Tomb of the Geek

I funod tihs in one of toshe fere TV lsngitis.

Yuo prbloaby cna't blveiee waht yur'oe rdanieg.

Aoccdrnig to rscereah at Cmrabigde Uinervtisy, it deons't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are. The olny improatnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be in the rghit pclae. The rset can be a taotl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm.

Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, bu the wrod as a wlohe.

I've long be fascinated by the concept of language. Not so much the development of languages over time, and not so much linguistics, as the very idea of language itself, the idea of the transmission of concepts from one mind to another.

I think what originally sparked that interest was heading of Noam Chomsky's discovery that all human languages had an identical root syntactic structure - that is, at their most basic, all languages are the same. That indicated one of two things: Either all human languages arose out of one original, first language - a "mother tongue" - or that we are languaging creatures, that is, that the basics of human language are "hardwired" into the brain. Chomsky favored the second explanation; he developed his famous sentence "colorless green ideas sleep furiously" as an illustration of his argument: The statement is nonsensical, it violates numerous rules of how words relate to other words, yet we instantly recognize its syntax as correct. The suggestion that syntax, i.e., structure, is separate from meaning strongly hints that while a particular language is a learned ability, the fact of language isn't.

There is still much dispute, particularly around the issue of how much of our languaging ability is, if I recall the terms correctly (I may not), "nature based" versus "rule based," i.e., how much is based on what we naturally carry in our heads versus how much is based on rules we learned as a social construct. But the idea that we are, again, languaging creatures, that it is a natural ability, is not.

And the more we learn about language, the more it seems tied in directly with our perceptions of the world around us, indeed with our very concepts of the nature of that world. From NewScientist for August 19, with thanks to RadicallyInept for the link:

Language may shape human thought – suggests a counting study in a Brazilian tribe whose language does not define numbers above two.

Hunter-gatherers from the Pirahã tribe, whose language only contains words for the numbers one and two, were unable to reliably tell the difference between four objects placed in a row and five in the same configuration, revealed the study.

Experts agree that the startling result provides the strongest support yet for the controversial hypothesis that the language available to humans defines our thoughts. So-called "linguistic determinism" was first proposed in 1950 but has been hotly debated ever since.

"It is a very surprising and very important result," says Lisa Feigenson, a developmental psychologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, US, who has tested babies' abilities to distinguish between different numerical quantities. "Whether language actually allows you to have new thoughts is a very controversial issue." ...

The language, Pirahã, is known as a "one, two, many" language because it only contains words for "one" and "two" — for all other numbers, a single word for "many" is used. "There are not really occasions in their daily lives where the Pirahã need to count," explains [Peter] Gordon[, the psychologist at Columbia University in New York City who carried out the experiment]. ...

Gordon says this is the first convincing evidence that a language lacking words for certain concepts could actually prevent speakers of the language from understanding those concepts.

Gordon says his experiment provides a stronger case than previous work which involved babies and animals such as rats, pigeons, and monkeys because the Pirahã are just like other adult humans - except for the language. At the same time, he does not claim that this applies to kinds of thought beyond numbers. "There are certainly things that we can think about that we cannot talk about," he said. Even so,

scientists are far from a consensus. Feigenson points out that there could be other reasons, aside from pure language, why the Pirahã could not distinguish accurately for higher numbers including not being used to dealing with large numbers or set such tasks.

"The question remains highly controversial," says psychologist Randy Gallistel of Rutgers University in Piscataway, New Jersey. "But this work will spark a great deal of discussion."

And, interestingly enough, they'll have to use the very subject under discussion - language, its nature, its limitations, and its effects on perception - in order to do that.