Linguists Find Proof of Sweeping Language Pattern Once Deemed a ‘Hoax’

Linguists find evidence of the sweeping pattern once a ‘hoax’ was considered

By Cody Cottier Edited by Allison Parshall

In 1884, anthropologist Franz Boas returned from Baffin Island with a discovery that would begin decades of linguistic disputes: on his own, the local Inuit language had four words for snow, suggesting a language between language and the physical environment. A great phone game inflated the number until, in 1984, the New York Times Published an editorial that states that the Inuit have “100 synonyms” for the frozen white things that we group under a single term.

Boas observation had increased to mythical proportions. In a 1991 essay, British linguist Geoff Pullum described these statements as a “deception”, citing the work of the linguist Laura Martin, who tracked the evolution of erroneous information. Hey liked the xenomorph of ForeignA creature that “seemed to arise everywhere once it is released in the spacecraft, and was very difficult to kill.” His scathing criticism made the taboo of the subject for a generation, says Victor Mair, a Chinese language expert at the University of Pennsylvania. But now, he says: “He is returning legitimately.”

In a new broad computational analysis of the languages ​​of the world, the researchers not only confirmed the emphasis on the inuit inuktitut, but also discovered many similar patterns: what is snow for the Inuit, lava is for Samoans and Scottish oatmeal. The results were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA. In April. Charles Kemp, a computational psychologist at the University of Melbourne in Australia and main author of the study, says that the results sacrima a window to the culture of languages ​​of languages. “It is a way of having an idea of ​​the main interests of a people,” which is important for a society, what they prioritize and value, “he says, citing Boas.

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The researchers analyzed bilingual dictionaries between English and more than 600 languages, looking for what they call “lexical elaboration”, in which a language has many words related to a central concept. It is the same phenomenon that fed the Inuit debate. But this study brings a turn: instead of the number or words, measured his Proportion, The portion of real estate of the dictionary is done by a concept. This produced elaboration scores for hundreds of concepts, from the “abandonment” to the “zoo”, based on English words for these concepts appeared in the definitions of foreign words. You can explore the results in this online module that shows what languages ​​most words have for each concept and what concepts most words have in each language.

Often, the elaboration is clearly a product of the environment: it is not surprising that Arabic languages, farce and Australian indigenous people abound with words to describe the desert, and Sanskrit, Tamil and Thai with words for elephants. Other cases are not so simple. Many oceanic languages, for example, have highly specific words for smell. In Marshallese, I & Lcedil; & Lcedil; & Amacr; Means “blood smell” and Jatbo It means “smell of wet clothes.” This can be explained by the moisture of the tropical jungle, which amplifies the aromas. But why is the concept of ecstasy so prominent in Portuguese and agony in Hindi? What historical and cultural circumstances do they conduct a language on such dark paths? “I’m not sure if you know everything,” says Kemp.

Mair says that this research, which stood out in the popular language record of the linguistic blog, helps to resurrect the very defamated idea of ​​linguistic relativity, sometimes known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. In its boldest form, linguistic relativity states that language determines how we perceive things, making speakers of different languages ​​experience the world in different ways (think of the film. Arrivalin which a character becomes clairvoyant after learning an alien language). But in Mair’s opinion, this study supports a softer statement: all our brains share the same basic machinery to comb the world, that language can subtly affect but not restrict. “It does not determine,” he says. “Influences.”

Similarly, Lynne Murphy, a linguist at the University of Sussex in England, which was not a center in this study, points out that “any language should be able to talk about anything.” We may not have the word Marshales JatboBut four English words make the trick: “smell of wet clothes.” It is not that having many precise words for smell reveals amazing cognitive skills for the smell of processing; It is simply that individual words are more efficient than phrases, so they tend to represent common discussion issues, highlighting the area or cultural importance. If we routinely needed to talk about the smell of wet clothes, we would reduce that difficult phrase to handle something like Jatbo.

Even so, “the lexical elaboration alone cannot tell us about the culture of its speakers,” at least not with certainty, says the main author of the study Temen Khishigsuren, a doctorate. Candidate at the University of Melbourne. And because this analysis was based on dictionaries, it comes with the biases and limitations of the lexicographers who wrote them. As Murphy says, “they offer only snapshots of a language at a private moment, from a partular angle.” Some of the dictionaries used have decades or centuries of antiquity, and may reflect the archaic conerns of the colonizers to translate the Bible or establish a commercial route and those of modern speakers. Fixed written language dictionaries such as German or Sanskrit are much larger than those of languages ​​that are spoken exclusively and loaded with esoteric terminology.

Because dictionaries do not represent how people use language in the real world, the next step would be to measure how people speak or write about the concepts that are studied, such snow, odors and elephants. This is difficult for languages ​​without large bodies or written text, but it could be possible for many languages, especially those that are largely used in social networks.

It has been remembering that the lexical elaborations of the thesis come from comparison between languages: French only has “many” words for uselessness because other languages ​​have less. And because all bilingual dictionaries in this study become English, it is the language in which everything else is translated, the analysis is influenced by the word used in English itself. If we find the elaboration patterns in another unusual language, it is safe to assume that their speakers will return the favor. “English is” different “like any other language,” says Murphy, which raises the question: “If we had begun, for example, Spanish or Chinese or Malayalam, what concepts would have been highlighted for English?”