Pitch perfect

Consider the simple interrogative English sentence, "She gave the package to him today?"

Now, change one at a time which word is stressed:

• "She gave the package to him today?"
• "She gave the package to him today?"
• "She gave the package to him today?"
• "She gave the package to him today?"
• "She gave the package to him today?"

English isn't a tonal language -- where patterns of rise and fall of pitch change the meaning of a word -- but stress (usually as marked by pitch and loudness changes) sure can change the connotation of a sentence.  In the above example, the first one communicates incredulity that she was the one who delivered the package (the speaker expected someone else to do it), while the last one clearly indicates that the package should have been handed over some other time than today.

In tonal languages, like Mandarin, Thai, and Vietnamese, pitch shifts within words completely change the word's meaning.  In Mandarin, for example, mā (the vowel spoken with a high level tone) means "mother," while mă (the vowel spoken with a dip in tone in the middle, followed by a quick rise) means "horse."  While this may sound complex to people -- like myself -- who don't speak a tonal language, if you learn it as a child it simply becomes another marker of meaning, like the stress shifts I gave in my first example.  My guess is that if you're a native English speaker, if you heard any of the above sentences spoken aloud, you wouldn't even have to think about what subtext the speaker was trying to communicate.

What's interesting about all this is that because most of us learn spoken language when we're very little, which language(s) we're exposed to alters the wiring of the language-interpretive structures in our brain.  Exposed to distinctive differences early (like tonality shifts in Mandarin), and our brains adjust to handle those differences and interpret them easily.  It works the other way, too; the Japanese liquid consonant /ɾ/, such as the second consonant in the city name Hiroshima, is usually transcribed into English as an "r" but the sound it represents is often described as halfway between an English /r/ and and English /l/.  Technically, it's an apico-alveolar tap -- similar to the middle consonant in the most common American English pronunciation of bitter and butter.  The fascinating part is that monolingual Japanese children lose the sense of a distinction between /r/ and /l/, and when learning English as a second language, not only often have a hard time pronouncing them as different phonemes, they have a hard time hearing the difference when listening to native English speakers.

All of this is yet another example of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis -- that the language(s) you speak alter your neurology, and therefore how you perceive the world -- something I've written about here before.

The reason all this comes up is a study in Current Biology this week showing that the language we speak modifies our musical ability -- and that speakers of tonal languages show an enhanced ability to remember melodies, but a decreased ability to mimic rhythms.  Makes sense, of course; if tone carries meaning in the language you speak, it's understandable your brain pays better attention to tonal shifts.

The rhythm thing, though, is interesting.  I've always had a natural rhythmic sense; my bandmate once quipped that if one of us played a wrong note, it was probably me, but if someone screwed up the rhythm, it was definitely her.  Among other styles, I play a lot of Balkan music, which is known for its oddball asymmetrical rhythms -- such wacky time signatures as 7/8, 11/16, 18/16, and (I kid you not) 25/16:

I picked up Balkan rhythms really quickly.  I have no idea where this ability came from.  I grew up in a relatively non-musical family -- neither of my parents played an instrument, and while we had records that were played occasionally, nobody in my extended family has anywhere near the passion for music that I do.  I have a near-photographic memory for melodies, and an innate sense of rhythm -- whatever its source.

In any case, the study is fascinating, and gives us some interesting clues about the link between language and music, and that the language we speak remodels our brain and changes how we hear and understand the music we listen to..  The two are deeply intertwined, there's no doubt about that; singing is a universal phenomenon.  And making music of other sorts goes back to our Neanderthal forebears, on the order of forty thousand years ago, to judge by the Divje Babe bone flute.

I wonder how this might be connected to what music we react emotionally to.  This is something I've wondered about for ages; why certain music (a good example for me is Stravinsky's Firebird) creates a powerful emotional reaction, and other pieces generate nothing more than a shoulder shrug.

Maybe I need to listen to Firebird and ponder the question further.

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The lenses of language

When we think of the word "endangered," usually what comes to mind isn't "languages," but there are a staggering number of languages for which the last native speakers will be gone in the next few decades.  Of the seven-thousand-odd languages currently spoken in the world, ten of them -- a little over a tenth of a percent of the total -- are the main language of 4.9 billion people, about sixty percent of the Earth's population.

It's easy to see why biological diversity is critical to an ecosystem; species can evolve such narrow niches that if they become extinct, that niche vanishes, along with everything that depended on it.  It's a little harder to put a finger on why linguistic diversity is critical.  If some obscure language spoken in the Australian Outback disappears, who (other than linguists) should care?

I choose Australia deliberately.  Since the first major contact between indigenous Australians and Europeans, in 1788 when the "First Fleet" of convicts from England and Wales landed in what is now Sydney Harbor, over half of the 250 or so indigenous languages have vanished completely.  About 110 are still in use, primarily by the older generation, and only twenty are in common usage and still being learned by children as their first language.

Language is such an integral part of cultural identity that this is nothing short of tragic.  But the loss goes even deeper than that.  The language(s) we speak change the way we see the world.  Take, for example, the Guugu Yimithirr language, spoken in one small village in the far north of Queensland, which has 775 native speakers left.  This language has the odd characteristic -- shared, so far as I know, only with a handful of languages in Siberia -- of not having words for left, right, in front of, and behind.  The position of an object is always described in terms of the four cardinal directions.  Right now, for example, my laptop wouldn't be "in front of me;" it would be "southeast of me."

When the Guugu Yimithirr people first came into contact with English speakers, they at first were completely baffled by what left and right even meant.  When it finally sunk in what the English speakers were trying to explain, the Guugu Yimithirr thought it was hilarious.  "Everything in the world depends on the position of your body?" they said.  "And when you turn your body, the entire world changes shape?  What an arrogant people you must be."

Every language lost robs us of a unique lens through which to see the universe.

The reason this rather elegiac topic comes up is because of another place that is a hotspot for endangered languages -- South America.  Last week it was announced that Cristina Calderón, of Puerto Williams in southern Chile, died at the age of 93.  Calderón, known to locals as Abuela Cristina, was the last native speaker of Yaghan, an indigenous language in Tierra del Fuego.  Not only was Yaghan down to a single native speaker, the language itself is a linguistic isolate -- a language that shows no relationship to any other language known.

So this isn't like losing a single species; it's like losing an entire family of species.

The government of Chile, in a well-meant but too-little-too-late effort, is funding the development of an educational curriculum in Yaghan, as well as a complete (or complete as it can be) Yaghan-Spanish dictionary.  The problem is -- as anyone who has learned a second language can attest -- there's a world of difference between second-language acquisition and learning your native language.  As Calderón put it, "I'm the last speaker of Yaghan.  Others can understand it but don't speak it or know it like I do."

As far as Yaghan's fascinating characteristics, the one that jumps out at me is the presence of rich sound symbolism.  This isn't onomatopoeia (like the words bang and boom in English), but is when a phonemic feature tends to show up in words with similar meanings.  Sound symbolism of some sort seems to be pretty universal.  The most famous example is the "kiki-bouba effect," discovered in 1929 by linguist Wolfgang Köhler.  Köhler made two simple drawings:

He then asked people of various linguistic and cultural backgrounds one question: a newly-discovered language has names for these two shapes.  One of them is called kiki and the other is called bouba.  Which is which?

Across the board, people identified the left-hand one as kiki and the right-hand one as bouba.  Something about the /k/ and /i/ phonemes in kiki was associated with sharpness and angularity (and negative or harsh concepts), and the /b/ and /u/ phonemes in bouba with softness and roundness (and positive or pleasant concepts).  It shows up in English in words like screech and scream and creep, and bubble and bless and billow -- but it's an effect that has shown up in just about every language where it's been tested.

In Yaghan, the sound symbolism is much richer.  It's usually connected with the beginnings or ends of the words -- words ending in /m/ often connote something rounded or soft (think of lump and bump in English), while /x/ at the end often connects with something dry or brittle.  An initial /tʃ/ (pronounced like the first sound in the word chip) is frequently associated with objects with spines or thorns or sharp edges.  And so on.

How does this shape how a native Yaghan speaker sees, understands, and classifies the world?

I know that language extinction isn't really preventable, at least not in the larger sense; languages have been splitting and evolving and going extinct for as long as our ancestors have had the capacity for speech.  But I can't help but feel that the primacy a handful of languages have achieved over the thousands of other ways to communicate is robbing us of some of the depth of the human experience.  Especially when you consider that a significant component of that primacy has been the determination by colonizers to eradicate the culture of indigenous groups and replace it with their own.

So in the grand scheme of things, it may not mean all that much that the last native speaker of Yaghan is gone.  But I still feel sad about it.  It's only by looking at the world through a new lens that we find out how limited our own view is -- and how much that view can expand by observing our knowledge through a different one.

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In the long tradition of taking something that works and changing it so it doesn't work anymore, Amazon has seen fit to seriously complicate how content creators (i.e. people like me) incorporate affiliate links in their online content.  I'm trying to see if I can figure out how to get it to work, but until that happens, I am unfortunately going to suspend my Skeptophilia book-of-the-week feature.  If I can get it up and running again with the new system, I'll resume.  I'll keep you updated.

Keeping count

I'm fortunate to have been raised in a bilingual home.  My mother's first language was French, and my dad (son of a father of French and a mother of Scottish descent) was also fluent, although much more comfortable in English.  The result is that my parents spoke French in front of me (and also with our older relatives) when they didn't want me to understand, which was a hell of an incentive to learn listening comprehension, although -- as I found out later -- a bit of a problem when you're actually called upon to speak it yourself.

My Uncle Sidney, my mother's brother, didn't help matters much, because he was extremely fluent in the art of the French swear word.  He taught me a good many really creative expressions when I was still quite young, but I found out pretty quickly that when Uncle Sidney said, "Go ask your mother what ____ means," it was better to remain in ignorance than to incite my prim and prudish mom's ire.

Eventually, despite the impediments, I learned to speak French fairly well.  I distinctly recall, though, how baffled I was when I first learned the French counting system.

Even living in a Francophone household, it struck me as weird right from the get-go.  One through ten, no problem.  Like English, eleven and twelve have their own special names (onze and douze).  But... so do thirteen through sixteen.  Then seventeen, eighteen, and nineteen translate, respectively, to ten-seven, ten-eight, and ten-nine.

Things don't go really off the rails until you hit seventy.  Sixty is soixante; seventy is soixante-dix (sixty-ten). Then we reach eighty -- quatre-vingt -- literally, "four-twenty."

For what it's worth, ninety-seven is quatre-vingt dix-sept -- four-twenty ten-seven.

I read French pretty well, but when I hit a number with more than two digits, I still have to stop and do some mental arithmetic to figure it out.

Turns out I'm not alone.  A study by Iro Xenidou-Dervou of Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam et al. found that even when you control for other factors, the language a child speaks (so the counting system (s)he learns) has an effect on the facility with which the child learns arithmetic.  The more it corresponds to a simple, regular base-10 system, the better the child is at learning math.

On the extremely logical side, we have Chinese.  In Mandarin, ninety-two is jiǔ shí èr -- "nine-ten-two."  We've already looked at French (where it would be "four-twenty-twelve").  But for my money, the winner in the what-the-fuck-were-you-thinking department would be Danish, where ninety-two is tooghalvfems, where halvfems (ninety) is an abbreviation of the Old Norse halvfemsindstyve, or "four and a half times twenty."

And don't even get me started about Roman numerals. [Image licensed under the Creative Commons Дмитрий Окольников, Roman numerals!, CC BY-SA 4.0]

"The fact that they were the same in every other aspect, apart from the condition where two digits showed up, shows you that it's the language that is making the difference," said study lead author Xenidou-Dervou, in an interview with BBC.  "The effects are small, and yet this is numeracy at its most basic, just estimating a number on a line.  As adults, we're doing very complicated tasks in our daily lives, and so even small difficulties caused by the number naming system could potentially be an additive hurdle to everyday mathematical skills."

All of this brings back a subject that's fascinated me since my days as a graduate student in linguistics: the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.  This is the idea that the language we grow up with profoundly influences our brain wiring -- so not only does our cognitive development influence our language learning, our language learning influences our cognitive development.  I found out about a particularly cool example of this when I was reading the brilliant book The Last Speakers, by K. David Harrison, which was an attempt to chronicle some of the world's most endangered languages.  When Harrison was traveling with a tribe in Siberia, he was intrigued to find out that they had no words for "right," "left," "behind," and "in front of."  Everything was described in terms of the cardinal directions.  So right now, my computer isn't in front of me; it's south of me.  (They also have direction-related words meaning "upstream" and "downstream.")

Anyhow, Harrison was trying to talk to one of the tribal elders about why that was, and all he got from him for a time was frank bafflement.  It was as if he couldn't even quite understand what Harrison was driving at.  Then, all of a sudden, he burst into gales of laughter.  "Really?" he said to Harrison.  "That's how you see the world?  So that tree is in one place, but if you turn around, it's now in a different place?  Everything in the world is relative to the position of your body, so when you move, the entire universe shifts around you?  What an arrogant people you must be!"

I know that these days, Sapir-Whorf is kind of out of vogue with linguists, but studies like the one by Xenidou-Dervou et al. make me realize how deeply woven together our cognition and our language is.  We create our world with our words, and the words we learn shape the reality we are able to see.

Including whether we say "ninety-two" or -- in old-system Welsh -- dau ar ddeg a phedwar ugain.

Literally, "two on ten and four twenties."

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation of the week is a fun one -- George Zaidan's Ingredients: The Strange Chemistry of What We Put In Us and On Us.  Springboarding off the loony recommendations that have been rampant in the last few years -- fad diets, alarmist warnings about everything from vaccines to sunscreen, the pros and cons of processed food, substances that seem to be good for us one week and bad for us the next, Zaidan goes through the reality behind the hype, taking apart the claims in a way that is both factually accurate and laugh-out-loud funny.

And high time.  Bogus health claims, fueled by such sites as Natural News, are potentially dangerous.  Zaidan's book holds a lens up to the chemicals we ingest, inhale, and put on our skin -- and will help you sort the fact from the fiction.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

The universal language

Sometimes I have thoughts that blindside me.

The last time that happened was three days ago, while I was working in my office and our elderly coonhound, Lena, was snoozing on the floor.  Well, as sometimes happens to dogs, she started barking and twitching in her sleep, and followed it up with sinister-sounding growls -- all the more amusing because while awake, Lena is about as threatening as your average plush toy.

So my thought, naturally, is to wonder what she was dreaming about.  Which got me thinking about my own dreams, and recalling some recent ones.  I remembered some images, but mostly what came to mind were narratives -- first I did this, then the slimy tentacled monster did that.

That's when the blindside happened.  Because Lena, clearly dreaming, was doing all that without language.

How would thinking occur without language?  For almost all humans, our thought processes are intimately tied to words.  In fact, the experience of having an experience or thought that isn't describable using words is so unusual that we have a word for it -- ineffable.

Mostly, though, our experience is completely, um, effable.  So much so that trying to imagine how a dog (or any other animal) experiences the world without language is, for me at least, nearly impossible.

What's interesting is how powerful this drive toward language is.  There have been studies of pairs of "feral children" who grew up together but with virtually no interaction with adults, and in several cases those children invented spoken languages with which to communicate -- each complete with its own syntax, morphology, and phonetic structure.

A fascinating new study that came out last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, detailing research by Manuel Bohn, Gregor Kachel, and Michael Tomasello of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, showed that you don't even need the extreme conditions of feral children to induce the invention of a new mode of symbolic communication.  The researchers set up Skype conversations between monolingual English-speaking children in the United States and monolingual German-speaking children in Germany, but simulated a computer malfunction where the sound didn't work.  They then instructed the children to communicate as best they could anyhow, and gave them some words/concepts to try to get across.

They started out with some easy ones.  "Eating" resulted in the child miming eating from a plate, unsurprisingly.  But they moved to harder ones -- like "white."  How do you communicate the absence of color?  One girl came up with an idea -- she was wearing a polka-dotted t-shirt, and pointed to a white dot, and got the idea across.

But here's the interesting part.  When the other child later in the game had to get the concept of "white" across to his partner, he didn't have access to anything white to point to.  He simply pointed to the same spot on his shirt that the girl had pointed to earlier -- and she got it immediately.

Language is defined as arbitrary symbolic communication.  Arbitrary because with the exception of a few cases like onomatopoeic words (bang, pow, ping, etc.) there is no logical connection between the sound of a word and its referent.  Well, here we have a beautiful case of the origin of an arbitrary symbol -- in this case, a gesture -- that gained meaning only because the recipient of the gesture understood the context.

I'd like to know if such a gesture-language could gain another characteristic of true language -- transmissibility.  "It would be very interesting to see how the newly invented communication systems change over time, for example when they are passed on to new 'generations' of users," said study lead author Manuel Bohn, in an interview with Science Daily.  "There is evidence that language becomes more systematic when passed on."

Because this, after all, is when languages start developing some of the peculiarities (also seemingly arbitrary) that led Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf to develop the hypothesis that now bears their names -- that the language we speak alters our brains and changes how we understand abstract concepts.  In K. David Harrison's brilliant book The Last Speakers, he tells us about a conversation with some members of a nomadic tribe in Siberia who always described positions of objects relative to the four cardinal directions -- so my coffee cup wouldn't be on my right, it would be south of me.  When Harrison tried to explain to his Siberian friends how we describe positions, at first he was greeted with outright bafflement.

Then, they all erupted in laughter.  How arrogant, they told him, that you see everything as relative to your own body position -- as if when you turn around, suddenly the entire universe shifts to compensate for your movement!

[Image available under a license at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Human_Language_Families_Map.PNG]

Another interesting example of this was the subject of a 2017 study by linguists Emanuel Bylund and Panos Athanasopoulos, and focused not on our experience of space but of time.  And they found something downright fascinating.  Some languages (like English) are "future-in-front," meaning we think of the future as lying ahead of us and the past behind us, turning time into something very much like a spatial dimension.  Other languages retain the spatial aspect, but reverse the direction -- such as the Peruvian language of Aymara.  For them, the past is in front, because you can remember it, just as you can see what's in front of you.  The future is behind you -- therefore invisible.

Mandarin takes the spatial axis and turns it on its head -- the future is down, the past is up (so the literal translation of the Mandarin expression of "next week" is "down week").  Asked to order photographs of someone in childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age, they will place them vertically, with the youngest on top.  English and Swedish speakers tend to think of time as a line running from left (past) to right (future); Spanish and Greek speakers tended to picture time as a spatial volume, as if it were something filling a container (so emptier = past, fuller = future).

All of which underlines how fundamental to our thinking language is.  And further baffles me when I try to imagine how other animals think.  Because whatever Lena was imagining in her dream, she was clearly understanding and interacting with it -- even if she didn't know to attach the word "squirrel" to the concept.

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This week's book recommendation is a fascinating journey into a topic we've visited often here at Skeptophilia -- the question of how science advances.

In The Second Kind of Impossible, Princeton University physicist Paul Steinhardt describes his thirty-year-long quest to prove the existence of a radically new form of matter, something he terms quasicrystals, materials that are ordered but non-periodic.  Faced for years with scoffing from other scientists, who pronounced the whole concept impossible, Steinhardt persisted, ultimately demonstrating that an aluminum-manganese alloy he and fellow physicists Luca Bindi created had all the characteristics of a quasicrystal -- a discovery that earned them the 2018 Aspen Institute Prize for Collaboration and Scientific Research.

Steinhardt's book, however, doesn't bog down in technical details.  It reads like a detective story -- a scientist's search for evidence to support his explanation for a piece of how the world works.  It's a fascinating tale of persistence, creativity, and ingenuity -- one that ultimately led to a reshaping of our understanding of matter itself.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Order of operations

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the idea, first codified in the 1930s by linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, that a speaker's language affects his/her cognition and brain wiring.  It's still a controversial idea now, eighty-some-odd years later.  Some linguists buy it, often citing examples such as the languages of a couple of Siberian nomad groups that have no words for left, right, in front of, and behind -- they relate everything to cardinal directions.  (To them, my coffee cup is currently east of me, not to my left.)  Investigations into these speakers have suggested that they have trouble even comprehending left and right -- when linguist and anthropologist David Harrison went there and tried to explain the concept, it elicited puzzled laughter.  "You people are arrogant," they told Harrison.  "You orient the entire world relative to the position of your own body?  So when you turn around the entire world changes shape?  Ridiculous."

Other linguists are not so sanguine.  There is evidence to suggest that any concept could potentially be expressed in any language by any speaker, and the oddness of left and right to the Siberians doesn't reflect their brain wiring any more than my inability to understand multivariate statistics reflects mine.  If I were sufficiently motivated and worked hard enough, I could learn whatever I wanted, and so can they; just because concepts are unfamiliar to a group doesn't mean their brains are wired differently.

The pro-Sapir-Whorf group got a bit of a boost this week from the publication in Scientific Reports of a study by Federica Amici, Alex Sánchez-Amaro, Carla Sebastián-Enesco, Trix Cacchione, Matthias Allritz, Juan Salazar-Bonet, and Federico Rossano, of the Max Planck Institute, the University of Florida, and the University of California-San Diego, called, "The Word Order of Languages Predicts Native Speakers' Working Memory."  The gist of the experiment is that the researchers looked at differences in working memory between native speakers of languages that tended to put modifiers after the verbs or nouns they modify (the languages they chose in this category were Thai, Ndonga, Khmer, and Italian) and ones where the modifiers usually come in front (Sidaama, Khoekhoe, Korean, and Japanese).

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons M. Adiputra, Globe of language, CC BY-SA 3.0]

They recruited between twenty and thirty volunteers for each language, and  gave them tests of their working memory, and found a clear correlation.  Speakers of languages where modifiers precede the noun or verb tended to have better working memory than those who speak languages where the modifiers follow the verb.  The guess they have is that for the first group, you have to keep track of the modifiers without knowing what noun or verb they'll apply to; for the second, you find out the noun or verb first, and simply modify it as you go along.

The authors write:

As predicted, LB [left-branching, languages where the modifiers come first] and RB [right-branching, languages where the modifiers come afterwards] speakers were significantly different in their ability to recall initial and final stimuli, showing a clear link between branching direction and working memory (WM). In WM tasks, LB participants were better than RB participants at recalling initial stimuli (and RB were better at recalling final stimuli)...  These results confirm our hypothesis and suggest that sensitivity to branching direction predicts the way in which humans remember and/or process sequences of stimuli, as real-time sentence comprehension relies more heavily on retaining initial information in LB languages but not in RB languages.

Interesting results, and certainly worthy of further investigation.  My hunch is that it won't turn out to be this simple; it's hard to imagine that something as simple as word order in sentences could have a profound effect on something as complex as memory.  But the correlation is there, and surely deserves an explanation.  Another one I'm curious about is whether speakers of tonal languages, such as Thai and Mandarin, are more likely to have perfect pitch -- something that (if true) would also bolster Sapir-Whorf.

In any case, the Amici et al. paper is pretty fascinating, and further elucidates the interplay between our behavior and our neural wiring.  I look forward to more research on this topic -- and more evidence, one way or the other, regarding how language shapes our brains.

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Humans have a morbid fascination with things that are big and powerful and can kill you.  Look at the number of movies made and books written about tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, and volcanoes, not to mention hordes of predatory dinosaurs picking people off the streets.  But in the "horrifically dangerous" category, nothing can beat black holes -- collapsed stars with a gravitational field so strong not even light can escape.  If you fell into one of these things, you'd get "spaghettified" -- stretched by tidal forces into a long, thin streamer of goo -- and every trace of you would be destroyed so thoroughly that they'd not even be theoretically possible to retrieve.

Add to that the fact that because light can't escape them, you can't even see them.  Kind of makes a pack of velociraptors seem tame by comparison, doesn't it?

So no wonder there are astrophysicists who have devoted their lives to studying these beasts.  One of these is Shep Doeleman, whose determination to understand the strangest objects in the universe is the subject of Seth Fletcher's wonderful book Einstein's Shadow: A Black Hole, a Band of Astronomers, and the Quest to See the Unseeable.  It's not comfortable reading -- when you realize how completely insignificant we are on the scale of the universe, it's considerably humbling -- but it'll leave you in awe of how magnificent, how strange, and how beautiful the cosmos is, and amaze you that the human brain is capable of comprehending it.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

It's not what you say, it's how you say it...

There's a controversial idea in the realm of linguistics called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.  Named after linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, the gist is that the language you speak strongly influences your brain, and your model of the world.  Thus, ideas that are easy to express in one language might be difficult or impossible to express in another.

I'm not just talking about linguistic lacunae, which are "holes" in the lexicon of a language.  An example from English is that we have no generic singular term for cattle.  Think about it; there's sow/boar/pig, billy/nanny/goat, stallion/mare/horse -- but bull/cow... what?  Oddly, we have a plural generic term -- cattle -- but no singular.

Sapir-Whorf goes much deeper than that.  It's not just talking about missing words; it implies that our entire framework for understanding can differ depending on the language we speak.  I ran into the real heart of Sapir-Whorf when I read the splendid book The Last Speakers by K. David Harrison, in which the author traveled with and interviewed people who are the last fluent speakers of some of the planet's dying languages.  The most amazing passages in the book occur when Harrison is in Siberia and is talking to some nomadic hunter-gatherers who speak a language in which there are no words for right, left, in front of, or behind.  Everything is related to the cardinal directions, and to being upstream or downstream of the river they use for travel.  Thus, the computer on which I'm writing this post isn't in front of me; it's northwest of me.  My space heater is north of me, the door of my office east of me.  When Harrison tried to explain our concept of left and right to them, they first didn't even understand what he was talking about, and when they did get it, they laughed.

What an arrogant, narcissistic culture you come from, they told Harrison.  You interpret where everything is relative to your own body?  And if you turn around, everything in the whole world changes position?  And two different people think the same object is in a different place because they're facing different directions?

In this case, it very much appears that the language these Siberian nomads speak alters the way they see the world -- and that model of the world reflects back and alters or constrains the language.

[image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

Sapir-Whorf has fallen a bit out of favor in the last couple of decades, and in fact was already waning in influence when I got my M.A. in linguistics in 1996.  But a study that came out this week in the American Journal of Political Science has brought it back to the forefront -- with the claim by Efrén O. Pérez and Margit Tavits that speakers of languages that lack a distinction between present and future tense make different decisions regarding political issues that will have an impact on the future.

In their paper, titled, "Language Shapes People's Time Perception and Support for Future-Oriented Policies," their study looked at bilingually fluent speakers of Estonian (which lacks a future tense) and Russian (which has one).  They found that when those people were interviewed in Russian, they tended to be less supportive of policies that would provide benefits in the long-term future than when they were interviewed in Estonian.

The authors write:

Can the way we speak affect the way we perceive time and think about politics? Languages vary by how much they require speakers to grammatically encode temporal differences.  Futureless tongues (e.g., Estonian) do not oblige speakers to distinguish between the present and future tense, whereas futured tongues do (e.g., Russian).  By grammatically conflating “today” and “tomorrow,” we hypothesize that speakers of futureless tongues will view the future as temporally closer to the present, causing them to discount the future less and support future-oriented policies more.  Using an original survey experiment that randomly assigned the interview language to Estonian/Russian bilinguals, we find support for this proposition and document the absence of this language effect when a policy has no obvious time referent.  We then replicate and extend our principal result through a cross-national analysis of survey data.  Our results imply that language may have significant consequences for mass opinion.

Which I find absolutely fascinating.  I've long been of the opinion that our stances about many things -- not least our political opinions -- are far more fluid than most of us think.  The "well, it's my opinion, of course it's not going to change!" attitude that many of us have simply ignores that fact that most of our decisions are strongly contextual.

And now, it appears that one of those contexts may be the language you're using.

I'm aware that a lot of linguistic researchers these days have some serious doubts about the applicability of Sapir-Whorf, but I still think this is an interesting first look at a case where it may well bear out.

Anyhow, that's our look at some cool new research for today.  Me, I'm off to eat breakfast and get some coffee, which at the moment are southwest of me.

A case of the blues

This post is brought to you by the color blue.

But not to worry: this is not about the damned dress, about which I have heard enough in the past week to last me several lifetimes.  This is about a different viral story, and one that has even less scientific validity than the whole what-color-is-this-dress thing.

I refer to a claim I've seen multiple times in the last few days that claims that because ancient languages had no word for the color blue, that they were unable to see blue.  Or, more accurately, that "blue" didn't exist in their mental and linguistic framework, so they were unable to see the difference between blue and colors that were nearby on the color wheel (especially green).  This, they say, explains Homer's "wine-dark seas," a metaphor I've always thought was as strange as it was evocative.  Kevin Loria, author of the article in question, writes:

In 1858, a scholar named William Gladstone, who later became the Prime Minister of Great Britain, noticed that this wasn't the only strange color description. Though the poet spends page after page describing the intricate details of clothing, armor, weaponry, facial features, animals, and more, his references to color are strange. Iron and sheep are violet, honey is green. 

So Gladstone decided to count the color references in the book. And while black is mentioned almost 200 times and white around 100, other colors are rare. Red is mentioned fewer than 15 times, and yellow and green fewer than 10. Gladstone started looking at other ancient Greek texts, and noticed the same thing — there was never anything described as "blue." The word didn't even exist. 

It seemed the Greeks lived in murky and muddy world, devoid of color, mostly black and white and metallic, with occasional flashes of red or yellow.

Loria goes on to tell us about the studies of a linguist named Lazarus Geiger, who found that there was also no word for blue in ancient Hebrew, Icelandic, Chinese, and Sanskrit.

The conclusion?  Our ability to see blue is a recent innovation -- and has to do with our having a linguistic category to put it in.  Without a linguistic category, we can't discriminate between blue and other colors.

There are two problems, of increasing severity, with this hypothesis.

The first is that this is a specific case of what is called the Strong Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis -- that our experience of the world depends on our having a linguistic framework for it, and without that framework, we are unable to conceptualize categories for things.

The Strong Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis has a difficulty -- which is that it doesn't square with what we know about either physiology or language evolution.  In the case of color discrimination, the fact is that in the absence of a physiological impairment (e.g. colorblindness), most people have similar neural responses to observing colored regions.  There are a small number of people, mostly female, who are tetrachromats -- they have four, instead of three, color-sensing pigments in the retinas of their eyes, and have a much better sense of color discrimination than we trichromats do.  But the physiology would argue that mostly we all experience color the same way.

The Strong Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, apropos of color discrimination, fails on a second level, however; Brent Berlin and Paul Kay found, back in the 1960s, that languages have a very predictable order in which they add color words to their lexicon.  It goes like this:

1. All languages contain terms for black and white (or "dark" and "light").
2. If a language contains three terms, then it contains a term for red.
3. If a language contains four terms, then it contains a term for either green or yellow (but not both).
4. If a language contains five terms, then it contains terms for both green and yellow.
5. If a language contains six terms, then it contains a term for blue.
6. If a language contains seven terms, then it contains a term for brown.
7. If a language contains eight or more terms, then it contains terms for purple, pink, orange, and/or gray.

This agrees with the way our eyes perceive color, in terms of the peaks of cone sensitivity. It is surmised that the greater the necessity to differentiate between different colors -- for example, in determining the difference between poisonous fruits and edible ones in a rain forest -- the greater the complexity of words for different shades and hues.  In the ancient world, understandably enough, you coined words for things that had survival value, and pretty much ignored everything else.

But what about Loria's claim that many ancient languages didn't have words for blue? This brings us to the second problem with the article -- which is that this is simply an untrue statement.

The ancient Greeks had the word κυανός, which means "dark blue" -- specifically the color of the mineral azurite, which was highly prized for jewelry and statuary.  It's the root of our word "cyan."  And the Greeks weren't the only ones; the Hebrews had the word t'chalet, as in Numbers 15:38:

Speak unto the children of Israel, and bid them that they make them fringes in the borders of their garments throughout their generations, and that they put upon the fringe of the borders a ribband of blue.

Even today, the tallit, or Jewish prayer shawl, is always decorated in blue.  (And it is no coincidence that the Israeli flag is blue and white.)

What about Old Icelandic?  They had the word blár, which meant, you guessed, it, "blue."  It's no new innovation, either; it's used in the 10th century Hrana saga hrings (The Saga Cycle of Hrani), in which we have the line, "Sýndi Hrani, hversu hún hafði rifit af honum klæði, og svo var hann víða blár go marinn," meaning, "Hrani showed that she had torn off his clothes, and he was widely blue and bruised."  (What?  It's an Icelandic saga.  You thought it was going to be about bunnies and rainbows?)

And I don't know any Chinese or Sanskrit, but I'd bet they had words for blue, too.  One of the most prized gemstones in the ancient world was lapis lazuli -- and according to an article posted at the website of the Gemological Institute of America:

Historians believe the link between humans and lapis lazuli stretches back more than 6,500 years. The gem was treasured by the ancient civilizations of Mesopotamia, Egypt, China, Greece, and Rome. They valued it for its vivid, exquisite color, and prized it as much as they prized other blue gems like sapphire and turquoise.

Hard to imagine why our distant ancestors would have done this if they saw blue stones as, in Loria's words, "muddy and murky... mostly black and white and metallic, with occasional flashes of red or yellow."

[image courtesy of photographer Hannes Grobe and the Wikimedia Commons]

So the whole premise is false, and it's based on zero biological evidence.  But that hasn't stopped it from being widely circulated, because as we've seen more than once, a curious and entertaining claim gets passed about even if it's entirely baseless.

I'll end here.  I'm feeling rather blue after all of this debunking business, and not gray or metallic at all.  And I suspect I'd feel that way even if I didn't have a word for it.