foreword

Not long ago, the argument about whether Chinese is about to die has once again swept the Internet.

From someone once again swearing that Chinese is dead, to another group of people who are still using it and using all kinds of flowers to prove that Chinese is not only not dead but also alive and well. Those who sing bad Chinese are really going to die. .

So, today, let's look at the decline of Chinese from the perspective of language relativity.

Linguistic Relativity

Linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir believes that "cultural concepts and classifications contained in different languages affect language users' cognition of the real world, that is, users of different languages will be affected by language differences. This is the origin of linguistic relativity .

Under the influence of the Sapir-Worf hypothesis, which is full of the idea of the principle of language relativity, the famous science fiction writer Ted Jiang wrote the famous "Story of Your Life", which was remade into the movie "Arrival" in 2016.

In the eyes of extreme language relativists, language can determine thinking, without language there is no thinking, and the characteristics of language determine whether people can think about something , as shown in works such as "1984", let your vocabulary list Without words that express a meaning, you don't want what it means.

But extreme linguistic relativity has been basically denied by linguistics, so linguistic researchers often say something like this:

We should teach people a language without stress so that people will never feel stressed.

The more popular view now is that although language cannot determine thinking, it can indeed affect thinking to a certain extent . Professor Zhou Xiaolin, director of the Center for Brain and Cognitive Science at Peking University, believes: "More scholars have formed a more consistent understanding that language and thinking are related, and language can have an impact on people's thinking structure and cognition."

The related arguments are based on an increasing amount of experimentation and are therefore more grounded than the purely speculative debates on language and thought that preceded them. Although some experiments are still controversial or interpreted differently, there are growing signs that this effect is real.

For example, in terms of color discrimination, Chinese and English users have the words "blue" and "green", so in an experiment called "color selection card", people tend to use blue and green. , blue and green to distinguish. But when a Tarahumara speaker who has no "blue" and "green" but only the word "blue-green" completes the experiment, it is found that he has the same probability of choosing the color card of these three colors, because in the In his view, these three colors "belong to the same category" and there is not much difference.

To a certain extent, this use points out a principle that language (and writing) follows when determining words: the tendency to make the categories referred to by different words vary as much as possible, and the objects of the categories referred to by the same word are the same as similar as possible.

This argument was confirmed in related experiments and computer simulations by Kay and Kempton, who dubbed this phenomenon "categorical perception," which suggests that language does affect people's perception of color to some extent. .

The same phenomenon occurs in the perception of numbers.

In 2008, Mike Frank et al. found that Piraha speakers with only three words representing numbers, "1", "2" and "many (more than 2)", when completing a series of experiments on placing objects, needed to When more than 2 items are placed, the error rate increases significantly.

In terms of sound, since Dutch uses "high" and "low" to describe tones, while Persian uses "thick" and "thin" to describe tones, in one experiment, the experimenter asked subjects to watch at the same time A picture and listening to a sound, and describe the tone of the sound, it was found that when subjects were shown a picture with a line placed at a high or low position, the judgment of the pitch of the Dutch subjects was obviously disturbed, while the Persian subjects were not. There was apparently not much interference; when subjects were shown pictures of thick or thin lines, the reverse was true. More interestingly, when the Dutch were taught the relevant Persian language, there was also a disturbance in the test results of the Dutch, although not as significantly as the Persians.

In another study, it was found that infants' ability to distinguish differences between language-related sounds diminished with language learning, but the ability to distinguish language-unrelated sounds remained unaffected.

In a more complex experiment, the researchers performed a statistical analysis of the results of graph matching experiments between English and German speakers and found that German speakers, who were more purpose-oriented, also showed stronger purpose in graph matching. Orientation. When comparing the date calculation between Chinese users and English users, the advantages of Chinese users are also more obvious - after all, one is directly saying "day of the week", while the other is similar to "X Day", the conversion difficulty can be seen One spot.

These experiments are telling us that language does have some influence on thinking.

If you compare a person to a computer, then long-term memory is hard disk, working memory is memory, and language, as a conforming system, gives information on how information is stored on hard disk, how it is presented in memory, and both. between codecs. The aforementioned Professor Zhou pointed out, "In psychology, any thinking can be regarded as transferring the existing knowledge reserves in long-term memory into working memory, and then processing and integrating this information. Including language in the If the classification and storage methods in long-term memory are not conducive to operations, the processing and processing of information may be difficult and hindered, which will manifest as an impact on cognitive ability.”

Therefore, "If language is rich, the expression and storage of relevant information will be richer. When this knowledge is retrieved into the working memory system, it will help cognition. Conversely, if some concepts are not differentiated in the brain's knowledge system If there is no corresponding symbolic expression, or the system of symbolic expression is not conducive to operations, people will have difficulty in understanding related things, and the efficiency of operations and operations in working memory will be reduced or even impossible.”

This is probably a way that language can affect thinking and cognition.

From this point of view, when the language people use to describe the same kind of affairs can provide more vocabulary and the more detailed the differences between words, then people's thinking will be more inclined to use more ways to describe the same kind of affairs. Representing affairs and distinguishing affairs with more detailed vocabulary is helpful for thinking. On the contrary, thinking will increasingly tend to use "one complete abdominal muscle" to express "all eight-pack abs", which is undoubtedly a decline, both in terms of language and thought.

Even, from the perspective of the social function of language, rich vocabulary at least in the early stage of language appearance is to provide a more detailed classification of possible dangers in the environment to better alert partners. This is the environmental monitoring of language. with social debugging feature.

A well-known example has to be mentioned here, that is, there are more than 100 shocking words for snow in Eskimo. Of course, some linguists (such as Geoffrey Pollum) point out that Eskimo is a polysynthetic language, so these 100+ snow-related words are actually a combination of a few words (similar to the many words in Chinese In response to this objection, other linguists (such as Ole Henrik Magga) point out that there are 180 Sami languages in Scandinavia and northern Russia that describe snow. Unlike ice's vocabulary, there are thousands of words about reindeer, and their language is definitely not polyglot.

The reason why Eskimos and Sami have so many words for snow and reindeer is that they need to be able to express the potential dangers in their environment accurately enough to communicate the accompanying dangers to the whole world. group. This is the social function of language.

In fact, linguists have counted the correlation between the number of words describing the same thing in different languages around the world, and the correlation between the weather and other natural conditions in the area where the main users of the language are active, and found that to a certain extent There is this linguistic needs-theoretic tendency that diversity in language reflects the primary interests of human survival concerns .

In this sense, the increasing tendency to use homogenized language to refer to a large number of things in general is undermining the function of language—whether it is an effect on thinking, a weakening of the expressive function of thinking, or because The lack of vocabulary leads to the weakening of social functions, both of which exist to a certain extent.

Of course, some may object that we are only using a hot word, but not eliminating other words that already exist, so we increase the expression rather than reduce it.

However, although this statement is reasonable to a certain extent, it is actually a general expression to try to cover up the occurrence of other more precise expressions, which is unintentionally suppressed by the public opinion field. blunting of thinking.

This is like a Chinese teacher coming to the classroom and telling the students who are getting fatter and fatter, anyway, you have taken physical education class every semester, so everyone's physical fitness will not deteriorate, so let's take Chinese class in this class.

Thinking, like the body, needs to be tempered through continuous use, so the act of occupying the opportunity cost of using the detailed expression itself is weakening the thinking ability-of course, it should be emphasized here that this effect does not Not overnight, but subtle, so of course you can't suddenly turn into a baboon just because you say "no child".

This kind of thing that needs to be accumulated for a long time to show its power, before it really shows its destructive power, there will always be a group of people who will stand up and tell you: this kind of destruction does not exist, because I am fine now.

So, going back to language, we can actually see from the two perspectives of the interaction between language and thinking, as well as the social function of language, the excessive use of homogenized and single words in daily communication is undoubtedly a problem. an act of killing language.

The reason for this phenomenon is closely related to the Internet and entertainment to some extent.

The medium is also the message

Many language phenomena, both at home and abroad, are roughly in line with a virus-like diffusion model, that is, a language phenomenon appears in a small area, quickly spreads to the entire population through the Internet, and becomes a temporary or long-term paradigm.

In this process, the help of the network is of course indispensable, because if it does not make the transmission of information faster than ever before, it may not be able to infect a wide enough group of people until the heat of the paradigm dissipates in the primitive population. Ignite everyone.

Here, people tend to cite technology neutrality and tool neutrality to maintain the function of the Internet. After all, the Internet also allows many good things to be circulated and known to more people, so it is not entirely bad.

However, there is no one person in the world who is always a devil from birth to death. People have good moments and evil moments, but can it be considered that everyone is neutral and that no one in the world is a devil? ? Souls under the knife like Samuel Little and Henry Lee Lucas probably wouldn't agree with this Virgin's point of view.

In fact, according to the famous American political scientist, the founder of communication, Harold Lasswell (Harold. Lasswell) in his paper "The Structure and Function of Communication in Society" and later developed information communication. From the perspective of the 5W1H elements (who, who thinks, what channel, what is said, what effect is achieved, and in what way), the information channel itself is an important part of information dissemination, so that the channel or more broadly speaking, the tool and the Technology itself is not completely neutral - it is part of general information at the social level, so how can it be completely separated from the bias of information?

Generalization theory in communication (mass media subtly cultivate audience's worldview ) and bullet theory ( mass media has irresistible communication effect, audience is only passively stimulated by information ) actually tell us that with information The media upgrade from the newspaper to the Internet, people's worldview is inevitably shaped by the upgrade of technology, or, at least, the upgrade of tools has strengthened people's ability to shape the worldview of the audience - no matter how we call the tools in this The process is neutral, and the convenience of allowing some people to better shape the world view of others cannot be considered absolutely neutral. This is like what people often mentioned in the issue of gun bans. It's easier to hurt other people, and you can of course stress that the firearm itself is neutral, but it actually has its original sin by making it easier to do evil.

Plus, if those who control the flow of information, intentionally or unintentionally, make people only accept certain types of information, the power that such a tool will bring to these people will be unimaginably huge, huge enough to influence the birth of national leaders. ——This is what Cambridge Analytica of the United States and its parent company, the Strategic Communications Laboratory, have done in many countries. In the United States’ own presidential election, it cannot be said that there is no such situation in which data and algorithms are used to influence the situation. After all, Facebook has used related papers for accurate advertising.

So tools are not neutral and technology is not impartial. They make some things easy and others difficult, which is no longer absolutely neutral.

Therefore, from this perspective, it is not entirely unreasonable to think that the Internet has caused the decline of language.

We can even think that both the Internet and language have created information cocoons for the general public. With the information flow customized by algorithms and the special patterns of language used in the information flow, people's worldview and The way of thinking will be reshaped - of course, it's the same sentence, this is a subtle influence, and a statistical change in a relatively short period of time may be seen in the technology of large groups, but when it comes to individuals, there may be some people You will never be bound by a cocoon all your life, and some people are bound by a cocoon all of a sudden but don't know it for a lifetime.

But more helpless and more troublesome than the information cocoon, the algorithmic world, and the non-neutrality of tools are the fundamental reasons for all of this, compared with all the above are just toys in its hands.

invisible hand

This invisible hand is actually a capital that has become more and more flattering in order to obtain benefits with higher efficiency.

In Shiono Shiono's "The Story of the Romans", we can already see the existence of flattering capital. In order to overthrow the consul of the hostile faction, the tribune can propose a lot of flattering Roman civilians, but in fact it is completely impossible. to get a very high approval rate and become the consul for the next year, while the commoners only care about short-term interests (the law of flattery proposed by the tribune) and do not care about long-term interests. Instead of doing any good, it has become a tool for politicians to eliminate political enemies.

The same situation exists in many countries now. No matter what kind of political correctness, you say that they are not weapons in the hands of politicians at all? Those who believe this statement are too naive. Of course, it is not easy to get the benefits expected by one's own faction in the fornication with professional politicians.

Capital may not necessarily appeal to the crowd, but appealing to the crowd must be the development direction of capital.

What Meizhong brings is that capital and the crowd seek out solutions that can resonate more effectively.

In The Dictionary of Stupidity, the author put forward the theory that the larger the population, the lower the IQ of the population . This seemingly pessimistic law is equally pessimistically true. Therefore, when capital wants to profit with the highest efficiency, it will naturally have its own audience as wide as possible, and the collective IQ of such a population can make the amoeba feel that they may be able to fight.

On this basis, the more popular something is, the better it can drive out good money; and the more you want a thing to be manifold, the closer it is to bad money. Only such a thing can affect the most people in the shortest time - if it is combined with the blessing of technical tools, it will be even more foolproof.

We can imagine that in the future, if the brain network for short, emotions can be directly transmitted to others without the need for traditional and modern media such as language, text, video and audio, then all human beings will be surrounded by a sea of emotions, and among them, pleasant emotions must be the most extensive. , people will no longer be curious about why they are pleasant, but will just keep relaying the feeling of happiness. At that time, the capital of Meizhong will definitely build a large number of pleasure producers, so that they can produce continuous pleasure 24 hours a day, whether it is by hand-washing or taking drugs.

Meizhong Capital doesn't care whether this will degenerate humans into baboons, they only care whether these baboons can be harvested by themselves 24 hours a day.

And do humans who become baboons reflect on why they become baboons?

Neither will it.

Because, as long as pleasure is enough, what is the difference between a man and a baboon?

Oh, there are differences - baboons are always baboons, but people are not always people .

From this perspective, is the decline of language still a problem?

No, it's never been a problem.