Languages, thoughts and realities?


Term Paper, 2003

17 Pages, Grade: 1


Excerpt


Table of contents:

1 Introduction

2 Whorf’s Hypothesis
2.1 Problems in Translation
2.2 The Method of Translation
2.3 The Access to Reality
2.4 Cause and Consequence in Whorf’s Hypothesis
2.5 Languages and Concept-schemes

3 Summary and Conclusion

1 Introduction

“Newspeak was the official language of Oceania and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. [...] The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought impossible.

It was intended that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought - that is, a thought diverging from the principles of Ingsoc - should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words.” (Orwell, 1949, p. 312)

In his bestseller “Nineteen Eighty-Four” George Orwell describes a totalitarian system preventing any non-conform thinking by manipulating the language. The idea is that at least a big part of our thoughts is generated by means of language. By cutting concepts out of the language it could be possible to restrict the maximum range of our thoughts. If this is true, then it is likely that languages exist, that contain concepts that can also not be expressed in our language. Therefore we cannot translate those thoughts into our mother tongue and we cannot even understand them unless we do not speak this language. Of course this is just fiction. And even in his novel this fiction of restricting thought by diminishing language exists only as a plan and doesn’t work in the reality of this invented world.[1] In spite of that the idea is interesting. The purpose of the following pages will be to examine the relationship between language and thought and to give an answer to the question whether restrictions in language can prevent us from thinking into certain directions and to analyze what consequences this would have.

2 Whorf’s Hypothesis

One of the first defenders of the claim that language strongly influences thought was Benjamin Lee Whorf. He noted that language isn’t merely a simple collection of norms and agreements. It is a complex system and in any system all parts are dependent on other parts. This means, that a change in one concept of a language causes changes in other concepts, which themselves must cause further changes. Step by step those changes can increase or decrease. If such changes are too serious, then speakers who are not informed about them will be unable to understand the ones who underwent the change. Whorf concluded that changes in the language system have to proceed very slowly so that all the speakers can adapt the altered or new concept without being in danger of strongly misunderstanding their fellows. (see Whorf, 1963, p.98) It follows that new inventions and circumstances alter the language very slowly, but that the other way round language affects strongly the people, who are trying to change the circumstances or trying to invent something genuinely new.

“Die Sprache [...] wird zwar durch Erfindungen affiziert, aber nur sehr geringfügig und langsam. Dagegen ist aber umgekehrt sie für die Erfinder und Neuerer mit unmittelbarer Wirkung gesetzgebend.“ (Whorf, 1963, p.98)

Putting this a little bit further, Whorf asserts that if we restrict our language to a special reduced vocabulary (in his example if we’d only use simple folk-english) some concepts might get lost and can never be re-implemented into the system. (Whorf, 1963, p.45) Of course after a long period of time the slow development of language can accidentally find the old concepts again. But even in this case it would be impossible to realize that, because there is no way of comparing those concepts.

In one sentence Whorf’s hypothesis claims that:

Language restricts thought. Or in other words: the set of all possible thoughts can never go beyond the means of the language the person speaks who thinks them. (see Whorf, 1963, p.98)

Now let’s take into consideration that there are different languages existing at the same time. If Whorf is right by saying that the change of language systems proceeds slowly, then probably many of those languages have a different system of concepts. Because of the strong dependence of thoughts on language, claimed by Whorf, it is likely that there are languages that are at least partially not translatable into each other. That means there can be two languages, so that some thoughts expressed by one speaker in the first language, which are based on concepts that differ much between the two languages[2], will be unthinkable for the speaker of the other language. Therefore, the issue if thought is restricted by the language system is closely connected to the question whether there could be a language that cannot be translated into another one. If thought is restricted by language, then different languages tend to have different restrictions. Thus it is impossible to give ANY translation from the area of one language into another language, where this particular area is restricted.[3]

If thought is restricted by the language one can speak (as Whorf claims), then it is possible, that there is a language that cannot be translated into a special other one. It logically follows, that if each language is necessarily translatable into each other then thought isn’t restricted by language.[4] So:

If we find a reliable way of translating every message between ANY two chosen languages[5], then Whorf’s hypothesis is refuted.

2.1 Problems in Translation

For doing this we have to examine what problems may appear while translating between languages. Above I mentioned that sometimes areas of the world are organized differently by different languages. Research on that has been performed by Berlin and Kay in 1969. They investigated the meaning of words for colors in English and Hanunóo, a Philippine language. They found out, that “English [...] has a range of eleven primary colour terms (‘black’, ‘white’, ‘red’, ‘green’ , ‘yellow’, ‘blue’, ‘brown’, ‘purple’, ‘pink’, ’orange’ and ‘grey’), whereas [...] Hanunóo (according to Conklin, ‘Hanunóo Color Categories’, 1955, p. 339-44) makes do with four:

(ma)biru = black, dark tints of other colours

(ma)lagti = white, light tints of other colours

(ma)rara = maroon, red, orange

(ma)latuy = light green, yellow, and light brown

The difference between the two colour terminology can be diagrammed like this:” (Leech, 1981, p.24-25, the  - sign isn’t correctly depicted)

Abbildung in dieser Leseprobe nicht enthalten

(Picture 1) (Leech, 1981, p.25)

Both systems of color categories, the English and the Hanunóo, can categorize each occurring color, certainly sometimes using expressions like “a dark (ma)rara”, “light-green” or something like that. There are various other examples between languages that are closer related to each other. For example the German concepts of “Bach”, “Fluss” and “Strom” do not correlate fully with the English concepts of “brook”, “river” and “stream”.

Now, when the borders between many correlating words are different in between languages it seems to be that intranslatability might occur. This would be a proof for Whorf’s hypothesis then. But in spite of the confusion such partially correlating concepts cause, all sentences of any language can still be interpreted all the other ones. When I explained the Hanunóo concept of “(ma)biru” I only used measures of the English language system. I think those explanations like “’(ma)biru’ looks like black but can have dark tints of other colors” are a good possibility to define the meaning of a foreign word in the own language. Even if you believe that something is only a sufficient translation if the original ranges of ALL the occurring words in the translated message are maintained, there still would be the possibility to define all the words of the message in the same way as we did with “(ma)biru”. So each message still remains intelligible in the other language.

But since it could be that many or even all of the concepts differ between the two languages in the way the colors concepts do, how could we be sure that the English explanation I’ve given for the colors is appropriate?

This problem per definition cannot be solved by observing the structures of the language itself. The question is: when is an explanation appropriate?

My first approach to that question is that an explanation of a foreign word is appropriate only if it refers exactly to all the things in the outside world that are meant by the word. That means the word “(ma)biru” is explained appropriately in English, if the same properties are denoted by “(ma)biru” and by its English explanation. But is that the whole story?

Indeed the question is not as simple as it seems if we bear in mind the work of Gottlob Frege. He introduced the distinction between the intension and the extension of a concept. The extension is the set of objects the concept refers to. The intension on the other hand is the intended meaning, the emphasis of the word. Let’s illustrate this with a small example: To make it clear, our example uses the background assumption, that incidentally only if an animal has a heart, it also has a liver. We say: animals that have a heart are called “heart-animals” and animals that have a liver are called “liver-animals”. Now the intended meaning of heart-animal and liver-animal is different although the set of objects for both concepts is the same. (see Frege, 1969, p. 40-43) Accordingly, the explanation of one word in another language can be inadequate, when it is defined by only pointing at all the objects that belong to it.

[...]


[1] Otherwise, what purpose could a thought police have?

[2] or are only contained in the first (or source) language

[3] For this argument I use the picture of gaps in the language system. Another picture would be to say, that, instead of one language containing no sentences about one area of the world, the same areas of the world (topics, structures which are organized by concepts) are structured differently by both of the languages. Translation also would be impossible. Both pictures are equivalent, since the differently structured area of the second picture can be mapped into two different areas of the first model. The trick is that the model contains different areas for similarly structured parts of language with different physical objects AND different areas for differently structured parts of language about the same physical object. Then the part of the first-picture-area of one language that is filled by concepts is a gap in the other.

[4] 1. TrL => possible not (L1 translatable into L2) with TrL=Thought restricted by Language; L1,L2=Languages, L1¹L2; “=>” = follows 2. not (possible not (L1 translatable into L2)) => not TrL | from 1. by transposition 3. necessary (L1 translatable into L2) => not TrL

[5] including possible languages from Neptune or elsewhere

Excerpt out of 17 pages

Details

Title
Languages, thoughts and realities?
College
Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg  (Institut für fremdsprachliche Philologien)
Course
Language and Cognition (WS 2002/2003)
Grade
1
Author
Year
2003
Pages
17
Catalog Number
V37687
ISBN (eBook)
9783638369619
ISBN (Book)
9783638886406
File size
514 KB
Language
English
Notes
This paper analyzes Whorf's Hypothesis. It uses Nagel's and Davidson's notion of concept scheme to refute Whorf's hypothesis in every way it could possibly be interpreted. Furthermore, it shows practical ways of how any possible language can effectively be translated into any other language. It creates a bridge between Linguistics, Philosophy, Psychology and Epistemology (theory of knowledge).
Keywords
Languages, Language, Cognition
Quote paper
Franz Wegener (Author), 2003, Languages, thoughts and realities?, Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/37687

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