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0 pointsbsza1y ago0 comments

Sapir-Whorf states that language affects the way you perceive reality. I only stated that it affects your way of thinking, i.e. the set of ideas you are capable of having. It is ironic that the existence of this very concept in the English language, "Sapir-Whorf", has a gravitational effect that makes one associate similar ideas with it and automatically label them as wrong. This is a tool very often used in politics, and it only works if the idea you want to discredit has a sufficiently close relative in your language with a succinct name and a negative connotation.

For example, Westerners often label Japan as "xenophobic" (as did Biden recently), while the Japanese themselves do not see themselves as such. I theorize this is at least partly because the Japanese counterpart of "xenophobia" literally translates back as "foreigner hatred", which is a much stronger expression than "foreign-fear". This makes any argument using that expression sound ridiculous. "I'm not refusing to rent my house out to you because I hate you; I just don't know where you're coming from, what your lifestyle is like, and whether you pose a flight risk." This is within the gravity well of "xenophobia"; it is not within the gravity well of "外国人嫌悪". It is much harder to make the same argument when the language itself is working against you.

As to your other comment, a populist tells people what they want to hear. Any actual "cause" is only a means to an end for them. And Hitler was so good at being a populist that people wept at his speeches and became wholly subservient to his agenda. I think this was mostly due to his mastery of the language. It was the advertising slogans, not whatever he was selling. Had he had a larger audience to speak to, he would have changed the narrative accordingly.

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tsimionescu1y ago

The Sappir-Whorf hypothesis is precisely related to cognition, ideas, and not perception of reality. In fact, the only aspect of linguistic relativism that was somewhat confirmed was the part related to color perception, so you seem to have this reversed.

One of the more infamous notions of purely cognitive S-W that dorm peddle that is entirely discredited is the idea that people who speak gendered languages tend to associate "feminine qualities" with feminine nouns describing even inanimate objects, and "masculine qualities" with the reverse. This has been measured in various ways and is simply false.

I would bet that your example of "foreigner hatred" vs "xenophobia" would also turn out to be wrong if studied. The much, much more likely reason Japanese people don't consider themselves xenophobic is that people don't typically think of themselves as holding bad views. I would bet lots of English-speaking white nationalists also don't consider themselves xenophobic for the same reason.

Finally, I think your outlook on the level to which Hitler manipulated the German people is highly optimistic about human nature. I think it's unfortunately quite clear that people didn't need a lot of sophisticated convincing to do what they did in WWII, they wanted to do most of that and all they needed was someone who would allow and organize them. And to be clear, I'm not only speaking of the German people here - atrocities against Jewish people and other minorities were committed in many European countries where people didn't speak an ounce of German, they just needed to be let loose. Including, shamefully, my own country (Romania), to be clear that I'm not just pointing fingers at others.

bszaOP1y ago

Sapir-Whorf, in its original form, claims language influences your perception of reality. Its "stronger" form, linguistic determinism, claims language determines your thoughts. I claim neither of those things. I claim that, since language, as a highly intellectual cognitive function, obviously has some sort of effect on your thoughts (but not to the point of determining them), having more of them makes us, as a collective, capable of having ideas we might not have had otherwise, some of which might be effective vaccines against mind-viruses (or mind-viruses themselves, in which case it's lucky we're not a monoculture).

That language affects thinking isn't the extraordinary claim, its contrary is. It is hard to believe that your method and efficiency of solving a problem is invariant to the format in which you represent that problem, especially when that format can be so varied.

> I think it's unfortunately quite clear that people didn't need a lot of sophisticated convincing to do what they did in WWII

They needed a decade of sophisticated propaganda and indoctrination, and even a change in the language itself, with words like "Übermensch" and "Lebensraum" being added to the dictionary. It didn't happen overnight.

I also don't know where you're getting the claim from that the countries where the Holocaust took place "didn't speak an ounce of German", given that a large part of it took place on former Austria-Hungary territory where German was presumably the most prevalent second language. But even supposing they didn't, how would that disprove my point? I'm not saying language barriers make you immune to mind-viruses, I'm saying they can slow down their spread. The effects of this one were devastating, but they could have been much more devastating without any language barrier whatsoever. Because one country I can realistically believe not to have spoken an ounce of German is the UK. And they had no shortage of like-minded individuals either, but the local moustache man, Mosley, while said to be a good orator, was no Hitler. I think the public having the ability to understand what Hitler was saying would have been demoralizing at best and galvanizing at worst. It definitely wouldn't have helped Churchill's cabinet, which at one point already had half the mind to strike a deal with him.

I'm aware that this is just a form of security through obscurity, but practice shows that security through obscurity often works. Might not be the strongest argument for preserving languages, but in my mind, a language monoculture is just like any other monoculture, with all its drawbacks.

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tsimionescu1y ago

bszaOP1y ago

> I think it's unfortunately quite clear that people didn't need a lot of sophisticated convincing to do what they did in WWII

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