Over-reliance on English hinders cognitive science

I mean I'm not really qualified or rigourous enough to prove this but if you have learned chinese and english it should be pretty damn obvious that it is linguistic. But in any case, human language and culture are intractable if you start trying to speak idiomatically.

Sure maybe you could isolate a bunch of scholars and give them a specification of Chinese and ask them to go at it, which is maybe what we do with Latin and Greek.

I would struggle to see how someone could earnestly argue the opposite, that language doesn't shape thought, when Chinese doesn't use conjugation, has looser notions of tense, has no direct/indirect article, uses glyphs instead of an alphabet, can be read top to bottom, right to left, left to right and doesn't use spaces to delimit words. That's even before we talk about tones or the highly monosyllabic nature of the language alters things like memorisation. (ever notice how Chinese people are often good at memorising numbers?)

French, Spanish, and Portuguese are spoken across multiple cultures. So there should be enough data to test the theory.

French is a second language for many countries. So that may provide data as well.

To summarize the Wikipedia article on linguistic relativity, the "strong" hypothesis that language determines thought has been debunked. But there are many things that a language influences. To use a computer analogy, all mainstream programming languages are Turing complete, so you can express any computation in them. In this sense the language does not determine what programs you can write. But in practice, as any computer person will tell you, different languages are good at different things. And that is kind of this paper, they cite a lot of examples where English has poor vocabulary or odd quirks, and show by comparison to other languages that this measurably affects conclusions about certain cognitive abilities. The issue they're complaining about is like if you benchmarked Python programs and tried to draw conclusions about the speed limits of computing, but never tried C++ or assembly.

This seems like the (broadly accepted, AFAIK) weak form of Sapir-Whorf (language has impacts on cognition) but not the (generally viewed as debunked) strong form (language places strict limits on the bounds of possible thought).

For me it's neither. Time seems to flow from back to front, as if I'm seated in a chair moving backwards; I can see the past as it recedes (moving away in the direction I'm facing), and can't see the future (I'd need eyes in the back of my head).

They gave the example of the verb yiwei in Mandarin. If you say “ta yiwei X” it means “s/he thinks X” with a strong connotation that X is in fact false. The Spanish equivalent is supposed to be the verb creerse [1], like if you say “Juan se cree que lo van a ascender” it means “Juan thinks that they are going to promote him” but with a strong connotation that he won’t in fact be promoted. English doesn’t really have a verb for “think” with the connotation that the belief is false. The claim (for what it’s worth, I am skeptical) is that English speakers are slower to learn the concept that someone can have a false belief, because English lacks such a verb.

[1] according to https://ojs.ub.uni-konstanz.de/sub/index.php/sub/article/vie... for example. I don’t know enough Spanish to say if the verb really works this way. Verbs like this are called “contrafactive”

Unlike many other languages, English has grown because it's adaptable. It has almost as many borrowed words for advanced concepts as "native" words. It's hard to even distinguish anymore.

If anything, a solid counter argument can be made that Romance languages (descended from Latin) lack the flexibility of English and other Germanic languages.

Non primary English speakers frequently complain that English is more complicated than other languages. This is true. I'm a native speaker and only can read limited Spanish. Where I get hung up is the dependence on gender of objects. Similar experience with Japanese when I was studying that a few years ago.

I completely believe that primary language has a physical effect on the brain in terms of neural structure. It must have.

But since English is so adaptable, if there's a concept that is better expressed in another language we tend to adopt the words of other languages to express it.

However other languages seem to be less adaptable. For example, France has or had an official government ministry for decades to manage new foreign words entering the French language. To this day, there are newish specific French words for technologies coming from English speaking countries.

Another good example is some YouTube videos from India I've run across. (I turn on subtitles). But say the speaker is talking in Hindi. Many times more technical terms are English words or phrases that are freely interspersed with Hindi. They're borrowing the English words, with a bit of a Hindi dialect hitting the pronunciation.

Going back to Japanese, we see the same thing. I don't know if the JP gov has a language ministry.

But if you look at written Japanese text you definitely see that most numerology is written with western/English 0-9 characters mixed with katakana or hiragana. When you hear people speaking, and once your ear is oriented towards Japanese sounds, you can start to pick up on the adopted English words that are said with a native dialect emphasis.