Untranslatable Words -not quite true, is it?

I love these words, and I love it that they can't be translated by a single English word or short phrase.
20 Awesomely Untranslatable Words from Around the World:
But it's not quite true to say that they are "examples of instances where other languages have found the right word and English simply falls speechless." After all, they each have a short 'definition' in English. So English doesn't fall speechless (especially as 'tartle' is a word from an English dialect!). Merely has to be a bit more prolix. This is important because we don't want to fall into strong linguistic determinism, do we?

Running Words Together: The Science Behind Cross-linguistic Psychology

A bit more info for mulling over in respect of the debate on linguistic relativity and determinism. This piece of research written up briefly here Running Words Together: The Science Behind Cross-linguistic Psychology tells us, among other things: "Despite the vast differences between the four languages, however, all participants used distinct words to describe when the student was walking and to identify precisely when she began running. These results indicate cross-linguistic commonalities in naming patterns for locomotion and help to support the notion of certain universal rules and constraints in all languages.
“We found that converging naming patterns reflect structure in the world, not only acts of construction by observers,” Malt stated. “On a broader level, the data reveal a shared aspect of human experience that is present across cultures and reflected in every language.” So the first bit of the article shows how language can affect thinking, the latter shows how reality tends to form language. I think that this is still coming up in favour of critical realism.

Effects of language on color discriminability

A very interesting set of experiments if you are at all interested in the matter of linguistic determinism, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis or the notion that language determines thought. At first this paper, Effects of language on color discriminability might seem to be saying that it does; language seems to affect our colour discrimination. But be careful; linguistic determinism says that the actual perception is determined by the language. The results here or more commensurate with seeing language as a secondary level beyond the basic perception:

"Because the effect of language can be altered by linguistic interference, it seems that
language is acting a secondary process in the color discrimination tasks used in these studies. This secondary process can alter the results or speed of a color judgment,but it seems more likely that this interference happens at a decision stage rather late in the processing stream."

That's not to say that language may not channel thought in some cases or make certain perspectives more likely among a language community, merely that it does not control fully. There is room for perceptions at variance with the language's predispositions. In the Genesis story of Adam naming the animals, God brings the animals to Adam to name and whatever name Adam gave, that was its name. I think that this is saying that there are boundaries: that God makes it that there are some things that are 'given' but within that we have a degree of freedom to 'name' (taxonomise, represent, divide and combine etc) and God is willing to let that stand, may even be enjoying what we make of 'it'. This seems to me to allow for linguistic determinism in a weak form in that it can be overturned by human creativity.

Linguistics' new buzz...

I've been following this story for a few weeks now, and this article, though long, seems to be the best at explaining what the big buzz is in linguistics with the Piraha language. The interesting thing for me, not a convinced Chomskyan, is this. "In a comment on Everett’s paper published in Cultural Anthropology, Michael Tomasello, the director of the Department of Developmental and Comparative Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, in Leipzig, endorsed Everett’s conclusions that culture can shape core grammar. "
In part it interests me because it seems to put Sapir-Whorfe hypothesis into reverse, despite the Whorfian perspective of the linguist at the centre of the debate. And that is important because a lot of academic post modernism seems to be linguistic-determinist in approach, whereas this seems to actually turn that on its head.
A Reporter at Large: The Interpreter: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker:

Infant determinism is a myth

EducationGuardian.co.uk | Research | Helene Guldberg:: "The determinist myth: The idea that the first three years of our lives make us who we are is scientifically unsound, argues Helene Guldberg"

While we're on the subject of determinism, perhaps we should note that the studies on the effects of early esperiences in humans are not as conclusive as we might have thought. Though there are some quite clear 'worst-case' scenarios, they may not tell us much about less extreme cases. One worst-case is this:
It may well be the case that extreme emotional deprivation in the first two years of life can have devastating, irreversible consequences. Gerhardt points out that researchers who studied the brains of young children in Romanian orphanages found a "virtual black hole" where the orbitofrontal cortex - an area of the brain involved in the regulation of emotions - should have been.

But then we should note what is said after that:
However, it is exceptionally rare to see children subjected to the anything like the appalling treatment of the Romanian orphans. Extreme conditions of emotional deprivation may be so exceptional that they tell us absolutely nothing about the situations where there is engagement between adult and child.

The plasticity of the human brain may yet be even more versitile than we thought. This may turn out also to have bearing on debates about things like [homo]sexuality, paedophilia and sociopathology ...