In that case please accept my apologies. I only used such combative terms because I understood your post to say you read the article (or at least skimmed it) and then dismissed it as psychobabble (which I also have no patience for). When you get around to looking at it you can actually skip the first four paragraphs.
Ok. I finally got around to reading and understand what you are trying to write.
It is a nice and interesting article but there are some comments i have.
The following texts are my humble Opinions :
The writer of the article clearly states that although different languages describe certain situations differently with respect to sexes or past,future or present, this does not limit the ability of any person to limit them to the constraints of the language. For example : If i would tell in English to you that i spend time with my neighbor last evening, you are going to ask what we did if you are interested. Since i am decent and i have nothing to hide, i would explain what we did. From that explanation you can deduce what the sex is of the neighbor. But only from the following explanation you would know what had happened that evening. In Dutch, French or German ( I think in most Latin derived languages, Germanic languages and languages under Latin influences but i am not entirely sure about this), you would know if i told you that i spend time with my neighbor it is a man or a woman. If you are interested you are going to ask what we did. Since i am decent and i have nothing to hide, i will explain this to you. The reason why i point this out so strong is that the the following explanation reveals what has occurred. Thus in 4 different languages, the same result will occur. The following explanation reveals what has occurred.
Again it is me who explains it and it is not the language that is the limiting factor.
It is the listener who has a prejudice about me that will assume a female or a male neighbor. This explains more about the lister then about me. It is the driving force of our thoughts and also our greatest weakness. Prejudice. It has a bad vibe to it but it does not have to be. You need to have to start from something. Thus you can use a positive form of prejudice and be a healthy positive paranoid. Or you can use a negative form of prejudice and be a unhealthy negative paranoid. Having a negative prejudice is much easier then to have a positive prejudice. Because with a negative prejudice, you can just rely on instincts. With a positive prejudice, you need to constantly be present as a layer in between your instinctive reactions and the emotions and thoughts your brain will form. You are shaping your thoughts and toning down the strength of instinctive behavior with this. Everybody has a prejudice. It comes from our most basal instinctive behavior to be cautious about everything that is different or unknown from what we have learned so far. It is about using the prejudice and controlling the window of interest in your mind. That is something people should learn more often. Because then it is also easier to learn.
To return to the article :
The next example is that the Chinese do not know past future or present differences in the language. Thus i can safely assume if i ask what a Chinese person did yesterday in Chinese, the constructed sentence will reveal that i asked what the Chinese person did yesterday. It is not limiting as long as the language allow for the words to be arranged or select words to describe the situation.
The next is about the gender of words. There is the male gender, the female gender or no gender at all for words in Dutch. Why is this done ? It is how speech evolves. Once in a while there is a clean up but that is it for as far as i know in dutch history.
For example : I do not like the bed, it is too soft. I could also say : I do not like the bed. The bed is too soft. This does seem to be more obvious. But it makes a conversation less pleasant when i say this :
"The bed looks very nice. The bed has a shape i like. I am going to lay down on the bed and try it out. Too bad. The bed is too soft. I really like the bed. Perhaps if the bed has another mattress i will like the bed because then the bed is not too soft.
"
There is nothing wrong with this text. But people would think i have some issues because i mention "the bed" so often. Again prejudice comes to mind here. But when somebody speaks in this way it is tiring (at least it would be for me). Better would be :
" I like it, it has a great shape, but i am not going to buy it because the mattress of the bed is too soft. "
Many examples are given, but every time it is the prejudice of the test subject that determines the outcome. For example, i am an image thinker. When for example you mention a bridge, i see a bridge in my mind, i think of physics and mathematics. I can more or less predict where the spots are where the heaviest load is carried. I do this by overlaying a picture where for example Red is a very heavy load and yellow is a light load. I do this by using the prejudice mechanism of my brain. Instead of not using it, i use the speed of prejudice governed instincts. I am sure that a lot of people do this the same but have different interests. For me the structural integrity is the first thing that pops up in my mind when i look at a bridge. I do not associate it with a male or a female. If i shift the window of interest to for example female, somewhere in my brain a group of neurons would start to signal that for example the bridge has two arches and that reminds of two wonderfully shaped breasts or a wonderfully shaped bottom. But again only if i wish it to be. Thus although i have different interests, i can shift my "window of interest" to subjects that i normally would not care about(
constantly). Am i special ? No, not at all. Most people do this from the moment of being able to grasp the world around them. Others need more time and determination or help to do this. But everybody can do it.
The next example is about giving directions and i like it a lot because it explains what i mean about prejudice and having a certain mindset all the time in this special case from infancy on :
The egocentric system of giving directions. It is used more often than the geocentric system because if i would say at the traffic light go right, it is a relative form of giving directions. This is more handy because now you only need to know your own location relative to the traffic light. If i would have told you to go north at the traffic, you would first have to determine where north is. The geocentric system is an absolute system. Thus the egocentric system is more easier to use and not because of the language. The example of the Aboriginal is about that he is using words as east, south, north, west, for a relative positioning system based on the fact that someone has stated that a certain direction is north. This does not mean he is constantly aware of the north pole of the earth. If he is, then that is something he does consciously and has nothing to do with his language being the cause, the language just describes the way he thinks (and learned from his ancestors) and not the other way around. When looking at history, i can clearly see that the language follows the events in history.
This explains a lot.
In order to speak a language like Guugu Yimithirr, you need to know where the cardinal directions are at each and every moment of your waking life. You need to have a compass in your mind that operates all the time, day and night, without lunch breaks or weekends off, since otherwise you would not be able to impart the most basic information or understand what people around you are saying. Indeed, speakers of geographic languages seem to have an almost-superhuman sense of orientation. Regardless of visibility conditions, regardless of whether they are in thick forest or on an open plain, whether outside or indoors or even in caves, whether stationary or moving, they have a spot-on sense of direction. They don’t look at the sun and pause for a moment of calculation before they say, “There’s an ant just north of your foot.” They simply feel where north, south, west and east are, just as people with perfect pitch feel what each note is without having to calculate intervals. There is a wealth of stories about what to us may seem like incredible feats of orientation but for speakers of geographic languages are just a matter of course. One report relates how a speaker of Tzeltal from southern Mexico was blindfolded and spun around more than 20 times in a darkened house. Still blindfolded and dizzy, he pointed without hesitation at the geographic directions.
This is also a very nice example :
Again, if someone would say : "the last time i checked i had 2 wives".
You could seek something behind it. He is just taking into account that he cannot be absolutely certain about anything he is not keeping track of constantly. This reminds of Heisenberg by the way. It also gave a forced update of my environment. I have to look at my eggs that i have cooked for my upcoming dinner.
In coming years, researchers may also be able to shed light on the impact of language on more subtle areas of perception. For instance, some languages, like Matses in Peru, oblige their speakers, like the finickiest of lawyers, to specify exactly how they came to know about the facts they are reporting. You cannot simply say, as in English, “An animal passed here.” You have to specify, using a different verbal form, whether this was directly experienced (you saw the animal passing), inferred (you saw footprints), conjectured (animals generally pass there that time of day), hearsay or such. If a statement is reported with the incorrect “evidentiality,” it is considered a lie. So if, for instance, you ask a Matses man how many wives he has, unless he can actually see his wives at that very moment, he would have to answer in the past tense and would say something like “There were two last time I checked.” After all, given that the wives are not present, he cannot be absolutely certain that one of them hasn’t died or run off with another man since he last saw them, even if this was only five minutes ago. So he cannot report it as a certain fact in the present tense. Does the need to think constantly about epistemology in such a careful and sophisticated manner inform the speakers’ outlook on life or their sense of truth and causation? When our experimental tools are less blunt, such questions will be amenable to empirical study.
For many years, our mother tongue was claimed to be a “prison house” that constrained our capacity to reason. Once it turned out that there was no evidence for such claims, this was taken as proof that people of all cultures think in fundamentally the same way. But surely it is a mistake to overestimate the importance of abstract reasoning in our lives. After all, how many daily decisions do we make on the basis of deductive logic compared with those guided by gut feeling, intuition, emotions, impulse or practical skills? The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter, and their consequences probably go far beyond what has been experimentally demonstrated so far; they may also have a marked impact on our beliefs, values and ideologies. We may not know as yet how to measure these consequences directly or how to assess their contribution to cultural or political misunderstandings. But as a first step toward understanding one another, we can do better than pretending we all think the same.
The basic prejudice system of your brain is more important than language. It can be trained to think in a certain way that your "window of interest" follows a list of priorities. In abstract essence explaining it in computer terms, you could say that your window of interest is similar as when using a search algorithm where the search query is your window of interest while the search algorithm is traversing through the array of data in memory to seek for matching or closely matching data. It is the matching of data that is the challenge. Does it need a perfect match ? Can it be a bit of ?
For example : By how much in values between 0 and 1000.0000.000. Where 0 is no match at all and 1000.000.000 is a perfect match ? This matching algorithm in essence determines how creative a person is. Because when you vary it, you get the results as when seeing kids playing. Then you can use solid logic to redefine the matching criteria for feedback purposes and self correction. For example :If everything is a perfect match, you are probably going to be locked up for insanity. If nothing ever matches, you are going to need help as well because on average to you everything sucks and is of no use. Fuzzy logic and the human mind. Knowing when to switch from fuzzy mode to exact match mode.
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