2003年05月02日 金曜日
You Think What You Write?
by Jane Pinckard
Language
Great NYTimes article about recent scholarship linking Asian writing systems to cognitive patterns (free registration required). Controversial new works by Hannas (The Writing on the Wall: How Asian Orthography Curbs Creativity) and Nisbett (The Geography of Thought: How Asians and Westerners Think Differently . . . and Why) explicitly draw correlations between Asian writing systems - based on syllabaries - to lack of innovation and creativity in cognitive thinking among Asian cultures.
I had thought this sort of culture-determinism dead; I am surprised and intrigued to see it on the rise again. I'm not saying that there isn't some interesting work to be done in this area, because I believe that systems of writing are very relevant to culture, but the conclusions seem a little too neat. The article does a pretty good job of balanced, informative reporting.
Posted by Jane Pinckard at 2003年05月02日 04:42
Comments
I'm curious to know why you thought cultural-determinism was dead. Has the world overshot and become too PC to criticize at that level? I don't have much exposure to this field of thought and analysis, but I'm interested to know more as I've begun to understand my own roots. thnx
I'm curious to know why you thought cultural-determinism was dead. Has the world overshot and become too PC to criticize at that level? I don't have much exposure to this field of thought and analysis, but I'm interested to know more as I've begun to understand my own roots. thnx
I'm curious to know why you thought cultural-determinism was dead. Has the world overshot and become too PC to criticize at that level? I don't have much exposure to this field of thought and analysis, but I'm interested to know more as I've begun to understand my own roots. thnx
matt: it isn't a question of the world's "getting too PC." it's that culture-determinism theories of the thirties and forties were debunked pretty well by linguists who came after them. the article i linked to explains it fairly well, if a bit brusquely.
the idea that a language prohibits creativity is intriguing, but it seems as though it would be extremely difficult to isolate the language factor outside of all the other cultural factors which may also be playing a part. seems to me a bit ridiculous - and pointless - to say the answer lies in just one thing. cultures are complex and organic systems, not a colection of disparate pieces we can take apart at will.
Thanks for the references. I've had Geography of Thought sitting in my to-read pile for a while now.
Very interesting articles. I'm wondering if they can conduct experiments on bi-lingual kids. If language is what's suppose to be inhibiting creative thought, I would think they'd try to find people who, say,speak primarily english but have lived most of their lives in korea? Their thought processes would remain 'western' while their social upbringing would be 'eastern'. how would that child describe the fish tank?
As to the former book, I don't understand why Korean is treated as a language using "Character-based orthographies", and lacking " the abstract features of alphabetic writing", etc. Everyone knows that Korean doesn't use so many ideograms nowadays. Almost all of the text is written in phonograms, you know.... As to Japanese and Chinese, they are very different not only in the way of writing but also in the strucuture of grammer. They don't belong to the same language familly.
Well, I haven't read the book itself, so I hope that it is only the writer of its review who is totally ignorant of asian languages.