Poly-linguals keep claiming that Sapir-Whorf is really true.
Overgeneralization. I do not know how many languages does one need to know to be considered polylingual, but if 6 is enough, then let me say this:
Yes, some concepts are carved differently in different languages, and it feels… strange… when one encounters this for the first time. Sometimes it is kind of scary when you realize that you can express a concept in a foreign language, but there are no words in your native language that would describe it with equal power, and you can only use a sentence or two to describe what in the other language you could have said directly by using one word, or just slightly modifying an inflection.
This effect is often exaggerated ad absurdum, probably because it is useful for some theories or even politically (“if we could make people use different words, we could build a perfect society”) and for polylinguals it is good for signalling (“man, I speak foreign languages, and it totally gave me magical powers”). I predict that this effect is stronger in predominantly monolingual societies.
As an example, it is often said that people would be less sexist if they stop using words “he” and “she”, and find some gender-neutral pronoun. If you believe this, you should go to Hungary, because in Hungarian language there is no word for “he” or “she”, there is only a gender-neutral pronoun… but the Hungarian society is more or less the same as in surrounding countries. So I consider this theory experimentally disproved on sample of millions of people—and yet I predict that most LW-ers will not update zir / eir / vis / shklir opinion on this.
Also, there is a question of how many time should one invest to these polylingual insights. Let’s say that after 2000 hours of study of foreign languages you have found dozen occasions where the wordspace is divided differently in different languages. Should you invest another 2000 hours to find another dozen examples? You will probably hit diminishing returns, because languages are similar, they evolved from each other. What is the cost/benefit analysis of this? If I tell you that in Russian there is no word for “blue”, only words for “dark blue” and “light blue”, how much enlightened do you feel? How many hours of your time would you like to pay for this mystical knowledge?
Learning languages is good if you want to communicate with other people. And as a side-effect it gives you a few insights, but if your goal are only the insights, then you can use your time much better.
EDIT: And to be less of a hypocrite, I admit that learning languages can also be a beautiful hobby. But there is no need to rationalize it by pretending it gives you more that it does.
That said, once a linguistic structure has been culturally associated (however arbitrarily) to a particular ideological position, using that linguistic structure within that culture signals (however inaccurately) one’s association with that position. For example, the signaling effects of using gendered and ungendered pronouns are more or less independent of the social-engineering effects of those pronouns.
And, of course, signaling choices have social-engineering effects of their own. My using, or not using, linguistic structures that are (however arbitrarily) culturally associated with sexism (once those structures are known to exist) has an effect on how acceptable I am perceived as considering sexism to be, which in turn has an effect on how acceptable sexism is perceived to be more generally.
So I consider this theory experimentally disproved on sample of millions of people—and yet I predict that most LW-ers will not update zir / eir / vis / shklir opinion on this
You just convinced me that removing grammatical gender does not make society less sexist. (I still believe that using gender-neutral pronouns or phrases instead of a single gendered pronoun does, and that having a gender-neutral pronoun at all makes society less biased against genderqueers.)
I parsed your comment as: “using genderless pronouns reduces sexism; but using genderless language does not reduce sexism”.
Then I imagined a graph where x-axis is how large part of the language is gendered, and y-axis is how much this makes people sexist. So at the beginning the curve starts going down (because this is what you believe), and at the end it jumps back right to the original level (to catch the new data point). Sounds ad-hoc to me.
Or let me put it in different words: If you think that language structure has an effect on sexism, how exactly would you structure the language to produce minimum sexism possible (ideally zero)? For some reason, removing gramatical genders completely seems not optimal. -- So if you would start with a language that does not have gramatical genders, would you actually add them to the language to make it less sexist?
Note: You have an option to defy my data, because I actually don’t have a proof that Hungarians are not less sexist. It honestly seems to me so, but that is not completely reliable.
Another option is to say that the influence of language on sexism is not strictly f(language), but more like f(language.today, language.yesterday), so it is not precisely the absence of single-gendered pronouns, but rather their recent (or ongoing) removal that reduces sexism. (They I would say that it is backwards: non-sexism removes pronouns, pronouns don’t remove sexism.)
I previously believed that removing some amount of mentions of gender in language (e.g. replacing “he or she” with “they”) would reduce sexism. If I met a society where white people were referred to as “whe” and black people as “ble”, I would think “Wow, that society is pretty racist”. By analogy, I think our society is pretty sexist. There are reasons why removing some gendered language, like pronouns, or all grammatical gender, would make people less sexist; for example, they would not be constantly primed to think of gender and thus act in gender-dependent ways. Hungary disproves this (no need to defy your data, I believe you).
However, I still believe that removing unbalanced mentions of gender (e.g. replacing epicene “he” with “he or she”) reduces sexism. (In the aforementioned society, there’s a proverb that goes “An Englishwhite’s house is whis castle”, and if asked everyone tells you that it also applies to blacks and other races.) They don’t just constantly remind people that gender exists, they also remind them that there is a default gender for people to be and anything else is a special quirk. As efforts to remove these mentions usually come from people who fight sexism in general, it’s very hard to test whether there is any causation flowing this way rather than the other one.
I also believe that having a pronoun applicable to genderqueers helps, because it contributes to making it a recognizable category (wearing black, not wearing a clown suit). This is probably swamped by other ways to make the existence of more than two genders noticeable.
While I was offline, I realized that there are two aspects of this situation. First, whether gendered words exist in given language or not. Second, whether they are used correctly or incorrectly (such as using male pronoun “he” in situations where female person is also possible). These are partially independent (even in a language without gramatical genders it is possible to use constructs such as “director-man” and “director-woman”, and then incorrectly use the word “director-man” in situations not limited to male persons).
Now in your comment I see the third aspect; whether there is a gender-neutral pronoun for people who don’t identify as “he” or “she”. Construct “he or she” is bad, because even when it tries to describe a superset, does it by enumerating subsets. I don’t see any problem with singular “they”, but I am not a native English speaker.
I am afraid that inventing a new pronoun specifically for genderqueers would lead to infinite discussions… such as whether the same pronoun should be used for all kinds of genderqueers, or whether there should be different pronouns for different groups, and everyone would accuse everyone of insensitivity because they use last-year pronouns instead of the most current update. (Evidence: there is still not consensus on the gender-neutral pronoun, and that should be much easier task.)
Yup, those are the three aspects I’m talking about.
I’ve never seen anyone demand a pronoun that didn’t cover binary people, only gender-neutral ones. Having to make do with “he”, “she” and combinations thereof is insufficient.
Overgeneralization. I do not know how many languages does one need to know to be considered polylingual, but if 6 is enough, then let me say this:
Yes, some concepts are carved differently in different languages, and it feels… strange… when one encounters this for the first time. Sometimes it is kind of scary when you realize that you can express a concept in a foreign language, but there are no words in your native language that would describe it with equal power, and you can only use a sentence or two to describe what in the other language you could have said directly by using one word, or just slightly modifying an inflection.
This effect is often exaggerated ad absurdum, probably because it is useful for some theories or even politically (“if we could make people use different words, we could build a perfect society”) and for polylinguals it is good for signalling (“man, I speak foreign languages, and it totally gave me magical powers”). I predict that this effect is stronger in predominantly monolingual societies.
As an example, it is often said that people would be less sexist if they stop using words “he” and “she”, and find some gender-neutral pronoun. If you believe this, you should go to Hungary, because in Hungarian language there is no word for “he” or “she”, there is only a gender-neutral pronoun… but the Hungarian society is more or less the same as in surrounding countries. So I consider this theory experimentally disproved on sample of millions of people—and yet I predict that most LW-ers will not update zir / eir / vis / shklir opinion on this.
Also, there is a question of how many time should one invest to these polylingual insights. Let’s say that after 2000 hours of study of foreign languages you have found dozen occasions where the wordspace is divided differently in different languages. Should you invest another 2000 hours to find another dozen examples? You will probably hit diminishing returns, because languages are similar, they evolved from each other. What is the cost/benefit analysis of this? If I tell you that in Russian there is no word for “blue”, only words for “dark blue” and “light blue”, how much enlightened do you feel? How many hours of your time would you like to pay for this mystical knowledge?
Learning languages is good if you want to communicate with other people. And as a side-effect it gives you a few insights, but if your goal are only the insights, then you can use your time much better.
EDIT: And to be less of a hypocrite, I admit that learning languages can also be a beautiful hobby. But there is no need to rationalize it by pretending it gives you more that it does.
Absolutely agreed, as far as it goes.
That said, once a linguistic structure has been culturally associated (however arbitrarily) to a particular ideological position, using that linguistic structure within that culture signals (however inaccurately) one’s association with that position. For example, the signaling effects of using gendered and ungendered pronouns are more or less independent of the social-engineering effects of those pronouns.
And, of course, signaling choices have social-engineering effects of their own. My using, or not using, linguistic structures that are (however arbitrarily) culturally associated with sexism (once those structures are known to exist) has an effect on how acceptable I am perceived as considering sexism to be, which in turn has an effect on how acceptable sexism is perceived to be more generally.
You just convinced me that removing grammatical gender does not make society less sexist. (I still believe that using gender-neutral pronouns or phrases instead of a single gendered pronoun does, and that having a gender-neutral pronoun at all makes society less biased against genderqueers.)
I parsed your comment as: “using genderless pronouns reduces sexism; but using genderless language does not reduce sexism”.
Then I imagined a graph where x-axis is how large part of the language is gendered, and y-axis is how much this makes people sexist. So at the beginning the curve starts going down (because this is what you believe), and at the end it jumps back right to the original level (to catch the new data point). Sounds ad-hoc to me.
Or let me put it in different words: If you think that language structure has an effect on sexism, how exactly would you structure the language to produce minimum sexism possible (ideally zero)? For some reason, removing gramatical genders completely seems not optimal. -- So if you would start with a language that does not have gramatical genders, would you actually add them to the language to make it less sexist?
Note: You have an option to defy my data, because I actually don’t have a proof that Hungarians are not less sexist. It honestly seems to me so, but that is not completely reliable.
Another option is to say that the influence of language on sexism is not strictly f(language), but more like f(language.today, language.yesterday), so it is not precisely the absence of single-gendered pronouns, but rather their recent (or ongoing) removal that reduces sexism. (They I would say that it is backwards: non-sexism removes pronouns, pronouns don’t remove sexism.)
That’s not what I said. Let me rephrase:
I previously believed that removing some amount of mentions of gender in language (e.g. replacing “he or she” with “they”) would reduce sexism. If I met a society where white people were referred to as “whe” and black people as “ble”, I would think “Wow, that society is pretty racist”. By analogy, I think our society is pretty sexist. There are reasons why removing some gendered language, like pronouns, or all grammatical gender, would make people less sexist; for example, they would not be constantly primed to think of gender and thus act in gender-dependent ways. Hungary disproves this (no need to defy your data, I believe you).
However, I still believe that removing unbalanced mentions of gender (e.g. replacing epicene “he” with “he or she”) reduces sexism. (In the aforementioned society, there’s a proverb that goes “An Englishwhite’s house is whis castle”, and if asked everyone tells you that it also applies to blacks and other races.) They don’t just constantly remind people that gender exists, they also remind them that there is a default gender for people to be and anything else is a special quirk. As efforts to remove these mentions usually come from people who fight sexism in general, it’s very hard to test whether there is any causation flowing this way rather than the other one.
I also believe that having a pronoun applicable to genderqueers helps, because it contributes to making it a recognizable category (wearing black, not wearing a clown suit). This is probably swamped by other ways to make the existence of more than two genders noticeable.
While I was offline, I realized that there are two aspects of this situation. First, whether gendered words exist in given language or not. Second, whether they are used correctly or incorrectly (such as using male pronoun “he” in situations where female person is also possible). These are partially independent (even in a language without gramatical genders it is possible to use constructs such as “director-man” and “director-woman”, and then incorrectly use the word “director-man” in situations not limited to male persons).
Now in your comment I see the third aspect; whether there is a gender-neutral pronoun for people who don’t identify as “he” or “she”. Construct “he or she” is bad, because even when it tries to describe a superset, does it by enumerating subsets. I don’t see any problem with singular “they”, but I am not a native English speaker.
I am afraid that inventing a new pronoun specifically for genderqueers would lead to infinite discussions… such as whether the same pronoun should be used for all kinds of genderqueers, or whether there should be different pronouns for different groups, and everyone would accuse everyone of insensitivity because they use last-year pronouns instead of the most current update. (Evidence: there is still not consensus on the gender-neutral pronoun, and that should be much easier task.)
Yup, those are the three aspects I’m talking about.
I’ve never seen anyone demand a pronoun that didn’t cover binary people, only gender-neutral ones. Having to make do with “he”, “she” and combinations thereof is insufficient.