In my opinion, language is one of the profoundest of all influences on
a person’s or a people’s psyche, self-view, and worldview, a much
stronger determinant than race or custom or religion and maybe even
than place.  Today I am curious about one aspect of that influence. 
My question would probably be good for (and maybe already has been) a
doctoral dissertation of some kind, so I am not looking for an
exhaustive analysis; I just want to scratch the itch.  The question
has three parts, and a satisfactory answer will address all three.

(This one sounds as if it were right up PinkFreud’s alley, but any
interested researcher is welcome to respond.)

Part 1:  Of some set of the world’s languages--say, maybe, the top
forty (possibly with closely related languages treated as language
groups)--which ones make no distinction between singular and plural
forms?

Part 2:  Of some significant representation of the world’s
ethnic/cultural groups, however they might be defined, which ones are
more individual-oriented and which more group-oriented?

You see where I’m going with this, don’t you?

Part 3:  Is there a correlation between the two?

My Sunday-afternoon hypothesis is that in cultures whose language does
not have a distinct singular form, there is a greater tendency toward
groupthink, and in those whose language treats singular and plural
differently, a greater focus on the individual and a stronger sense of
self-definition.  I am looking for some evidence in support of or in
contradiction to this hypothesis.

Bonus question:  What psychological pattern, if any, distinguishes
cultural groups whose inflections account not only for singular and
plural but also for dual (as English used to do and as Sanskrit does
do) or some other number between “one” and “many”?

Thank you.
Apteryx

---

Clarification of Question by apteryx-ga on 06 May 2003 20:56 PDT

With all this excellent attention and no direct takers, I conclude
that my question must be just too big.  I've decided to reduce the
question to one-third (the most interesting third) and halve the
price, from $21.72 to $10.86.  Leli, I invite you to step up and claim
the question.  You don't have to add anything to what you've said. 
The answer you have already given as a comment has led me to some very
interesting material on this subject, enough for me to consider that I
got what I was looking for.

There's always another question, though (I think my last words are
going to end with a question mark; gosh, I hope I get to have last
words!).  What I wonder now, of course, is whether the individualist
vs. collectivist psyche is the *result* of those language dfferences
or the *source* of them.  But we'll save that for another day.

Thanks, all!
Apteryx

Thank-you apteryx

How nice of you to ask me to count my comment as your official answer;
but I imagine we are both disappointed that no-one has grappled more
comprehensively with your interesting topic. You were kind enough to
say I needn't add anything so I'll just report on my searches.

I suspect you've already found Hofstede's scores for different
cultures and felt that my reference to his work was a partial answer
to part 2 of your question. For me, it was interesting that not only
Asian cultures but also some Latin American countries rate low for
individualism:

Geert Hofstede's Cultural Dimension Scores
http://www.geert-hofstede.com/geert_hofstede_dimensions.htm	

As I played around with search terms connected with Hofstede's work
and various Asian languages, I found that the results were often in
one of these two categories:

1 References to linguists/ethnolinguists chipping away at the question
of what light a language sheds on its culture. This includes quite a
few 'cultural diversity' studies by scholars interested in endangered
languages and the tiny groups of people who still speak them.
Ethnologue.com has many citations to journal articles of this kind:
http://www.ethnologue.com/web.asp

2 Practical studies from the point of view of educationalists wanting
to understand students from more than one culture, or trainers
introducing cross-cultural issues to businesspeople.

There were also some suggestions that languages recognizing
hierarchies may reflect 'groupthink'. This is mentioned in a personal
piece by someone comparing Korea with the West and relating her
experience to Hofstede's categories:

"In the Korean language there are so many levels of the language that
are built in to the structure of the language. One Korean language
grammar book I have lists six different levels of the language -
polite formal high style, polite informal middle style, the plain
style, the intimate style, the familiar style, and the authoritative
style. For each level of the language there are rules that are not
broken by the Korean people regarding who uses which style and to whom
(I think this is one of the reasons why Korean is one of the most
difficult languages in the world to learn as a foreign language). I
think that because Koreans must categorize people in their minds into
certain age groups, and social groups in order to even be able to
begin to talk with them, Korean people tend not to think of a person
as an individual, but rather more for the role that he or she fills in
society."

"The Influence of Language on Culture", by Donna Cho
http://www.hongik.ac.kr/~tidings/no_102/102-15.html



"Linguistic determinism" and "linguistic/cultural relativism" may be
the search phrases which bring you closer to discussions about the
relationship betwen language and psyche. But the debate is mostly
about whether language does or doesn't shape thinking. No-one seems to
be considering the possibility that language differences are the
result rather than the source of cultural variation.

"The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, which is variously referred to as the
'Whorfian Hypothesis,' 'linguistic relativism,' and 'linguistic
determinism' (a description of the strong formulation meant by
implication to be a bad thing, I think) concerns the relationship
between language and thought, and suggests in its strongest form that
the structure of a language determines the way in which speakers of
that language perceive and understand the external world. This
formulation is generally understood by many to be untenable, but the
hypothesis also exists in a weaker form : that language structure and
content does not determine a view of the world, but that it shapes
thought to some degree, and is therefore a powerful impetus in
influencing speakers of a given language to adopt a certain
world-view."
http://www.emptybottle.org/glass/2003/04/linguistic_relativism_and_korean.php

Read Sapir online here:
Introduction to the Study of Speech 
http://www.bartleby.com/186/

Steven Pinker has argued against this sort of approach:
"Professor and co-director of MIT's Center for Cognitive Science,
Pinker demolishes linguistic determinism, which holds that differences
among languages cause marked differences in the thoughts of their
speakers."
The Language Instinct : How the Mind Creates Language   Steven Pinker 
Perennial (2000)
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0060958332/103-6316520-3260604?vi=glance



Lastly, if you're interested in plurals, try this teaser!

"Whorfism (Linguistic determinism)

    * A Zuni speaker might just ‘see’ one ‘thing’, whereas an English
speaker [sees] two ‘things’ — precisely because of the languages that
they speak.
    * A Welsh speaker might just ‘see’ one ‘thing’, whereas an English
speaker [sees] three ‘things’ — precisely because of the languages
that they speak.
   
Reasons for Language Change
http://courses.nus.edu.sg/course/elltankw/2262/change.htm



I'm glad you found my comment led you to one or two interesting places
- thank-you for naming me the official answerer.
As a GA regular, you know you are very welcome to ask for
clarification so please say if I can help you further in any way.


Regards - Leli

Thank you, Leli.  You have given me abundant material with which to
pursue this intriguing topic.  In one of the twelve other lifetimes I
need for all the things I'd like to learn just for the pleasure of
knowing them, I will study linguistics and philology and not just
dabble in languages.  Then perhaps I will explore the avenue you
pointed to:  "No-one seems to be considering the possibility that
language differences are the result rather than the source of cultural
variation."  That seemed such an obvious question to me because I can
readily imagine unused elements of language atrophying and falling
off, just as some forms and structures of English have done or are
doing (for example, I think the subjunctive will be all but extinct
within my children's lifetimes).  A culture that underwent a radical
psychological change, perhaps for political reasons (as ours in the
U.S. has been doing for several decades, though not in this particular
way), is bound to see changes in language as a result.  And once the
word for, say, "myself" goes away, how will it ever come back?  Maybe
through exposure to languages that have it?  I hope somebody is
tracking linguistic changes that reflect a global society.

For now, I would not make any further request of you, but I would
certainly invite you and anyone else who has further thoughts on this
topic to add comments.  I'll check back periodically and see if
anything more has grown here.  And--if somebody ever feels ready to
answer the entire original question, I'll repost it.

I wish there were a way to send messages to people through GA.

Apteryx

I believe most of the languages without plural forms are Asian
languages; I'd like to leave the answering of this fascinating
question to one of GA's Researchers who lives in an Asian culture
(there are many such Researchers, and I am eager to see their
responses.)

Just out of curiosity, have you by any chance read Ayn Rand's short
novel "Anthem," in which a collectivist society of the future has
banned the use and even the concept of the word 'I' in favor of 'we'?
There is a similar novel by Yevgeny Zamyatin entitled "We."

The Chinese have plural, e.g. for Hokkien a "lah" sound is added to
"he"/"she" and it becomes "them". However there is no distinction
between genders when saying he/she, his/hers, him/her. So practically
all people -- even those with otherwise good English -- refer to a man
as female, e.g. "she is singing in a boy-band lah" (why the "lah" is
added I don't know).

Following up on Pinkfreud's comment, I entered the following in
Google:

  asian languages "no plural"


The Asian Languages (by Roger Chriss)
http://www.xlation.com/essays/tran11.php

"Asian languages lack much of the linguistic equipment we
take for granted in an Indo-European tongue. For instance,
neither Japanese nor Chinese have the singular or plural, verb
tenses, gender, cases, articles, or declensions as we know them
in English, Spanish, or German.

There is no plural form for a noun like 'cat'. You simply
say 'cat' (which means one or many); the number of cats, if
important, is revealed either through context or the addition of
a number with its counter (a part of speech used to identify what
is being counted). Similarly, there is no gender (masculine,
feminine, or neutral). In Spanish, the word 'cat' is 'gato' and
is masculine. No such distinction exists in Japanese, Chinese, or
other Asian languages."

Hope this helps.

Have a look at Daniel Chandler's "Semiotics for Beginners" at:

http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Documents/S4B/sem01.html


Also you might enjoy Colibn Watson's novel "The Embedding" which deals
with the results of bringing up a group of children with a completely
artificial language.

Pronouns, even without singular/plural variation, could be relevant to
your "groupthink" question:
This article on "pronoun drop" refers to a much-quoted study by
Hofstede. (I think Hofstede's focus was more on cultural than
linguistic differences.)

"Kashima, E. S., & Kashima, Y. (1998). Culture and language: The case
of cultural dimensions and personal pronoun use. Journal of
Cross-Cultural Psychology, 29, 461 – 486.
-	Analyzed cultural differences between countries with languages that
have a ‘pronoun drop’ option (such as Spanish, Portuguese, Italian,
Mandarin, Indonesian, Korean, Russian, etc .) and that don’t have a
‘pronoun drop’ option (e.g. English, German, French, Greek, Finnish,
etc. ).
-	Pronoun drop option refers to the possibility in spoken language to
express first and second person perspective without the explicit use
of “I” or “you”
-	The idea is that an explicit use of “I” and “you” highlights a
figure against the speech context that constitutes the ground; the
absence reduces the prominence of the speaker; consequently, the
authors hypothesize that countries with a pronoun drop language tend
to be more collectivistic as compared to countries with languages with
obligatory pronoun use. This should be the case because implicitly in
a conversation less ‘overt’ distinctions are made between speakers,
less emphasis is put on the different perspectives.
-	Across 71 countries and 39 languages indicators of
individualism-collectivism (Hofstede, 1980) correlated with the type
of language in the direction that pronoun drop countries were less
individualistic."

Click on 'pronouns.doc' at this link:
http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/class/Psy394V/Pennebaker/ClassNotes/


Comparing 'I' and 'we' is part of this study:

"The purpose of this study is to examine how culture (Taiwanese and
North American) as well as language (Chinese and English) influence
certain writing features that are conceptually linked to collectivism
and individualism. The selected features are as follows: (1)
indirectness, (2) personal disclosure [(a) first person singular
pronouns and (b) personal anecdotes], (3) use of proverbs, (4)
collective self [(a) first person plural pronouns, (b) humaneness, and
(c) collective virtues], and (5) assertiveness.
The design of the study also permitted examination of individual
differences in group-oriented (collectivism) as opposed to idiocentric
(individualism) thinking. "

Evaluating the Impact of Collectivism and Individualism on
Argumentative Writing by Chinese and North American College Students
SU-YUEH WU  National Pingtung Institute of Commerce, Taiwan, R.O.C.
DONALD L. RUBIN
The University of Georgia
http://www.ncte.org/pdfs/subscribers-only/rte/0352-nov00/RT0352Evaluating.pdf

As for fictional worlds experimenting with language, how about Ursula
LeGuin's "The Dispossessed", set in a society where no-one is allowed
to use a possessive pronoun? Resources are scarce and to be shared;
children are brought up to say 'the plate' not 'my plate'. As far as I
rememember, 'your' is also forbidden. 'My' copy of the book has
disappeared so I can't quote anything, but an example in a reader's
review on Amazon says: "Possessive pronouns are even avoided. Instead
of saying "My hand hurts," one would say "The hand hurts me."

Very interesting question - looking forward to reading an answer.

For what it's worth, in Spanish one says the equivalent of "the hand
hurts me" instead of "my hand hurts." Thus a fairly well-known 1997
Spanish movie (Abre los ojos) was released as "Open Your Eyes" in
English, although a word-for-word translation would be "Open the
Eyes."

quite a question,

Unfortunately too little time to take it on, but a few comments:

* Chinese does make a difference in singular and plural, but does so
in its adjectives. Wo (my) is singular, women (our) plural. Nouns do
not change.
* Chinese does make a difference between his and her, not phonetic,
but in the written language: the characters are different.

Regards,

Fons

Hebrew (and I think Arabic) has no word for toe. Toes are simply known
as fingers. This was *actually* a problem for me when I ended up in an
Israeli ER once.

Not relevant I 'spose, but hey...

First of all, thank-you for the stars and the feedback.

On reflection, I think I was a bit reckless to suggest "no-one" is
studying the 'effect' of culture on language. I meant that linguistics
professors don't seem to be working on it.
Perhaps 'cultural studies' is the place to look?

Can't echo your subjunctive as here in Britain it is much nearer to
extinction than in the US. Every year there are new examples of the
British adopting American usage but the subjunctive is definitely an
exception.

Good luck with your many interests!

Leli