the relationship between language and thought, even if you get outside of these debates about reality perception, is still something people grow back and forth on in pinning down. And this is getting beyond things like things that don't have to do with our language system, like beliefs and outlook. So we've definitely talked before about how even if you speak exactly the same language as someone, you may have very different takes on reality, even within that same language. There are certainly many English speakers that I have disagreements with, in fact, yes. And different brains can allow you to perceive reality, including linguistic reality differently. So we've talked on the show about how you might perceive sounds as colors or time as a physical structure. And that kind of synesthesia is a way of different brains perceiving reality differently, regardless of the fact two people might speak exactly the same language. We've also talked about ways that the inner experience is subjectively different, like whether or not you have literal mental pictures, or whether you think of visualizing something as a purely metaphorical process or somewhere in between, the same thing for whether you think of a mental voice or an inner voice as a literal voice that you're hearing in your head, often sounding sort of like your own voice, maybe muttering a bit, or whether you're sort of just imagining that a voice could be happening and treating this much more metaphorically. And a lot of people find out, oh, wait, other people are actually visualizing or editorializing in a really different way than I am. The insides of other people's heads are really different. Again, even though we're speaking the same language, we can be having different subjective internal experiences that are really fun to try to pin down once we surface them to the level of consciousness and realize other people actually are different in these ways we take for granted. And of course, there are other non-linguistic ways of expressing yourself and your reality, whether that's through visual media like art or sonic media like music, lots of things that aren't language and their relationship to language and cognition and worldview and reality intersect in different ways too. And so when people talk about, okay, does the language have any relationship to how we think, there's a number of different levels that this question could be operating on. And perhaps the simplest one is whether you have a word for it. And like, there are new words all the time. We somehow understand new words all the time. It's not like no one ever took a photo of themselves before the word "selfie" came into existence. But a word like "selfie" does give us sort of a convenient handle with which to talk about a new-ish phenomenon. In that, it used to be much harder to take a photo of yourself because front-facing cameras where you could see the screen at the same time as you're able to press the button weren't as popular. You had to sort of turn the camera around and hope that you got the angle right or use a mirror or something like this. So there were like advances in the shape of the world that preceded the development of a name for doing the activity. We did a whole episode on color words and how they're different across languages. And I still occasionally look at two different shades of blue and I totally get what Russian speakers are all about with having two completely different words for light blue and dark blue. One of my friends is an English speaker and her favorite color is blue but only the blue that the Russians think of as dark blue. She doesn't like the lighter sort of aqua blue at all. And so she can have this sort of color preference even though saying my favorite color is blue is a lossy way of encoding that. And it's fun to notice these lexical differences and they're often relatively easy to explain. It's not impossible for me to convey to you that some languages have green and blue as the same word. There's a difference though in whether it's your habit to think of them as being part of the same semantic area or not. And I find it really neat how different languages divide up certain types of meaning spaces in different ways. So a word I think about a lot is the French word do or deuce which is variable depending on whether it's describing an object that's masculine or feminine. But it has this sort of unified concept of sweet or fresh or mild or soft. So like they are four very different adjectives to me. Yeah. Fresh water is do compared to like salt water. But so is like a shirt could be soft which is still do or like if you're buying salsa you can get the do kind or you can get the spicy kind. But it has this sort of do is generally a fairly positive adjective. You know it's like the thing that's not in the extremes. It's the thing that's not as I don't know like something that's spicy or salty or something has like an extremeness of flavor. So something that's do is a more mild flavor. And if you want to say something is really sweet as in sugary sweet you don't use do you would say sucre like actually sugary sugared. Yeah. So do has this sort of unifying property of mildness that I now think of as being all variations on a theme because I've encountered it in these different types of contexts whereas in English we're using different types of words like sweet water is not the same thing as fresh water or something like that. I would absolutely be alarmed to buy a bottle of mild water. I mean I know some kids who refer to like bubbly water as spicy water so I don't know. Okay. Yeah. I can see maybe we can work on moving towards a French lexical space here but moving beyond individual words or sets of words there's also been a lot of discussion about this hypothesis of how your language shapes your reality through more grammatical features and unlike words which we're acquiring all the time languages don't like to change grammatical paradigms up that much they're much more fixed they're much more a small set of contrasts against each other and because you learn them and because you use them all the time they're seen as a way of habituating you to a particular worldview and I come across this a lot while reading in the literature on evidentiality and the way that you can have a grammatical form that shows the source of evidence for a claim. So this is the difference between something like it's raining which I know because I've experienced the rain directly on me or I've seen the rain or it must be raining because someone's come in and they have an umbrella and they're covered in water and it should be raining because the weather forecast has told me that it might be or because someone else said that it was. And you've done a really great job of showing English speakers can convey that kind of evidence information we're just not doing it with a little paradigm on the verb in the way that a lot of languages with evidentials do. And so we don't have something that obligatorily makes us specify this or that does it with sort of a single tiny word or tiny athics we have to do it with like an adding an extra phrase like I hear that or they say that or someone told me that or I guess that it must be raining. Yeah. And there's certainly an extent to which it makes you more habitually aware like I don't know if this is just because I've been working with them thinking about evidentiality for so long but I often am like much more aware of like saying something and I'm like because I heard about it. I don't know for certain I just have to very clearly let you know but that's very different to an extreme interpretation of this theory that would say that you have to declare your source of information for everything and you can't lie. I promise you people lie and choose the source of evidence that suits the claim that they're making regardless of whether it's true or not all the time. So like just because you have have evidentials does not mean you can't lie using evidentials. Absolutely. And this gets to the interesting sort of sticky points about this because you're not the first linguist who I've heard say oh well as soon as I learned about evidentials that I started using all these evidence phrases in English a lot more which sort of counteracts the idea that it's the structure of the language that's like forcing you to do this because they're optional English and it's like once I start paying attention to this thing now I'm excited and interested and sort of driven to use it more even though the language didn't require it. So like is it the language itself that's saying oh you must do this or is it oh if I think about sources of evidence for a while then I'm interested in doing this I invested in doing this. Indeed. This gives us to this other feature of language that people often discuss as an element of language and reality which is that people it's always framed in the hypothesis as like the language you speak as though speaking one language has been normal throughout human history or even at this point in time but which it really is not yes there's this kind of intersecting thing that people often discuss which is how they feel like they're different people when they're speaking different languages as though this is a supportive form of evidence for this hypothesis about the relativity of your experience. I believe that people genuinely feel like a different person speaking different languages. I notice that like I'm less verbally funny when I speak French which I think is also because my French is not as fluent as my English which is definitely one reason why you could feel like you're a different person because of a fluency thing. But also because of the context in which you've learned a particular language or you've mostly used a particular language like if I feel like a different person with my family compared to when I'm doing work and I do both of those things in English but I do them in a very different social context. So if you have a language to map on to both of those things it's like yeah I feel like a different person in the work language in the family language because I feel like a different person within my work life versus in my family life. It's a bit like childhood nostalgia for particular foods where it's just like this feels like a different authentic version of me. Right. Like it takes me back to the moment when I used to eat cherries as a child and I haven't had a cherry in so long but it's not an intrinsic feature to cherries so much as it is a feature of my experience with cherries where this makes me think about the previous times that I've experienced this particular food. So yeah lexical grammatical and social are kind of the elements that people draw on while discussing this theory. You know the thing that drives me wild about this idea of like oh the language shapes your perception of reality is that it always misses to me the most clear cut example of your language actually influencing your perception which is sounds. Oh. You make a good point I've not heard anyone make before. So when you're a baby if you have typical hearing you can perceive the difference between any pairs of sounds that are relevant for any human language which is why you know if you're wherever you grow up you will learn that language you're not sort of genetically destined to learn English or something like this. But as you grow up you lose the ability to distinguish between sounds that aren't relevant for the languages that you're exposed to. So an English speaking kid retains the ability to distinguish between T and D but loses the ability to distinguish between the two extra sounds that are sort of like that that are in Hindi for example. Totally. And I don't not good at producing them I'm not good at hearing them because I didn't grow up I was exposed to Hindi and like this is just a very straightforward and uncontroversial example. To the point where we can see it in people's brains like when they do neuro imaging they can see in people's brains what gets activated and if you've grown up without these particular contrasts in your language it won't light up in the same way. Right you can do it in like children's studies you can see like what age infants stop paying attention to two different sounds like if you're playing them ba ba ba ba and then you switch to pa pa pa and they sort of notice that there's something different and then they stop noticing that there's something different if their language isn't distinguishing between these two sounds like it's very clear cut in a scientific experiment side but also it's very boring to put on a list of you know here are some examples of the language shaping your reality because it's hard to explain and articulate if you don't have this distinction what it could be like to perceive them differently or if you do have this distinction what it could be like to perceive them as the same. And it's worth pointing out it's not impossible right. Oh yeah. Like I know Mandarin speakers who have learnt to map themselves onto beautiful American English vowels and I know English speakers who can perceive Mandarin tones in the kind of wide variety of contexts where I can hear them in isolation and citation but I can't in conversation. And it is possible that the amount of work that takes compared to you can say to someone Russian has two different words for blue you don't even need to tell them what those two words are and someone can go oh yeah I can kind of say that right or like light blue and dark blue and you can go like oh yeah well I do make a distinction between red and pink so I guess if I did that in the blue spectrum it would be possible as well like the blue thing is so satisfying in some ways because it's so easy to actually communicate about it. Mmm. Ironic. Yeah. We'll get back to that. And so this whole theory whether you think about the strong version or the weak version depending on what part of language you're focusing on is known as linguistic relativity. But I feel like it's more commonly talked about in popular culture as the Sapier-Wolf hypothesis or sometimes just Sapier-Wolf. Yeah. They are definitely treated as interchangeable that's true. And Sapier-Wolf were people they were historical linguists. They were linguists they didn't do historical linguistics it's always worth pointing out. Oh yes. Right. They were linguists who existed in history. They were and I absolutely went through a big linguistic relativity phase in undergrad. Oh that's interesting I don't think my undergrad in linguistics ever really talked about Sapier-Wolf. I always did a bit but then I just got really into it and I read like the whole Benjamin Lee-Wolf book which is kind of treated as the go-to reference on this. So Wolf was a linguist working in America in the 1930s and Sapier was his supervisor, senior colleague. I always used to think of them as like massively different in age but there's only like a 10 to 15 year age gap. Oh okay. So Wolf came to grad school because he was interested in the relationship between language and culture and what I found really fascinating about him, I mean I found many things fascinating about him. One is that he died quite young he was only in his 40s and he never had an academic position which when I was reading his stuff as an undergrad struck me as a bit unusual. James McElvenny has this great episode of the history and philosophy of the language sciences podcast where he says it turns out, "Wolf didn't want an academic job because it didn't pay well enough for his lifestyle." Wow. So what was his lifestyle, what did he do instead? I don't know what his lifestyle was like but he looks very dapper in the one public photo of him that goes around, he has a very nice suit on and he was like a fire marshal or a fire investigator, he goes to investigating workplaces for like fire insurance. So which paid surprisingly well compared to being a professor. Yeah, paid really well and he would do lectures on the side and a lot of his writing was in like popular magazines like a couple of his most canonical articles are in an MIT alumni mag. Oh my god, he was like a link homer like before we had link homers he was writing for the general public. Suddenly I like this guy now. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He was super interested in writing for the public and it like sometimes gives me a bit of a conundrum because I'm just like is the reason that this theory is so amped up and so popular is that he was in like popularizing mode rather than rigorous scientist mode. But the fact that he chose not to be in academia means that like good for him, I wouldn't judge you Gretchen. I don't begrudge anyone not having an academic job Gretchen. Look I'm very happy to not have an academic job I have to say. I don't want to say that having an academic job makes you like more rigorous and authentic but also then like he died young so like if he had been around long enough for his ideas to be picked up like what would the debate have been like then there's just like a lot going on. So he called it linguistic relativity. He called it linguistic relativity in his writings. His writings were influenced by Sapir and he talks about Sapir a lot in his work and there's definitely quotes from Sapir as well that fit this linguistic relativity idea. But it's also worth pointing out that like it's an idea that they both rolled with and talked about sometimes in like actually contradictory or completely different ways or like strong view, weak view but like they were both influenced by ideas that were already being discussed in American linguistics and in German philology going back before that and a whole bunch of other kind of European and American philosophy and linguistics and philology like they didn't just come up with this out of nowhere. They're actually part of a very clear philosophical tradition. And they never named it after themselves like they didn't call it the Sapir-Wolf Hypothesis. No, they weren't absolute egotistical maniacs like that. It came from so Wolf passed away in 1941 and then in 1954 a student I think of Wolf's had a conference proceedings chapter called the Sapir-Wolf Hypothesis in which he lays it out drawing on their work. And then a few years after that in the mid-1950s, there is a book called Language Thought and Reality which pulls together Wolf's public writings and some of his unpublished writings. Again, most of it coming from magazines and public writing rather than academic articles. This is fascinating and also terrifying, you know. But it explains why I've heard so many different versions of what the Sapir-Wolf Hypothesis or linguistic relativity even is. Because he never sat down and sort of formulated it as like this is the Sapir-Wolf Hypothesis, it had this sort of like long chain of communication which is sort of like somebody publishes a bunch of our work together somehow and is like, "Ah, yes, the McCulloch-Gone Hypothesis," which is that emoji are literally gestures and we're like, "No, no, no, we just think they're like gestures in a communicative context." Yeah. I mean, he must have been very charismatic to have these students continuing to work on his theories and interests for so long after he passed away. One of the biggest challenges in this debate is that people keep coming back to him and his very charismatic way of writing as central to this. One of the strongest examples that Wolf pinned his theories to was the way that Hopi speakers talked about time and experienced reality. So Hopi is a Uto Aztecian language from northeastern Arizona in what is now the USA. There are at least 5,000 speakers of the language, so Wolf's argument was that Hopi speakers have a way of describing time where things have either been done, will be done or hope to be done, or can be discussed in an abstract way. And because of this, Hopi speakers do not experience time the same way we do and therefore don't experience reality the same way we do. And Einstein's theory of relativity wouldn't work for them because they don't understand time and experience it the same way we do. Oh no. Oh no. He was writing a rival fan fiction before a rival, basically. Yeah, this is really getting into science fiction territory here. I got a bad feeling about this one. And it wasn't until 1983, like literally four decades later, that Eckhart Molotki just low-key publishes this 600-page book called Hopi Time, which lays out the incredibly sophisticated grammatical constructions of tense and aspect that are used in Hopi and just really crosses Hopi time off the list of arguments in favour of linguistic relativity. Like, if you're going to say that language influences thought, you've really got to get your facts about the language right first. Yep. Yeah. And writing in a popular magazine, Wolf unsurprisingly, isn't super forthcoming about how he came upon the language, who he was working with, what his examples are. Yeah. But like, this is the classic case with science where it's like you come up with an idea and then someone four decades later gets around to doing the work to be like, "Uh, no." So the specific facts that Wolf was sort of relying on, which like, he's dead by the time this grammar gets published, end up getting debunked, but the idea has this persistence. Indeed. It keeps floating around. And especially I feel like in the late 20th century, like the 90s, the early 2000s, there was a lot of ink still being spilled about like, what can we say about the sacred war of hypothesis or about linguistic relativity? And I think a lot of people building up Hopi time style strawman arguments to then demolish or kind of taking the weak version and weakening it down to the point of non-existence. Because like, there is this intuitive appeal if you're like, "Oh yeah, I feel like I'm a different person when I'm speaking English versus I'm speaking French. What if this had some sort of applicability?" Or I feel like culturally, you know, speakers of this language and speakers of that language have differences, which may well be true, although there are still differences like within the same cultures as well. You know, can you find some sort of aspect to experimentalize it? Like if I wanted to do a proper experiment to it, I'd want to really have like exactly the same stimuli, bring people into a lab, measure the reaction times, like do this sort of very controlled scientific type of study, and maybe I'd want to pick a language that has more extensive documentation than Hopi so that we're making less exoticizing claims about the languages. And that is some of the work that got done in the late 90s, early 2000s, including work by Lyra Boroditsky and a group of colleagues where they were looking at German and French, so languages with much more documentation, much larger populations, and they were looking at the fact that these two languages have grammatical gender for nouns and things that don't have any kind of gender to them. So German and French have words for bridge, and each of those has grammatical gender assigned as part of the grammar, but they each have a different gender. So the words for bridge in French is "pan," which is masculine, and the word for bridge in German is "brucke," which is feminine. And this is just by sort of historical accident that these words for bridge have different of noun class categories. It's not that anyone thinks the bridge is a woman or a man, or the bridge has an internal felt lived sense of gender. It's that all the nouns in these languages get divided into two or three categories, and these are the two or three categories that these particular words in. But do people's cultural stereotypes and attitudes towards what they think of as masculine or feminine characteristics influence how they draw a picture of a bridge if they're asked to do so in respect of language? What this series of experiments on this and kind of related concepts showed was that French speakers would think of bridges as being more sturdy and strong, and German speakers would look at the same stimulus and say it was elegant and graceful, which they attributed to cultural stereotypes about gender and therefore the grammatical gender system influencing the way people perceived and experienced these bridges. And these results got quite a bit of attention in the early 2000s. There was a TED talk. There was this sort of excitement around, okay, well, maybe strong savior worth of zero concept of time is clearly false, but maybe this sort of weaker savior worth effect, there could still be found something in it. And what's gotten less attention is that as the scientific method keeps going, there've been quite a few attempts to replicate these studies, and they haven't really panned out. They haven't quite been a 600-page demolition, but they've just been with a lot less attention. These attempts to do exactly what was described in the original papers that don't show the same effects of people habitually thinking in terms of gender for non-animate objects. And there's been a lot of sort of replication crisis stuff in psychology generally, where if you can find a result that you get some of the time, it's worth publishing a paper about it. And then it's like, this is awkward. We don't keep getting this result if we try it in other circumstances. Compared to something like the Buba Kiki effect, which is, you know, we have the blobby shape and you have the spiky shape and you say one's called Buba, one's called Kiki, which is which, which is really robust. If you show this to a group of people, you can ask a random room full of people, "I've done this a lot." People are generally quite consistent about saying, "Yeah, the majority of people will assign the blobby one Buba and the spiky one Kiki." And even with that, I still get like one in 10, one in 20 people being like, "No, I want to put it the other direction for some reason that makes sense to them." So even though you can get a really robust finding from this, like 95% of people agreeing on something is really great, but it doesn't necessarily tell you exactly about like the overall worldview of English speakers and we can't possibly escape this worldview, because if we really couldn't possibly escape it, like the fish don't know they're in water sort of situation, you should really get like 100%. And that's not really what these studies are showing us, that there's this sort of inextricable worldview. They're showing us like on average, maybe, but maybe it doesn't even replicate. Like, I don't know, there's some similarity. That's not getting to the sort of exciting, tantalizing, almost mystic promise of savior warfare that makes people very excited about this hypothesis. There's also been some large data set studies using, again, modern methods to try and bring robust evidence to linguistic relativity claims. There was one in the 2010s that was about the relationship between whether your language had a future tense or not and whether you were good at saving and they were using like national language and national saving rate statistics and data across a large data set. Oh my God, that study. The thing about that study right is, and there has been lots of work on the problems with the data in terms of like whether these languages have future tense or not, there's been problems with whether you're just looking at like cultural effects that have nothing to do with language and there's just like convenient and explainable historical overlaps. So the thing about it for me is that you could make up a story that says if your language has a future tense, you are really good at saving because you can see the goal of the future and the separate you that needs that money for the future or there's a story that says if your language does not have a future tense, you are really good at saving because that you 10 years from now who needs the car, who needs the house or the pony or whatever. That sounds plausible. Yeah. Is the same you as you. They are undivisible because there's no separate future self. There's only the self that needs and so you're really good at saving. And that's sort of the problem with this study is not only were there massive methodological issues in terms of like the data overall, which there really were and I remember being in the linguistics blogosphere when they were being soundly torn apart, but also even if all of the data had been good and had been the best version of itself, you can come up with a compelling story that accounts for this cultural influence in either direction. Yeah. And that's always been my concern with some of these studies is you're kind of creating these stories around the language or the data that you happen to have to hand. There is some work that shows this thing about if your language is encouraging you to pay attention to a particular thing, you do in fact pay attention to that thing more. Oh, absolutely. I think this habitual thinking to speak type stuff does show up. One of my favorite examples is in terms of spatial directions. So if you're sitting at your desk or if you're doing the dishes or you're kind of moving through your environment, you're probably thinking about like my coffee cup is on the left of me, there's a nice tree out the window on the right of me as an English speaker. We tend to think about our immediate environment in terms of left, right in front of me, behind me. Absolutely. I've also done this. Yes. We are speakers of some languages in Australia, Cooktayor and Google Yimera are some languages where you see and other parts of the world as well where you think in terms of a more absolute system. So you think about maybe your coffee cup is to the west of you or that nice window over there is to the north of you because even for this kind of immediate location, you're orienting yourself always in terms of this absolute field of north, south, east, west or sunrise, sunset or coastal mountain. Sort of uphill, downhill, upriver, downriver. I think it may not be an entire coincidence that a lot of these languages are spoken in places like mountaintops or places where there are sort of salient geographical features, but like lots of people live on mountaintops and don't speak languages that have absolute directional systems only as well. And the nifty thing about this is we're not just relying on the evidence of people saying this is to the north of me, this is to the south of me. When we ask people to arrange objects and then move around and reorient them, like turn around 180 degrees, they're still orienting them in terms of that big north, south picture or for me as a gesture researcher, what's really compelling is if I ask someone to tell a story and they're talking about like a car going really fast down the road and then I come back two weeks later, we set up the camera facing 180 degrees the other way, they will still orient that gesture heading towards north because that's the way they experienced it. Rather than heading towards their right or towards their left in a consistent way that doesn't respect that absolute orientation. And this kind of evidence shows that it's much more about the process of thinking and that this habit of speaking in terms of north, south, east, west is influencing a whole range of other elements of their thinking as well. So I remember reading about the languages that do this probably 10 years ago now. We definitely have talked about it previously on this podcast and thinking, oh, that's neat. And especially the finding that the speakers of languages that do absolute directions all the time are better at paying attention to where north, south, east and west are. They can be inside a building, they can be driving around inside a city and they can still consistently point to where north is. And when I started thinking about this, I was like, gosh, it'd be kind of cool to know where north is all the time. I wonder if I could develop this ability if I paid more attention. And since then, I've become much better at knowing where north is, where south is, where the sunrise sunset is because I sort of decided about 10 years ago, hey, it would be cool if I knew this and paid attention to it more. And this is why it's about habit and not just about the language, because we have a word for north. We do have a word for north. We just don't. It's called north. Simply having the word doesn't unpack the skill of knowing where north is. That's the language and the language choosing to make the language prioritizing spatial reference. The language is selected by the community and maintained by the community has this agreed-upon habit that trains everyone to habitually be aware of where north, south, east and west are. And even Samuel Delaney, who wrote Babel 17, which is one of his relatively early books, I posted about the fact that I was reading this, that we would inevitably have to discuss this because it has so much linguistic stuff going on in the book. And some people on Blue Sky replied saying, "Oh, you should read the interview with Delaney from 2011 where he has further thoughts about how he wrote about this in 1966." And so here's what Delaney said in 2011 about him having written Babel 17 and how Sapier Worfian it is. Okay. He says, "For a couple of years in my early 20s, I was a die-hard believer in the Sapier Worf. Even though I..." Oh my gosh. Though I... Oh my gosh, that is an authentic early 20s experience. Though I had never encountered the term or even read a description of it, which begins to hint at what's wrong with it as a theory. I even wrote a novel that hinged on this concept, Babel 17. I'm going to avoid pointing out the irony of conceiving of reality in a way even though he didn't have a word for it. But Samuel Delaney is not avoiding this point. He says, "If I'd had the term Sapier Worf Hypothesis, it might have been easier for me to realize that it was just incorrect in the same way that when, at 21, I first encountered the word dyslexia, I was able to realize that I wasn't the only one with these problems, that it was a condition rather than individual personal failure, and these stories made a lot more sense. The realization of the flaws in the Sapier Worf Hypothesis in that they caused me to begin considering the more complex linguistic mechanisms of discourse you might say gave me my lifetime project." Aw. So this is really sweet and I love this additional point about dyslexia because it reminds me that the connection between thought and language that I think is even more profound is that naming something like dyslexia gives us a way to communicate about our internal mental states that are so mysterious with each other. And the thing that I see people get excited about when it comes to discussing the Sapier Worf Hypothesis is less like, "Oh, therefore, I must not be able to understand this person at all because we have different color terms," and more that this gives us an attempt to figure out what it's like in someone else's mind and to share the experience of being a particular person who has particular thoughts and thinks about things in particularly shaped ways and enhance that specificity of understanding each other even more rather than locking ourselves in one particular worldview. I like that linguistic relativity starts off from a premise that there's not one language that is doing everything in a completely logical and ordered and best way of doing language and that it is thinking about the fact that we need to consider the diversity of ways that people organize their thoughts and pay attention to particular things in their reality. And I think there's definitely a version of this theory that allows us to pay attention to what is in people's linguistic habits and what people pay attention to within their language and within their culture. But it's also taught me that scientific theories and linguistic theories really are just the product of humans with all of their flaws and all of their interests and that we have to contextualize them within the context that they came from. Yeah. And I sometimes get approached by people at conferences or conventions or things like that saying, "Oh, you're a linguist. That's so exciting because I love the CPU hypothesis." And I want to say, I think what it represents for those people at that time is this desire to understand more people more deeply and to experience this sense of curiosity about all of the different ways of understanding the world. And I want to preserve that curiosity and that interest in understanding what other people are like and understanding what other languages are like and understanding how people relate to their languages and their cultures without implying that we can't still grow and learn new things and change and accommodate different things to our worldviews or develop new habits of paying attention to things. And I think that's sort of the ideal version of what the fandom for this theory really means and why this theory has had such a long lived life despite so many of the individual bits of evidence for it not quite standing up. [Music] For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to Lingthusiasm.com. 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