Re: Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

I'm too am delurking, also because discussions Sapir-Whorf and the
translatability of languages intregue me  I thought I'd throw this out
and see if anyone finds it interesting or has any comment.

I am an American-born native speaker of (Mandarin) Chinese and
English, and a fluent second (or third) language speaker of German.
Chinese was my first language, but I speak English better, having grown
up in the English-speaking United States.

Clearly, the cultures of China and the United States are very
different, as are their languages.  The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
would say that it would be difficult to hold many ideas in the same
way at the same time in both languages.  However, I can speak both,
I can think in both, and have carried out bilingual (and
even trilingual) conversations, switching back and forth from
language to language from moment to moment, interpreting from one to the
next.  I have never really felt like I had any trouble holding a
thought, and expressing it in any of several languages.  In
interpreting, I've never really felt that I had to compromise a thought
in one language in order to dress it in another.  Of course there are
cases where my ability in one language or another falls down, in that I
lack vocabulary or facility with a subtle nuance of grammar, but I think
that's a fairly trivial case of trouble in performance.  In short,
though I am mostly American, I can speak Chinese, and I feel I can
think like an American in Chinese.

Clearly culture does affect the way people think.  I may say something
that to my way of thinking is normal and acceptable, but would seem
strange or inapropriate to a Chinese person, whether I say it in
English or in Chinese.  That is, culture changes the context to certain
ideas, and changes they way we interpret or react to them, but this has
more to do with social norms and world view than anything inherent to a
given language.

I know there are people, and some on this list, who do claim to feel
differently when they speak one language rather than another.  Any
thoughts?  Do these feelings stem from the language itself, and how one
expresses one's self in it, or is it due to being in a different social
environment?  Anyway, hope I haven't rambled on too long.

-Weiben Wang
wwang@nypl.org



Date:    Mon, 11 Oct 1999 16:38:18 +1000
From:    Walter Mack <z1254398@...>
Subject: Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

Hi all,

I've been lurking here for a while now, with a view to finding out more
about conlangs (not sure why, I'm just interested in
languages).

Anyway, I read some literature on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that the
language in which a person thinks structures their thoughts.
An interesting proposal, obviously leading to such languages as loglan,
lojban and laadan, to name a few.

However, while I discussed the idea  with my father (who is a native
speaker of German and speaks both German and English fluently), we came
up
with a new hypothesis:

Let us assume that a person is fluent in two (or more) languages. For
the
purposes
of this argument, let these languages be English and Japanese, both from
two separate language families (however they could be two languages from
the same family). The one language will never quite translate directly
into the other. However, our hypothetical person can think equally well
in
either one.
Suppose they have, unconsciously, developed a para-language of "symbols"
which they use to translate between the two verbal languages. In
essence,
the person would be able to think in symbols, as well as (or instead of)
words.
If this were correct, then just learning several languages would
facilitate thinking that was as fast (or faster) than if one were to
be a native speaker of lojban?

I'd love to hear your comments on this one.

Walter Mack
mack@uq.net.au