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School district bans the dictionary to comply with Ron DeSantis’s book-ban law
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this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
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Have you seen the movie Arrival? This is where I first learned of this.
I talked to a neurologist friend afterward who was convinced of it, along with his M.D. psychiatrist girlfriend. I'm surprised to hear it's less certain to linguists than to medicine. Unfortunately I forgot the evidence I found so compelling, maybe it was that I had just seen that movie.
Amongst linguists, Arrival is beloved for essentially everything except that one single element haha. Except for the linguistic relativism, it's actually an extremely accurate depiction of what linguistics work looks like. Of course, it is still a sci-fi movie and so it needs a little magic as well, and I won't begrudge it for that.
I'm not surprised about your medical friends though. Because everyone speaks a language, they people often thing that this makes them qualified to speak on linguistics, especially smart people.
I don't want to entirely overstate this though. For instance, if you present people with two shapes, one with a bunch of spikes and the other a more softer blob-like thing, tell them that one of them is called a bouba and one is called a kiki, and ask them to guess which is which, the vast majority of people with call the spikey one the kiki and the blobby one the bouba. So there are some curious inherent effects that language has on our perceptions, but they're subtle, and absolutely nothing like "you cannot imagine the mere concept of disobedience because you don't have a word for it".
I've heard of that research. Very cool. Some words definitely do have a shape don't they. I like the explanation of the 1984 bit.
My medical friends had the understanding that differences between languages in structure and syntax, even like, differences in conjugation, were correlated to physical differences in neuroanatomy. I pictured such things honing out certain neural pathways, and theorizing how it could have the effect of making certain rhetoric or logic more or less natural to learners of one language over another, perhaps. Thinking it might also effect how one might think about and perceive numbers or music.
Ah yeah, I have heard of similar things, particularly with differences in word order (subject-verb-object vs subject-object-verb, for example), and I don't doubt that there are some minor effects there. Ultimately though, my general understanding of the research is that any effects from this are quite small and don't really rise past the point of being little curiosities. In the grand scheme of things, all human languages are of essentially equivalent expressive power and all do essentially the same things, even if in different ways. This is perhaps not terribly surprising really, given that they're all running on the same hardware of a human brain.
I would note that there may be something of an slight over-correction in linguistic orthodoxy with topics like this, since efforts to prove the inferiority and simplicity of "savage" languages was a big effort in late 1800s and early 1900s scientific racism. I remember my professor once showing me a book written by the chair of Harvard's Linguistics Department talking about how the noble Sanskrit was corrupted by being mixed with too many "Orientals" until it became watered down into basic and dumb languages like Hindi. Hell, the entire theory of the Aryan race originated with linguistics, the term itself originally just being a (ultimately incorrect) term for Proto-Indo-European, the theoretical ancestor language of Greek, Slavic, Germanic, Celtic, Latin, Persian, Sanskrit, and some others, the idea being that any group of people whose descendants became all those great civilizations was obvious the pinnacle of humanity. It was of course noted that Hebrew does not belong to this family. The entire field - along with sociology in general - had a massive course correction after WWII for obvious reasons, and while this does align much closer to the actual truth, it has lead linguists to generally be quite reluctant to ever pursue the idea of any language being "better" in some way than others.