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I just saw this video by Tom Scott on linguistic determinism, or the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.
"Does the language you speak change how you think?" This is the title of the video. And my answer is: Yes! Of course! Obviously! It's a concept I was aware of before, but always took it as a given. I didn't even think that it's a controversial position. But Tom calls it 'not serious' and "easily disprovable."
Usually I will find some snarky blog post or a racist Substack defending a widely rejected theory, but I have not been able to find anything using my usual search terms, eg. "In defense of..." etc.
What are the best essays, papers, and books in defense of linguistic determinism?
I'm going to do the opposite and argue against the SWH, since I consider it to be false in terms of sweeping conclusions, and at most true in largely inconsequential ways.
Why? Well, for starters, I speak two very different languages fluently and am conversational in a third, I'd hope that engenders some insight, even if I'm not a linguist.
My English vocabulary probably outweighs my Bengali one by at least one OOM, so occasionally I find myself trying to translate from one to the other, and till date, I haven't found a single word that is utterly untranslatable, in the sense that even if there's no single word for it, you can't get the meaning across through analogy or chaining concepts together.
For example, neither Bengali nor Hindi (and many other related languages) has a (common) word for yesterday or tomorrow like English does. There might be one, I'm no linguist, but at least it doesn't come up in normal speech. Instead we use the same word "kal" for it, and grasp from context whether it's upcoming or referring to yesterday. Does this mean Indians as a whole are broadly incapable of understanding the distinction between yesterday and tomorrow? Of course not, it's contextual as I just said.
I expect that for any language with major adoption, it's almost always possible to translate between them and there are almost no thoughts or concepts that a speaker of one can hold that the other can't.*
*Here come caveats. Notice I said major, and not some dying tongue spoken by some 95 yo last of the Mohicans ass mf or an uncontacted Amazonian tribe. Speakers of such a tongue might suffer from outright paucity or poverty of concepts, to the extent that for an adult speaker, it might be exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to translate from a more full-featured language. Or perhaps you want to consider someone who is non-lingual or wasn't successfully socialized at all like a feral child. But my argument is that for most languages and for almost all purposes, you can build up a common framework and use it.
I recall one example of the SWH being some flavor of Australian aborigine that didn't use left or right, instead always orienting themselves according to the cardinal directions of the compass, including a very accurate ability to keep track of that while indoors or otherwise unable to just track the sun or stars in the sky. Big deal, that isn't so much as an utter inability on the part of the rest of us as much as a skill we hardly have reason to develop, even if it comes more naturally to some. Imagine taking a tribe of the former, blindfolding and spinning them around in circles till they're utterly disoriented, and then letting them loose in an enclosed structure. I expect that they'd end up arbitrarily choosing a direction as "north" and orienting around that, and make the environment rapidly update fast enough, and they'd likely develop self-referential notions of left and right.
Overall, I don't think the hypothesis is particularly impactful, especially when people use it to explain sweeping cultural claims. At most, the weak form of the SWH is true, and that only says that cognition can be guided by language, not necessarily limited or restricted by it.
The existence of homophones- best argument against the Sapir-whorf hypothesis.
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