https://nautil.us/blog/5-languages-that-could-change-the-way-you-see-the-world * * [p] Nautilus [nautilus-l] * Issues * Topics * Coronavirus * Blog * Thanks for Joining the Newsletter * * * Login * Subscribe SELECT NEWSLETTERS AND SUBMIT CONTACT DETAILS... * [*]New chapters Thursdays Nautilus publishes a new chapter of feature stories on its monthly theme, every Thursday. Sign up to this list to stay up to date on [ ] the latest and greatest. [ ] [Submit] * [*]Editor's picks Sundays Read about the Nautilus stories and blogs we've been thinking about over the past week. [ ] * * * Rewired_THUMB Issue 096 Rewired Escape_THUMB Issue 095 Escape Evolving_THUMB Issue 094 Evolving Forerunners_THUMB Issue 093 Forerunners Frontiers_THUMB Issue 092 Frontiers AmazeBrain_THUMB Issue 091 The Amazing Brain SomethingGreen_THUMB Issue 090 Something Green DarkSide_THUMB Issue 089 The Dark Side Love-Sex_THUMB Issue 088 Love & Sex Risk_THUMB Issue 087 Risk Energy_THUMB Issue 086 Energy Reopen_THUMB Issue 085 Reopening * Outbreak_THUMB Issue 084 Outbreak Intelligence_THUMB Issue 083 Intelligence Panpyschism_THUMB Issue 082 Panpsychism Maps_THUMB Issue 081 Maps Scharf_TH Issue 080 Aliens Catalysts_THUMB Issue 079 Catalysts Atmospheres_THUMB Issue 078 Atmospheres Underworlds_THUMB Issue 077 Underworlds Language_THUMB Issue 076 Language Story_THUMB Issue 075 Story Networks_THUMB Issue 074 Networks Play_THUMB Issue 073 Play * Quandary_THUMB Issue 072 Quandary Flow_Curtain-THUMB Issue 071 Flow Variables_THUMB Issue 070 Variables Patterns_THUMB Issue 069 Patterns Context_THUMB Issue 068 Context Reboot_THUMB Issue 067 Reboot Clockwork_THUMB Issue 066 Clockwork Curtain_THUMB Issue 065 In Plain Sight Unseen_THUMB-F Issue 064 The Unseen Horizons_THUMB Issue 063 Horizons Systems_THUMB Issue 062 Systems Coordinates_THUMB-2 Issue 061 Coordinates * Searches_CURTAIN_THUMB Issue 060 Searches Connections_THUMB Issue 059 Connections Self_Curtain_HERO Issue 058 Self Community-THUMB Issue 057 Communities Curtain_THUMB Issue 056 Perspective Trust_HERO Issue 055 Trust Unspoken_CURTAIN_THUMB Issue 054 The Unspoken Monsters_Curtain_THUMB Issue 053 Monsters Hive_Curtain_THUMB Issue 052 The Hive Limits_Curtain_THUMB-2 Issue 051 Limits Emergence_THUMB Issue 050 Emergence Absurd_THUMB-F Issue 049 The Absurd * Chaos_THUMB Issue 048 Chaos 047_TH-2 Issue 047 Consciousness Balance_CURTAIN-THUMB Issue 046 Balance Power_TH_2 Issue 045 Power Luck_TH-2 Issue 044 Luck Heroes_TH-1 Issue 043 Heroes Fakes_TH Issue 042 Fakes Selection-TH-1 Issue 041 Selection LEARNING_TH-2 Issue 040 Learning Sport_THUMB-2 Issue 039 Sport Noise_THUMB Issue 038 Noise Currents_TH-3 Issue 037 Currents * Aging_THUMB Issue 036 Aging Boundaries_THUMB-preview Issue 035 Boundaries Adaptation_CURTAIN_THUMB Issue 034 Adaptation Attraction_THUMB-F. Issue 033 Attraction Space_TH. Issue 032 Space Stress_THUMB Issue 031 Stress Identity_TH-1 Issue 030 Identity 029_Scaling_TH-2 Issue 029 Scaling 028_THUMB Issue 028 2050 027_THUMB_F1 Issue 027 Dark Matter 026_CURTAIN_THUMB Issue 026 Color 025-Water_THUMB Issue 025 Water * 024_THUMB-F. Issue 024 Error 023-THUMB-1 Issue 023 Dominoes 022_THUMB-2 Issue 022 Slow Information_THUMB-1 Issue 021 Information 020_Creativity_THUMB-v2 Issue 020 Creativity SP_Nature_THUMB Special Issue In Our Nature 019_THUMB Issue 019 Illusions 018_THUMB_1 Issue 018 Genius Cover_THUMB Issue 017 Big Bangs 16_THUMB. Issue 016 Nothingness 015_THUMB Issue 015 Turbulence 14_THUMB Issue 014 Mutation * Issue13_THUMB Issue 013 Symmetry 012_THUMB Issue 012 Feedback 011_THUMB Issue 011 Light Issue-010_COVER-THUMB Issue 010 Mergers & Acquisitions Time_COVER_THUMB Issue 009 Time SpaceNest_THUMB Issue 008 Home See Issue Library Enter Search Below... [ ] Search TRENDING TOPIC Science Practice [14783_7a60] Does Theranos Mark the Peak of the Silicon Valley Bubble? Aerodynamics Aliens Animals Anthropology Archaeology Architecture Art Artificial Intelligence Astronomy Chemistry Climate Cognitive Science Computer Science Cryptography Earth Science Economics Education Environment Evolution Fiction Fine Art Food Genetics Health History Information Theory Insects Linguistics Literature Math Memoir Microbiology Mortality Music Neuroscience Oceanography Paleontology Philosophy Physics Physiology Psychology Reproduction Science Practice Sociology Technology The Web Facts So Romantic On Biology 5 Languages That Could Change the Way You See the World Posted By Claire Cameron on Mar 03, 2015 * Add a comment * Facebook * Twitter * Email * Sharing * Reddit * Stumbleupon * Tumblr * Pocket Watrous discussion The Discussion by Harry Wilson Watrous I went to my neighbor's house for something to eat yesterday. Think about this sentence. It's pretty simple--English speakers would know precisely what it means. But what does it actually tell you--or, more to the point, what does it not tell you? It doesn't specify facts like the subject's gender or the neighbor's, or what direction the speaker traveled, or the nature of the neighbors' relationship, or whether the food was just a cookie or a complex curry. English doesn't require speakers to give any of that information, but if the sentence were in French, say, the gender of every person involved would be specified. The way that different languages convey information has fascinated linguists, anthropologists, and psychologists for decades. In the 1940s, a chemical engineer called Benjamin Lee Whorf published a wildly popular paper in the MIT Technology Review (pdf) that claimed the way languages express different concepts--like gender, time, and space--influenced the way its speakers thought about the world. For example, if a language didn't have terms to denote specific times, speakers wouldn't understand the concept of time flowing. This argument was later discredited, as researchers concluded that it overstated language's constraints on our minds. But researchers later found more nuanced ways that these habits of speech can affect our thinking. Linguist Roman Jakobson described this line of investigation thus: "Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey." In other words, the primary way language influences our minds is through what it forces us to think about--not what it prevents us from thinking about. These five languages reveal how information can be expressed in extremely different ways, and how these habits of thinking can affect us. A Language Where You're Not the Center of the World English speakers and others are highly egocentric when it comes to orienting themselves in the world. Objects and people exist to the left, right, in front, and to the back of you. You move forward and backward in relation to the direction you are facing. For an aboriginal tribe in north Queensland, Australia, called the Guugu Ymithirr, such a "me me me" approach to spatial information makes no sense. Instead, they use cardinal directions to express spatial information (pdf). So rather than "Can you move to my left?" they would say "Can you move to the west?" Linguist Guy Deustcher says that Guugu Ymithirr speakers have a kind of "internal compass" that is imprinted from an extremely young age. In the same way that English-speaking infants learn to use different tenses when they speak, so do Guugu Ymithirr children learn to orient themselves along compass lines, not relative to themselves. In fact, says Deustcher, if a Guugu Ymithirr speaker wants to direct your attention to the direction behind him, he "points through himself, as if he were thin air and his own existence were irrelevant." Whether that translates into less egocentric worldviews is a matter for further study and debate. Other studies have shown that speakers of languages that use cardinal directions to express locations have fantastic spatial memory and navigation skills--perhaps because their experience of an event is so well-defined by the directions it took place in. But Deutscher is quick to point out that just because their language doesn't define directions relative to the people communicating, it doesn't mean they don't understand the concept of something being behind them, for example. A Language Where Time Flows East to West Stanford linguist Lera Boroditsky and Berkeley's Alice Gaby studied the language Kuuk Thaayorre, spoken by the Pormpuraaw people, also in Queensland, Australia. Like Guugu Ymithirr, it uses cardinal directions to express locations. But Boroditsky and Gaby found that in Kuuk Thaayorre, this also affected a speaker's interpretation of of time. In a series of experiments, the linguists had Kuuk Thaayorre speakers put a sequential series of cards in order--one which showed a man aging, another of a crocodile growing, and of a person eating a banana. The speakers were sat at tables during the experiment, once facing south, and another time facing north. Regardless of which direction they were facing, all speakers arranged the cards in order from east to west--the same direction the sun's path takes through the sky as the day passes. By contrast, English speakers doing the same experiment always arranged the cards from left to right--the direction in which we read. For the Kuuk Thaayorre speakers, the passage of time was intimately tied to the cardinal directions. "We never told anyone which direction they were facing," wrote Boroditsky. "The Kuuk Thaayorre knew that already and spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time." A Language Where Colors Are Metaphors Humans see the world within a certain spectrum of light, and, if you have fully functioning retinal cones, that light breaks down into various defined colors. According to some linguists, all individual languages have a set of specific color terms that partition the visible color spectrum. Devised by anthropologist Brent Berlin and linguist Paul Kay in 1969, the theory of "basic color terms" argued that all languages had at least terms for black, white, red, and warm or cold colors. Not so in Yeli Dnye. In 2001, Steven Levinson, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, published a paper in the Journal of Linguistic Anthropology on Rossel Island in Papua New Guinea, which appeared to refute Berlin and Kay's theory. Rossel Islanders speak Yeli Dnye, which is quite dissimilar to other neighboring language groups. It has little specific color terminology--indeed, there is no word for "color." Instead, speakers talk about color as part of a metaphorical phrase, with color terms derived from words for objects in the islander's environment. For example, to describe something as red, islanders say "mtyemtye," which is derived from "mtye," or "red parrot species." Another example is "mgidimgidi," which can be used to say something is black, but is directly derived from the word for night, "mgidi." Not only that, writes Levinson, but the islander's grammar reinforces this metaphorical slant, saying, "The skin of the man is white like the parrot," rather than "He is white." He reports that in their art, islanders don't tend to use unnatural dyes or shades, sticking to neutral tones and patterns as a means of decoration. This doesn't mean Rossel Islanders have somehow evolved a different vision capacity from the rest of humanity, but it may have a profound effect on how they interpret their world; it certainly impacts how they describe it. A Language That Makes You Provide Evidence In Nuevo San Juan, Peru, the Matses people speak with what seems to be great care, making sure that every single piece of information they communicate is true as far as they know at the time of speaking. Each uttered sentence follows a different verb form depending on how you know the information you are imparting, and when you last knew it to be true. For example, if you are asked, "How many apples do you have?" then a Matses speaker might answer, "I had four apples last time I checked my fruit basket." Regardless of how sure the speaker is that they still have four apples, if they can't see them, then they have no evidence what they are saying is true--for all they know, a thief could have stolen three of the apples, and the information would be incorrect. The language has a huge array of specific terms for information such as facts that have been inferred in the recent and distant past, conjectures about different points in the past, and information that is being recounted as a memory. Linguist David Fleck, at Rice University, wrote his doctoral thesis on the grammar of Matses. He says that what distinguishes Matses from other languages that require speakers to give evidence for what they are saying is that Matses has one set of verb endings for the source of the knowledge and another, separate way of conveying how true, or valid the information is, and how certain they are about it. Interestingly, there is no way of denoting that a piece of information is hearsay, myth, or history. Instead, speakers impart this kind of information as a quote, or else as being information that was inferred within the recent past. A Language That Has No Word for "Two" In 2005, Daniel Everett of the University of Manchester published a study of the language of the Piraha people, an indigenous tribe living in the Amazon, in the journal Current Anthropology. In it he detailed a language unlike any other. The Piraha speak a language without numbers, color terms, perfect form, or basic quantity terms like "few" or "some"--supposed by some, like color, to be an universal aspect of human language. Instead of using words like "each" and "more" or numbered amounts to give information about quantity, Piraha said whether something was big or small. There is a word that roughly translates as "many," but really it means "to bring together." The Piraha also had no artistic tradition, and voiced no sense of deep memory. Steven Pinker famously called Everett's paper "a bomb thrown into the party." Everett had found a language that directly contradicted Noam Chomsky's widely accepted theory of universal grammar. In a series of experiments (pdf) done by linguist Peter Gordon, Everett, and others, the Piraha's cognition has been tested over and again: Is number cognition possible without a numerical system? The answer appears to be "not really." In one experiment by Everett, the Piraha were shown rows of batteries, and asked to replicate the rows. They were able to recreate rows containing two or three batteries, but not anything above that. Instead of counting, the Piraha used a system Everett called "analogue estimation strategy," which worked well for them up to a certain point. It may be that the Piraha have never actually needed to count in order to get by--Everett and others who have observed the Piraha in the field certainly think this is the case. Interestingly, the Piraha don't seem to have a very high opinion of outsiders. They are monolingual, preferring to stick with their own lexicon rather than borrow words from English or Spanish, and they call all other languages, "crooked head." It is a sharp contrast to our society, based on globalized languages and all manner of communication translated into nothing but numbers--endless streams of 1s and 0s. Claire Cameron is Nautilus' social media & news editor. 5 Languages That Could Change the Way You See the World Most Recent Entries See All * [18164_eadd2c9c45ec261d4ae662765] Biology The Alien-Haunted World Posted on Feb 14, 2021 * [18162_ee85e073c07e87d0df12a23e4] Ideas A Simple Way to Reduce Cognitive Bias Posted on Feb 12, 2021 * [18128_718010c95cc6dac83386e13c4] Ideas How Universes Might Bubble Up and Collide Posted on Jan 28, 2021 * [18127_35109f5ad05b4af6bf2f9279e] Culture Can You Treat Loneliness By Creating an Imaginary Friend? Posted on Jan 15, 2021 * [18132_c003c81e1a36826b21e90f7e9] Matter A Breakthrough in Measuring the Building Blocks of Nature Posted on Jan 08, 2021 Current Issue See Full Issue Rewired_THUMB 57 Comments - Join the Discussion [blog_wait] Related Issue 021: Information The anatomy of everything See Full Issue Related Facts So Romantic * Biology The Death of Hundreds Is Just a Statistic--But It Doesn't Have to Be conformity Imagine that tomorrow I were to show you a newspaper article describing a deadly wildfire. Do you think you'd be more upset upon reading that 10,000... Read More * Biology How Odd Behavior in Some Young Horses May Reveal a Cause of Autism foal madigan squeeze By gently squeezing maladjusted foals, veterinary researcher John Madigan recreates the experience of traveling through the birth canal, lowering the... Read More * Biology Why Are You So Smart? Thank Your Mom & Your Difficult Birth lucy walking A reconstructed skeleton of Lucy, the famous human ancestor. By 3.2 million years ago, Australopithecines were walking upright, imposing strict limits... Read More * Biology Before We Painted Like Picasso, We Had to Share Like Gandhi feminized human skulls faces Cieri A comparison of the facial features of ancient modern humans (left) to more recent modern humans (right). Modern specimens have a less prominent brow... Read More * About * Awards and Press * Contact / Work with Us * Donate * FAQ * Media Kit * Prime * Privacy Policy * RSS * Subscribe * Terms of Services NAUTILUS: SCIENCE CONNECTED Nautilus is a different kind of science magazine. We deliver big-picture science by reporting on a single monthly topic from multiple perspectives. Read a new chapter in the story every Thursday. Get Nautilus Editor's Picks and new articles right to your inbox! [ ] [Subscribe] x (c) 2021 NautilusThink Inc, All rights reserved. Matter, Biology, Numbers, Ideas, Culture, Connected Site by Code and Theory * Quantcast