The Language Hoax

Dr. McWhorter is, in my opinion, the best linguistics teacher around. He is really interesting to listen to, and he can teach you a lot. Not only is there linguistic knowledge and expertise in what he says, but there is also wit and knowledge of what is going on in the world in general. I suggest that everyone purchase and read his many books, and also buy the 4 courses he offers as part of the Great Courses series of The Learning Company. You won’t be disappointed. This man has a lot to teach, and he does so with grace, charm and unbridled efficacy.

Hawaiian has the term "mauka" (toward the mountain) and "makai" (toward the ocean) with respect to direction... Still used today and super useful

A bit thanks to the SFI for sharing these lectures and discussions! A question for other watchers: what is the notion of culture that McWhorter is using? It feels to me that the most interesting part of this discussion is how different people(s) have different ways to look at the world and interpret it. Disproving the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis shifts this issue from language to (other aspects of) culture - but I'm still not too sure how to define culture beyond a quite common-sense view of "what a group of people do".

This talk is brilliant, hilarious, and has completely dispelled one of my (many) misconceptions! Thank you John McWhorter and Santa Fe Institute! As a side thought, when I wonder about the potential origins of my Whorfian flavored quandries, my mind goes straight to Orwell's 1984 and his idea of "Newspeak." I am now wondering if Orwell was influenced by Whorf's paper.

I was trying to read an article lareviewofbooks about it and I was finding it a little confusing (mostly because English is not my first language), so I looked for videos that could help me. This lecture did it very well with all these examples. It would be good to have subtitles, at least for the audience's questions because most of them didn't use microphone so I couldn't hear what they said.

51:56 In fact you don't need it for higher math. Take the greater-than and less-than signs for example. To express “52 is greater than 48” in mathematical notation is “52 > 48”, but that could equally be expressed as “48 < 52”. Because we speak English and are used to phrasing these statements in English, we would say that the latter says “48 is less than 52” since that way of phrasing it follows the way it's written more closely: “48” is written first and “52” is written second, so naturally an English speaker might think to say the sentence in that order, as the language permits it. But writing “48 < 52” means “52 is greater than 48” just as much. The constraint is the English language here. If a speaker of a language which does not have an exact equivalent of “to be less than” were doing math, they would not have any trouble; they would be able to understand that “52 > 48” and “48 < 52” are equivalent, but they would simply express the two the same way in language. The two fundamentally are the same thing. Now imagine if the less-than symbol didn’t exist and we only had “>” to work with. Would math break down? Of course not. It would not even be any more difficult. It would be just as capable of representing all of the comparisons of magnitude that mathematical notation can express with both symbols—which, from a certain way of looking at them, are exactly the same symbol, only written in a different direction. Symmetric operations such as this have no “natural” orientation to them; the only reason for which we express them in a certain order is because language is expressed and understood as a linear string of information across a window of time, and so we all must say things in a certain order regardless of whether that oder has any connection to what the language is expressing. It's all arbitrary. As Steven Pinker nicely put it, when we say “The boy kicked the ball”, which of the things in the action itself comes “first”? “The boy, then the kick… then the ball?”

I wish he gave the percentage differences between English-Indonesian and Spanish-Greek speakers and English and Japanese speakers are. I suspect that, as is so often in the way of behavioral and social sciences the differences are insignificant and likely of merely apparent significance.

Pretty cool to see a co-author of one of my favourite comp sci books introducing the author of my favourite linguistics books.

it would make sense that although language evolves with humans that since we are - all human - then things would be similar if not the same across the board, in fact how we are able to first communicate with any other language(s) shows we think similar if not the same. :)

Great lecture!

Hi, I noticed in Your lecture sir some assumption which I find not always true. The easiest way to explain ( I'm not linguist) it would by example of two instruments - flute and clarinet. Flute looks like much easier instrument, no mechanisms, just tube and holes. clarinet looks much more complicated - tube and holes, as flute, but above of it plenty metal buttons, leverages and so on. Now, you assume that for playing flute you need less bright musician, as it has less elements to operate. Out of musician experience I tell you it is opposite - all those metal elements on clarinet are there to make life of musician easier. It is much harder to play full scale chromatic piece on simple flute than on complicated clarinet. Same with languages.

I love this 🥰

I think English is very influenced by capitalism, most new words are inspired by commerce in some way, from patents to tweets. All he's really saying is we shouldn't make rash assumptions, but it's a false equivalence to claim that he has proof of no causation at all. THAT is simply untrue, and demonstrably so. He's selling books pretty well by making straw men of old wives tales anyway. Nobody's seriously claimed the truths he's refuting since the dawn of the internet, when librairies were physical places of limited knowledge and access.