Linguist AND cartographer AND plumber (and……whatever the technical term for the boiler guy is. And judging by how he handles that flying fish thing, he’s a pilot, too)
*Looking at James Spader* there is a perfectly good movie with a linguist main character right there
Aaaand now it’s over.
My brain is like 90% linguist and I noped out of the whole idea of “Arrival” upon finding out that it subscribed to a not just Strong but supernaturally overpowered version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
no linguist buys that shit
ok so the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis goes like:
reasonable interpretation: if you grew up without separate words for pink and red, you might just think of pink as light red, and you might not have strong emotional associations that are sharply different between those two colors
“strong” interpretation: if we make everyone speak Newspeak, they will be mentally incapable of ThoughtCrime
and this went beyond that
what the hell are newspeak and thoughtcrime?
I think we’ve all gone way further than what OP was intending, lol.
LOL– it’s from the book 1984. The dictatorship in that book wanted total control over people, including their thoughts. Thinking the wrong thing was Thoughtcrime. And the leaders were working on inventing Newspeak, a new language that did not have words for the things that people were not allowed to think and talk about.
The objection I had to that was basically just practical: it wouldn’t work.
People have thoughts even if they can’t put them into words. And if they want to talk about it bad enough, they will MAKE UP a way to put it into words.
the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis claims that the language you speak can influence your thoughts.
it cannot influence them THAT much.
and, from what I read, Arrival was claiming a language could influence your thoughts to the point of being able to project your mind through time
I don’t think it’s necessary as a linguist to “nope out” of Arrival just because it features a strong Sapir-Whorf. It isn’t valid in real life, yes, but that’s what sci-fi is for, to explore impossible ideas.
As a martial artist I sure as hell know it’s impossible to control the elements with my movements, but that doesn’t mean I don’t enjoy Avatar.
Absolutely fair. We all have different thresholds for suspension of disbelief…. sometimes even varying within one person– I am certainly not gonna claim that my main interest on this blog (TRON 1982) is an accurate representation of programming, lol
I think that in this case it was the combination of “field that I’m very interested in” and “common misconception.” Sort of like how a neurobiologist might nope out on a movie whose premise started out with “we only use 10% of our brains.”
