1.) Which comes first, language or thought?

Infants are born with a language-independent system for thinking about objects, says Elizabeth
Spelke, a professor of psychology at Harvard. These concepts give meaning to the words they
learn later. Because languages differ in how they approach objects, many scientists suspected
that children must learn the relevant concepts as they learn their language. Thats wrong, Spelke
insists. Spelke and Susan Hespos, a psychologist at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tenn., did
some clever experiments to show that the idea of tight/loose fitting comes before the words that
are used/not used to describe it. When babies see something new, they will look at it until they
get bored. Hespos and Spelke used this well-known fact to show different groups of 5-month-
olds a series of cylinders being placed in and on tight- or loose-fitting containers. The babies
watched until they were bored and quit looking. After that happened, the researchers showed
them other objects that fit tightly or loosely together. The change got and held their attention for
a while, contrary to American college students who failed to notice it. This showed that babies
raised in English-speaking communities were sensitive to separate categories of meaning used
by Korean, but not by English, adult speakers. By the time the children grow up, their sensitivity
to this distinction is lost.

You might think our thoughts simply determine what we say. But maybe the language we speak
is what really determines the thoughts we can have. As Wittgenstein famously wrote, "The limits
of my language mean the limits of my world." And Benjamin Lee Whorf held that the language
you speak has a systematic influence on how you think about and interact with reality. John and
Ken wrestle with the relationship between language and thought with Lera Boroditsky from
Stanford University.

John and Ken begin by asking which comes first--language or thought? For a long time it seemed
like thought obviously came first, but more recent philosophy suggests that language molds our
thought more than previously considered. Ken points out that you can have a thought and then
express it in language, but also that your language creates the world for you and determines the
way you think. Ken argues that the categories of language allow us to interpret the world, while
John thinks that differentiating between categories of objects is a much easier task and evolves
far before language does. Is there any way to tease apart this chicken or the egg problem?

John and Ken introduce Lera Boroditsky, Professor of Cognitive Psychology at Stanford University.
John Perry asks Lera to explain the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis mentioned earlier--is language a
straight-jacket for thought? Lera describes how the connection between language and thought
was first noticed because different languages described the world in very different ways
structurally. She describes how different languages use different genders, tense, and case, and
how this may alter the way speakers of said language view the world--mainly that in languages
that use different genders or tenses or cases, these differences must be noticed in the real world
in order to be applied.
John points out that just because, say in Indonesian, there is no past tense that does not mean
that Indonesians have no sense of time. Lera agrees that language is sparse, and describes the
opposite of the Sapir-Whorf position which claims that everyone notices the same things about
the world, regardless of language. Ken asks for some stronger and weaker alternatives to these
disparate camps, and Lera describes how some of these theories can be altered to be more
reasonable and experimentally validated.

John, Ken, and Lera discuss the concept that certain things are just untranslatable between
languages, and even two individuals who speak the same language! Lera uses positions in sports
to illustrate these differences. Lera discusses experimental evidence for and against the Sapir-
Whorf hypothesis with callers who relate their own personal losses in translation and theories of
language and thought.

2.) Was it cultural features which then gave rise to the language needed to express
them or did the language itself condition how people thought about their
society?

For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable
and more often simply wrong. Research in my labs at Stanford University and at MIT has helped
reopen this question. We have collected data around the world: from China, Greece, Chile,
Indonesia, Russia, and Aboriginal Australia. What we have learned is that people who speak
different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly
affect how we see the world. Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our experience of
being human. Appreciating its role in constructing our mental lives brings us one step closer to
understanding the very nature of humanity.

Lera Boroditsky have described how languages shape the way we think about space, time, colors,
and objects. Other studies have found effects of language on how people construe events, reason
about causality, keep track of number, understand material substance, perceive and experience
emotion, reason about other people's minds, choose to take risks, and even in the way they
choose professions and spouses.8 Taken together, these results show that linguistic processes
are pervasive in most fundamental domains of thought, unconsciously shaping us from the nuts
and bolts of cognition and perception to our loftiest abstract notions and major life decisions.
Language is central to our experience of being human, and the languages we speak profoundly
shape the way we think, the way we see the world, the way we live our lives.

3.) If the language came first, did that limit how people thought about their
society?

The cultural anthropologist and ethnologist Franz Boas established the link between language
and behaviour from his studies of native American communities. He concluded that: 'The peculiar
characteristics of languages are clearly reflected in the views and customs of the people of the
world' (Boas, 1938: 31). He maintained that it was necessary to view the world around us through
the eyes Of Other cultures if we really wanted to understand it.
However, Noam Chomsky (1975) supports the existence of linguistic universals (universal
grammar), but rejects the existence of cultural universals. Chomsky is supported by Steven
Pinker, who resists the idea that language shapes thought.

Modern linguists tend to put the emphasis on the potential for thinking to be influenced rather
than unavoidably determined by language. The American resealther Lena Boroditsky (2001) also
criticizes the polarization of thought which leads to thinking that one feature influences the other.
She maintains that thete is a symbiotic relationship between language and the way we think
about culture, with each constantly influencing the other.

In the language versus culture debate, it is clear that sharing a language implies sharing a culture;
for example, in Belgium, where Flemish and French are the main shared languages, the scores
Of the Flemish and French-speaking regions are on Hofstede's four dimensions of culture very
similar to each other, but different from those of the Netherlands.

Without knowing the language well, one misses a lot of the subtleties of a culture, for example,
humour, and one is forced to remain a relative outsider. Therefore, in the cross-cultural
encounter, experienced travellers recognize that it is prudent to avoid jokes and irony until they
are sure of the other culture's perception of what represents acceptable humour: 'The essence
of effective cross-cultural communication has more to do with releasing the right responses than
sending the right message' (Hall and Hall, 1990:4).

SOURCES:

Spelke, E. (2004, July 22) Which comes first, language or thought?. Retrieved from
http://news.harvard.edu.

Boroditsky, L. (2006, October 22) Language and Thought. Retrieved from

https://www.philosophytalk.org.

Boroditsky, L. (2009, June 11) How does our language shape the way we think?. Retrieved from
https://www.edge.org.

B. Hurn, B. Tomalin (2013, May 7) Cross-Cultural Communicaton. Springer