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bolido_sentimental  1yr ago (text post)   4133 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 25, 2022

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Why anti-HBD people don't promote e.g. usage of artificial languages like Lojban? (the only example I know is early Soviets promoting Esperanto). Wouldn't be type of language affecting individual's development a lot? Also, Chinese and Japanese have problem that word lookup is difficult. This is a less problem is smartphone era, but earlier finding a word was pretty difficult whereas in alphabetic languages any child can find word in dictionary fairly quickly. I read someone hypothesing that this must have negative effect on social mobility.

As @Aransentin said, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis has been pretty thoroughly debunked (at least the strong form, and most linguists don't even take the weak form seriously anymore). There's been little to no evidence that language actually shapes culture or cognition; rather, it seems to be the other way around.

Which is why Lojban has never been more than a curiosity, whereas Esperanto still has a fairly large community. Lojban is interesting but started with a premise that they built a language around; natural languages don't develop around concepts like predicate logic. Esperanto was actually developed with the intention of being easy and natural to speak (at least for European language speakers).

I'd imagine most people aren't Sapir–Whorfists, and don't consider language to be particularly important for individual development compared to things like culture and family.

Still, even if they did, one would have to actually learn Lojban to not seem like a hypocrite when advocating for it – and if there's one thing people don't like to do, it's putting effort into things.

Under which standard of evidence Sapir _Whorf was debunked but, say, systemic racism wasn't?

There is active attempts to push pronouns/latinx/v Ukraine and other changes to language.

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