The Power of Language

We are all well aware of the many advantages that language offers us as humans. Whether it's in Vonnegut's entertaining prose, Chomsky's informative lectures, or O'reilly's infuriating rants, language offers its patrons the unique ability to transform the thoughts of those around them with surgical precision. Not as well known, however, is the notion that language shapes cognition according to its own unique syntactic and semantic structure. Put more succinctly, different languages affect the way we think about the world differently. This seems somewhat intuitive but has only relatively recently been widely accepted by the linguistic community as an alternative to the Chomskyan theory of universal grammar. According to this theory, thought is shaped not by the subtleties of a specific language but by a universal set of principles that is common to all humans. This new idea, known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, turns the Chomskyan era idea on its head, as recent experiments have shown that language affects the way we categorize the world, perceive color, and may even partially explain why Asians vastly out perform Americans in math every year.

In Malcolm Gladwell's new book Outliers, he attempts to debunk the American rags to riches story by emphasizing the context surrounding the seemingly unlikely success of outliers like Bill Gates, Bill Joy, and the Beatles (a bootstrapping conservative's worst nightmare). In explaining why Asians dominate western countries in math abilities, he argues that it's largely a product of the culture of discipline and hard work that thousands of years of rice farming has built into the people of the region. Instead of settling with the notion that Asians are just inherently smarter then the rest of the world, Gladwell tries to make sense of this phenomenon with not only an understanding of history and culture but also of language. Inherent in languages like Chinese are distinct advantages when it comes to understanding and manipulating numbers. Unlike English, which has an irregular number system (ex. 16=sixteen but 11= eleven not oneteen), Chinese utilizes a logical number system in which eleven is ten-one, twelve is ten-two, and so on. Also, Chinese number words are relatively brief compared to English number words. This allows Chinese speakers to memorize and manipulate longer strings of numbers than most other cultures. These two simple linguistic differences allow Chinese speakers to have a better conceptual understanding of mathematics and consequently allows them to perform simple calculations with more ease. Having this slight advantage as a child, when we all struggle to make sense of numbers, could mean the difference between a very discouraged math student and a budding young mathlete.