, the movie "Arrival" adapted from the novel "The Story of Your Life" by Chinese-American science fiction writer Ted Jiang finally arrived in China.
At the beginning of the film, the audience may be puzzled by the interspersed clips about the daughter of the protagonist linguist Dr. Banks, because the main plot of the film shows that Dr. Banks is an unmarried woman . As the story progresses, people understand: Dr. Banks can see the future, and what she sees in her dream is her future daughter. However, many viewers who did not understand the film thought that Dr. Banks was able to see the future as a special function of her. This understanding is wrong, why? The clue is the Sapir-Wolf hypothesis mentioned in the conversation between Dr. Banks and physicist Ian.
What is the Sapir-Wolf hypothesis? This hypothesis roughly says that language affects people's worldview, and people who speak different languages see the world in different ways. Specifically, this hypothesis is like: English speakers find that there is no tense change in verbs in Chinese, and they think that the Chinese have no concept of time; or Chinese speakers find that the word "rain" in English can refer to both rain and It can refer to rain, or the word "stone" can refer to both stones and throwing stones. It is believed that English speakers cannot distinguish objects from actions (Of course, such words are actually used in Chinese, such as "leadership". This is the word); or the ancients (their language only has southeast, northwest, no front, back, left, and right. When they talk about their feet, they will say "the foot in the north") that Americans often only say that the front and back are not left and right. Speaking of southeast and northwest, they think they are so confused that they can’t find the north; or the Marthais (there are three different past tenses in their language, which are used to express "recent", "long ago" and "distant past". There are four different forms of "evidence", which are used to express direct experience, inferences, conjectures, and hearsay. If you use the wrong form, you will be considered a lie) that Americans cannot distinguish between personal experience and hearsay.
"Arrival" is based on the Sapir-Wolf hypothesis. Therefore, after the protagonist, Dr. Banks, has learned the language of "heptapod", he has acquired the ability to see the world like them, that is, to be able to see. Into the future.
However, what is not mentioned in the film is that the Sapir-Wolf hypothesis has become notorious in today’s linguistics circles. The American psychologist Stephen Pinker has already made a comprehensive refutation of this hypothesis. The linguist Guy Doicher called it "Sapir-Wolf delusion" in his book "Words/Mirrors: The World Is Different by Language". This is easy to understand: the absence of tenses in Chinese verbs does not affect our understanding of time, and the absence of "evidence" forms in English does not affect English speakers to distinguish between personal experience and hearsay. In other words, language does not limit our thinking. If we have the ability to see the future, we won’t lose this ability because of the language we speak—an example is given in the book "Talks/Mirror": there is no yellow, green, and blue in the language of primitive people. Words such as, purple, etc. do not affect them to distinguish these colors. Like George Orwell’s novel "1984", it is actually impossible to eliminate "ideological crimes" by banning certain "sensitive words"-eliminating the word "greed" will not save the world economy and eliminate " The word "pain" cannot replace analgesics, and the elimination of the word "death" will not allow us to have eternal life.
So, doesn't language have no effect on our thinking at all? There are still. Anthropologist Franz Boas believes that language will not restrict you and prevent you from expressing certain things, but it will force you to express certain things. For example, English will force you to express the time when the action occurred, while Chinese does not have this kind of compulsion, but if you want to express the time when the action occurred, of course you can express it.
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