http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703467304575383131592767868.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_RIGHTInDepthCarousel_1




Couldn't believe my eyes when I saw this article in the WSJ, and not the Science Times where one usually finds thinking of this nature:


"Do the languages we speak shape the way we think? Do they merely express thoughts, or do the structures in languages (without our knowledge or consent) shape the very thoughts we wish to express?
Take "Humpty Dumpty sat on a..." Even this snippet of a nursery rhyme reveals how much languages can differ from one another. In English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we say "sat" rather than "sit." In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can't) change the verb to mark tense.

In Russian, you would have to mark tense and also gender, changing the verb if Mrs. Dumpty did the sitting. You would also have to decide if the sitting event was completed or not. If our ovoid hero sat on the wall for the entire time he was meant to, it would be a different form of the verb than if, say, he had a great fall.

In Turkish, you would have to include in the verb how you acquired this information. For example, if you saw the chubby fellow on the wall with your own eyes, you'd use one form of the verb, but if you had simply read or heard about it, you'd use a different form.

Do English, Indonesian, Russian and Turkish speakers end up attending to, understanding, and remembering their experiences differently simply because they speak different languages?

These questions touch on all the major controversies in the study of mind, with important implications for politics, law and religion. Yet very little empirical work had been done on these questions until recently. The idea that language might shape thought was for a long time considered untestable at best and more often simply crazy and wrong. Now, a flurry of new cognitive science research is showing that in fact, language does profoundly influence how we see the world."...


Ah so, the world is catching up with some aspects of NLP thinking.... to what extent and in what ways do linguistic structures form the collective unconscious software for running a culture ? or an individual mind for that matter ?........:


"The question of whether languages shape the way we think goes back centuries; Charlemagne proclaimed that "to have a second language is to have a second soul." But the idea went out of favor with scientists when Noam Chomsky's theories of language gained popularity in the 1960s and '70s. Dr. Chomsky proposed that there is a universal grammar for all human languages—essentially, that languages don't really differ from one another in significant ways. And because languages didn't differ from one another, the theory went, it made no sense to ask whether linguistic differences led to differences in thinking."....:So..... was Noam Chomsky part of the problem or part of the solution, NLPwise ?:............. let's read on and smell what emerges....


" * Russian speakers, who have more words for light and dark blues, are better able to visually discriminate shades of blue.


* Some indigenous tribes say north, south, east and west, rather than left and right, and as a consequence have great spatial orientation.


* The Piraha, whose language eschews number words in favor of terms like few and many, are not able to keep track of exact quantities
.
* In one study, Spanish and Japanese speakers couldn't remember the agents of accidental events as adeptly as English speakers could. Why? In Spanish and Japanese, the agent of causality is dropped: "The vase broke itself," rather than "John broke the vase."

The search for linguistic universals yielded interesting data on languages, but after decades of work, not a single proposed universal has withstood scrutiny. Instead, as linguists probed deeper into the world's languages (7,000 or so, only a fraction of them analyzed), innumerable unpredictable differences emerged.

Of course, just because people talk differently doesn't necessarily mean they think differently. In the past decade, cognitive scientists have begun to measure not just how people talk, but also how they think, asking whether our understanding of even such fundamental domains of experience as space, time and causality could be constructed by language.

For example, in Pormpuraaw, a remote Aboriginal community in Australia, the indigenous languages don't use terms like "left" and "right." Instead, everything is talked about in terms of absolute cardinal directions (north, south, east, west), which means you say things like, "There's an ant on your southwest leg." To say hello in Pormpuraaw, one asks, "Where are you going?", and an appropriate response might be, "A long way to the south-southwest. How about you?" If you don't know which way is which, you literally can't get past hello.

About a third of the world's languages (spoken in all kinds of physical environments) rely on absolute directions for space. As a result of this constant linguistic training, speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes. They perform navigational feats scientists once thought were beyond human capabilities. This is a big difference, a fundamentally different way of conceptualizing space, trained by language.

Differences in how people think about space don't end there. People rely on their spatial knowledge to build many other more complex or abstract representations including time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality and emotions. So if Pormpuraawans think differently about space, do they also think differently about other things, like time?....


OK.... we follow... this is getting very much up to roasting temperature in the way that NLP does Meta-Cognition... how we think about thinking.... (note that even using a metaphor like Meta requires some internal spatial encoding...) Sombody get George Lakoff on the phone, we need his input about now...


................."Pormpuraawans, we found, arranged time from east to west. That is, seated facing south, time went left to right. When facing north, right to left. When facing east, toward the body, and so on. Of course, we never told any of our participants which direction they faced. The Pormpuraawans not only knew that already, but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time. And many other ways to organize time exist in the world's languages. In Mandarin, the future can be below and the past above. In Aymara, spoken in South America, the future is behind and the past in front.
In addition to space and time, languages also shape how we understand causality. For example, English likes to describe events in terms of agents doing things. English speakers tend to say things like "John broke the vase" even for accidents. Speakers of Spanish or Japanese would be more likely to say "the vase broke itself." Such differences between languages have profound consequences for how their speakers understand events, construct notions of causality and agency, what they remember as eyewitnesses and how much they blame and punish others.".............


Should we find this remarkable ? Radically distinct ways of constructing maps of abstractions in relationship to the body and the physical environment ?

Muchas Gracias...

Bufo,

Thanks for raising the consciousness of different (cognitive) linguistic maps.

One exercise I used to set students/delegates was based upon as per your excerpt:

" * Russian speakers, who have more words for light and dark blues, are better able to visually discriminate shades of blue.

In my (British) culture we appear colour blind. No really!

Most people will quote the rainbow's basic colours if asked, as the same as Newton's colours from his earliest experiment on refraction:

Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple and Violet.

Yet; there is a colour missing here, hinted at in your description that most people appear to miss or misidentify. It is everywhere yet people are 'blind' to it. It's called Cyan. Or, Printer's blue or Russian Blue (surprise!).

In russian itself with pronunciation:

синий blue [see-niy] IIIIIIIIII
голубой sky-blue (cyan) [gah-loo-boy] IIIIIIIII <Caveat -this is really dependent upon the fidelity of your monitor colour rendition. Check it against the darker version of your printer ink. On my monitor it appears more as turquoise rather than 'pure' cyan.

In fact, we appear to have six 'basic' colours:

Red, Green, Blue, (Additive)
Magenta, Yellow, Cyan. (Subtractive)

You can find them in television's (electronically produced) colour bars or photoshop and other 'paint' programmes.





The task I set is to identify the difference between Blue and Cyan, and most find it difficult at first. The difficulty appears to be around intensity of the perceived sub-modality as well as the wavelength or shade. Most find it easy when both colours are presented together, less so when presented alone, particularly Cyan in mid-shades.

One reason for the apparent lack of distinction may be that the Rods in the eye which detects brightness or luminance peaks at this wavelength and may interfere with colour discrimination within the eye's cones at the same wavelength.

The set task is simple: Observe each object that contains colour; discriminate whether any 'blue' is blue or is in fact, cyan (and of course, not green!)

Clue: Printers love it because it's easy to print without mixing.

For fun, look for some common examples to check for yourself:

Head and shoulders bottle,

Cadbury's biscuit tin,

This forum's masthead colours.


The point of my exercise is this: If we were 'blind' to a major sub-modality member, to what else might we be missing or blind?


PS What better way to suggest other-worldiness than to use an apparently 'alien' light in Dr Who's Tardis console.

Here's a good on for auditory discrimination:

YouTube - Lionel Richie on helium

"
" *Russian speakers, who have more words for light and dark blues, are better able to visually discriminate shades of blue.
In my (British) culture we appear colour blind. No really!

Most people will quote the rainbow's basic colours if asked, as the same as Newton's colours from his earliest experiment on refraction:

Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Purple and Violet.

Yet; there is a colour missing here, hinted at in your description that most people appear to miss or misidentify. It is everywhere yet people are 'blind' to it. It's called Cyan. Or, Printer's blue or Russian Blue (surprise!)."


I think it only becomes an issue when it's presented as an option. I'd bet a high % of people if asked to read off the colour bars left to right you would get told, grey, yellow, blue, green... Only when you're asked to differentiate between cyan and blue do you have a pause.

Have I got my memory jumbled over the last 20 years but when these sort of tests have been run where more choice present in someone's natural language it actually slows down identifiation tests? I see snow I say snow, I don't have to take a decision as to it's qualities.

Counting Eskimo Words for Snow

SLK wrote:

...I think it only becomes an issue when it's presented as an option. I'd bet a high % of people if asked to read off the colour bars left to right you would get told, grey, yellow, blue, green... Only when you're asked to differentiate between cyan and blue do you have a pause.

I agree; for most people it's probably unimportant to them and doesn't affect their lives very much.

For NLPers it has value, I think, in how to question the 'folk knowledge' passed down to us about how things are with more critical discriminating (in the sensory acuity sense) e.g. finding finer distinctions in sub-modalities AND how people filter effects their (and our) perceptions. Missing one colour out of six is a big gap (to me). To what extent does that colour our language? e.g. Blue sky thinking or, Blue sky thinking?


I wonder what may be missing in other channels/modalities? Bufo has suggested some cracks in the (Ad) linguistic pavement.
The fifth taste of Umami/savouriness was isolated by Kikunae Ikeda (Japan).
I suspect we have a good understanding of Audio frequency since we have a bank of receptors similar to a piano within our cochlea; however, there are many scales presented to us; pentatonic, diotonic etc. which have a cultural dimension. There is another scale called Bohlen-Pierce which is not based upon existing octaves.

See also: Playing in the Cracks - Alternate Tuning Software Tools

And what about different kinaesthetics? Are there any that are represented in other cultures but not our own? We seem to be wedded to Pleasure-pain~Toward-Away from in our thinking. What about beyond (external) cold, heat, wet, dry, pressure, (internal) hunger, thirst fatigue etc. Perhaps that's a to-do list item.

SLK wrote:

Have I got my memory jumbled over the last 20 years but when these sort of tests have been run where more choice present in someone's natural language it actually slows down identifiation tests? I see snow I say snow, I don't have to take a decision as to it's qualities.

Counting Eskimo Words for Snow

Well, I speculate that depends on the person and their relationship of usefulness to the 'stuff'. (Non-specific) snow is mainly an inconvenience to us in a modern western environment, though to an Eskimo (other ethnic groups are available) may depend on the finer distinctions in order to eat.

For NLPers, I pose that we won't know how useful extra distinctions are, until we isolate the distinction from out of non-consciousness awareness and test it.

For me it means a richer, more complex and more consciously colourful subjective experience.

Test your colour acuity or 'IQ' here.

X-Rite: Get exactly the color you need, every time, anywhere in the world.

My score was 11.

zeitgeist wrote:

Test your colour acuity or 'IQ' here.

X-Rite: Get exactly the color you need, every time, anywhere in the world.

My score was 11.

oooh I like that.
I got 4

I found it interesting that I was much much slower on the green/blue than all the others.

30 Bit difficult on the mince pies after a couple of minutes...

SLK wrote:

I found it interesting that I was much much slower on the green/blue than all the others.

That was probably my fastest, I scored a 7. I heard that over 50% of men have some colour blindness for red. Not sure of the accuracy of this stat.