After reading in a recent column that…
…several questions came to my mind:
[ul]
[li]Are some languages better for developing the child’s intellect?[/li][li]Are some countries better off in rising their children simply because their language gives them a better tool for intellectual tasks?[/li][li]What features make a language better than other for that purpose?[/li][/ul]
I don’t know whether a particular language is better
for facilitating greater intellectual growth, but
this report in the Economist has a striking passage
with some relevance to the OP, Cecil’s column, and
previous threads on linguistics:
I speak 4 languages(English,Hindi,Gujarati,Marathi[almost]) fluently and 1(French) haltingly. The first 4 I learned as a child. And I found myself arriving at Sapir-Whorf independently around 15-16. I will definitely say that you think differently in each. But that’s probably due to what knowledge and conceptual domains are processed by each language. Education was primarily in English. Marathi was for communicating with some friends and people who didn’t speak anything else, Hindi was for speaking to majority of friends as well as for understanding entertainment, Gujarati for speaking with family/other friends…etc. I won’t pretend that you can assign a consistent “superiority” metric across languages, since the question of whether it requires a certain type of language in order to be able it to scale towards broader and diverse needs remains unanswered.
Read this Plastic discussion as well.
It would be far more instructive to work with more disparate languages.
Since the late 50’s, the Loglan Institute has been working on developing a language based on the laws of logic, and also without any sort of ambiguity, whether of the “I scream” sort, or the “pretty little girls’ school” sort, the whole point of the project being to create an experimental tool to test the Whorf hypothesis.
Interestingly, though Loglan has the simplest grammar of any known language – by a couple of orders of magnitude – it has proven hellishly difficult to learn. Human beans just don’t take to logic…
I speak Arabic (Syrian Dialect), though I’m a little rusty, and I always thought that Arabic didn’t have enough words to describe things in this changing world. Arabic has had to borrow a lot of words from other languages (though English borrows its fair share from other languages itself.) So I think that all languages are good in themselves, and are made better by the exchange of vocabularies with other languages.
The way different languages name numbers can make it harder or easier for children to understand numerical notation. For example,
DeepField writes:
> Are some languages better for developing the child’s intellect?
No.
> Are some countries better off in rising their children simply because their
> language gives them a better tool for intellectual tasks?
No. Some languages have larger vocabularies with words for modern things which makes it easier to talk about modern subjects, but it’s easy to fix the languages without this vocabulary. Just borrow the desired words.
> What features make a language better than other for that purpose?
None. No language is better in this sense.
The biggest problem with this question is that it ignores the questions of how children acquire language and how they become proficient in it. Children have a nasty habit of adapting the language to suit their needs as opposed to adapting themselves to the limitations of the language. One sees new words entering the language more from the young’ems from from the old’ems. Thus it’s no surprise that loglan is destined to be a failure.