102: The science and fiction of Sapir-Whorf
2025/3/21
Lingthusiasm - A podcast that's enthusiastic about linguistics
G
Gretchen McCulloch
L
Lauren Gawne
Gretchen McCulloch: 科幻小说中常出现学习外星语言获得超能力的设定，这反映了人们对语言与现实关系的复杂性感兴趣。例如，在《Babel-17》中，外星语言与意义之间存在紧密关系，学习这种语言可以获得对现实的深刻理解，甚至获得超能力。但这并非现实，语言只是影响思维方式的众多因素之一。人们对现实的感知也受大脑差异等因素影响，即使说同一种语言，人们对现实的理解也可能存在差异。
关于语言与思维关系的讨论，最简单的层面是：是否存在某个概念的词汇。新词的出现反映了人们对新概念的理解，但词汇的出现并不意味着概念的产生。不同语言对意义空间的划分方式不同，这体现了语言对思维方式的影响。例如，法语单词“doux”包含多种含义（甜、新鲜、温和、柔软），这与英语中使用不同词语表达相同含义的情况不同。
语言的语法特征可以通过塑造人们的思维习惯来影响人们对现实的感知。不同语言对证据类型的表达方式不同，这反映了语言对思维习惯的影响。学习某种语言的语法特征，可能会增强人们对该特征的意识，但这并不意味着该特征是强制性的。人们在使用不同语言时，可能会感觉自己像不同的人，这可能是由于语言熟练程度和社会环境的影响。婴儿时期，人们能够感知所有人类语言中存在的语音差异，但随着成长，会失去对非母语中语音的辨识能力。
萨皮尔-沃尔夫假说探讨语言与思维的关系，但萨皮尔和沃尔夫对该假说的观点并不完全一致。“萨皮尔-沃尔夫假说”这一名称并非由萨皮尔和沃尔夫本人提出。沃尔夫的一些著作发表在非学术期刊上，这使得人们对他的观点理解存在差异。沃尔夫认为霍皮语中对时间的表达方式不同于英语，这支持了他的语言相对性假说，但后来的研究否定了这一观点。沃尔夫的观点由于缺乏严谨的论证而存在问题，但其思想仍具有持久的影响力。人们对语言相对性假说的兴趣，源于其对理解不同文化和思维方式的吸引力。
一些研究试图通过比较不同语言的语法特征来验证语言相对性假说，例如比较德语和法语中对桥梁的性别表达。一些研究表明，语言的语法特征可能会影响人们对事物的感知，但这些研究结果的可重复性存在问题。“布巴-基基效应”表明，人们对形状的感知具有一定的共通性，但这并不意味着人们对现实的感知完全相同。一些大型数据集的研究试图从宏观层面验证语言相对性假说，例如研究语言中是否存在将来时与储蓄率的关系，但这些研究存在方法论问题，即使数据可靠，也可能存在多种解释。
语言可能会影响人们的思维习惯，例如语言中空间方向的表达方式会影响人们对空间方向的感知。一些语言使用绝对方向系统表达空间位置，这会影响人们对空间方向的感知和思维方式。人们对空间方向的感知能力可以通过后天学习获得，这表明语言并非唯一决定因素。小说家萨缪尔·迪莱尼在2011年的一次采访中承认，他早年曾相信萨皮尔-沃尔夫假说，但后来意识到其错误。迪莱尼认为，对语言相对性假说的认识，促使他思考更复杂的语言机制。人们对萨皮尔-沃尔夫假说的兴趣，在于其对理解他人思维方式的启发作用。语言相对性假说强调语言的多样性，以及人们对现实的不同理解方式。人们对萨皮尔-沃尔夫假说的兴趣，源于其对深入理解他人的渴望。
Lauren Gawne: 科幻小说中，学习新语言解锁新现实的设定，与“语言影响世界观”的经典语言学思想实验有关。学习新语言获得超能力是科幻小说中常用的比喻手法，与其他获得超能力的方式类似。语言强关系假说认为语言塑造了人们对现实的感知，但学习与某种技能相关的词汇并不能直接获得该技能。学习新技能会伴随着相关词汇的学习，但语言只是影响思维方式的众多因素之一。即使说同一种语言，人们对现实的理解也可能存在差异，这与语言无关。大脑差异会导致人们对现实的感知不同，这与语言无关。
关于语言与思维关系的讨论，最简单的层面是：是否存在某个概念的词汇。新词的出现反映了人们对新概念的理解，但词汇的出现并不意味着概念的产生。不同语言对色彩的划分不同，这反映了语言对人们感知的影响。不同语言对意义空间的划分方式不同，这体现了语言对思维方式的影响。一些研究表明，语言的语法特征可能会影响人们对事物的感知，但这些研究结果的可重复性存在问题。人们对萨皮尔-沃尔夫假说的兴趣，源于其对理解不同文化和思维方式的吸引力。一些研究试图通过比较不同语言的语法特征来验证语言相对性假说，例如比较德语和法语中对桥梁的性别表达。大型数据集的研究试图从宏观层面验证语言相对性假说，例如研究语言中是否存在将来时与储蓄率的关系，但这些研究存在方法论问题，即使数据可靠，也可能存在多种解释。
语言可能会影响人们的思维习惯，例如语言中空间方向的表达方式会影响人们对空间方向的感知。一些语言使用绝对方向系统表达空间位置，这会影响人们对空间方向的感知和思维方式。人们对空间方向的感知能力可以通过后天学习获得，这表明语言并非唯一决定因素。人们对萨皮尔-沃尔夫假说的兴趣，在于其对深入理解他人的渴望。
supporting_evidences
Lauren Gawne: '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.'
Lauren Gawne: 'Babel 17 is such an exact analytical language, it almost assures you technical mastery of any situation you look at.'
Gretchen McCulloch: 'Learning the language basically unlocks galaxy brain superpowers.'
Lauren Gawne: '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.'
Lauren Gawne: 'One of the ways that fiction can use sort of sciencey-ness to give someone powers.'
Gretchen McCulloch: 'There's the strong version of language makes you perceive reality differently.'
Lauren Gawne: 'Alas, wouldn't it be great if we had Babel 17-style unlock achievement?'
Lauren Gawne: '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 go back and forth on in pinning down.'
Lauren Gawne: 'Different brains can allow you to perceive reality, including linguistic reality, differently.'
Lauren Gawne: '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.'
Lauren Gawne: 'There are new words all the time.'
Lauren Gawne: 'We did a whole episode on colour words and how they're different across languages.'
Lauren Gawne: '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.'
Gretchen McCulloch: 'So, a word I think about a lot is the French word doux or douce, which is variable depending on whether it's describing an object that's masculine or feminine.'
Gretchen McCulloch: '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.'
Gretchen McCulloch: '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.'
Gretchen McCulloch: 'I don't know if this is just because I've been working with and thinking about evidentiality for so long, but I often am much more aware of saying something and I'm like, because I heard about it.'
Gretchen McCulloch: 'There's this intersecting thing that people often discuss, which is how they feel like they're different people when they're speaking different languages.'
Gretchen McCulloch: '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.'
Lauren Gawne: 'This whole theory, whether you think about the strong version or the weak version, depending what part of language you're focusing on, is known as linguistic relativity.'
Gretchen McCulloch: 'They were linguists. They didn't do historical linguistics.'
Gretchen McCulloch: 'I absolutely went through – a big linguistic relativity phase in undergrad.'
Gretchen McCulloch: 'He was a fire marshal or a fire investigator.'
Gretchen McCulloch: 'He would do lectures on the side.'
Gretchen McCulloch: 'They are definitely treated as interchangeable.'
Lauren Gawne: 'No, they weren't absolute egotistical maniacs like that.'
Gretchen McCulloch: 'Then, a few years after that, in the mid-1950s, there is a book called Language, Thought, and Reality, which pulls together Worf's public writings and some of his unpublished writings.'
Gretchen McCulloch: 'One of the strongest examples that Worf pinned his theories to was the way that Hopi speakers talked about time and experienced reality.'
Gretchen McCulloch: 'And it wasn't until 1983, like literally four decades later, that Eckhart Malotke 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.'
Gretchen McCulloch: 'The specific facts that Worf was relying on – which, he's dead by the time this grammar gets published – end up getting debunked.'
Lauren Gawne: '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 what can we say about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or about linguistic relativity.'
Lauren Gawne: '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 – 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.'
Lauren Gawne: 'These results got quite a bit of attention in the early 2000s.'
Gretchen McCulloch: 'compared to something like the booba-kiki effect, which is you have the blobby shape and you have the spiky shape and you say one's called booba, one's called kiki, which is which, which is really robust.'
Lauren Gawne: 'There's also been some large dataset studies using, again, modern methods to try and bring robust evidence to linguistic relativity claims.'
Gretchen McCulloch: 'The thing about that study is – and there has been lots of work on the problems with the data in terms of whether these languages have future tense or not.'
Gretchen McCulloch: '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.'
Gretchen McCulloch: 'There are speakers of some languages in Australia, Cooktayor and Gugu Yimera are some languages where...'
Lauren Gawne: '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.'
Lauren Gawne: '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.'
Samuel R. Delaney: 'For a couple of years in my early 20s, I was a diehard believer in the Sapir Wharf, even though I – Oh, my gosh.'
Gretchen McCulloch: 'But Samuel Laney is not avoiding this point.'
Gretchen McCulloch: 'The thing that I see people get excited about when it comes to discussing this Api Wharf hypothesis is less like, oh, therefore, I must not be able to understand this person at all because we have different colour 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 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.'
Gretchen McCulloch: '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 organise their thoughts and pay attention to particular things in their reality.'
Lauren Gawne: '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 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.'
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