i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

I'd like to take natural languages as an example for an interesting question I'm thinking about and use this to analyze implications for Controlled Vocabularies.

This post partially refers to a previous blog post (courses.ischool.berkeley.edu/i202/f10/blog/cultural-categorization) where the topic of cultural categorization using Russian imagery expressions as an example has been analyzed.

There are differences in languages in the way how languages express something. As an example, - to say it in a German expression - "I occasionally catch myself by using a 1 to 1 German expression in English" (meaning: I occasionally recognize that I have just said something in English that is a direct translation from a German expression). And apparently, I recognize that this is an English expression as well. :) However, Russian is more imagery than English (according to Darya) whereas I would say English is more descriptive than German. English has way more descriptive, fine-grained verbs but I perceive German to be more precise and factual.

Having recognized this, it is a very interesting question to ask: To which extend does a language shape the way people think and to which extend does the way of people's thinking shape the language? I am not referring to any chicken and egg problem, which results in endless cycles. In fact, I believe this is a dynamic and iterative process that evolves over time in a certain direction due to external influences. However, I think it is more important to think about - given the language constrains - how do people perceive their world they live in? How do people differ in how they tackle problems, explain problems, even understand topics?

Even though rather a philosophical question, this might be useful to think about when designing a controlled vocabulary. The fundamental way in which a vocabulary is designed (e.g. describing images with factual information of with emotions) enables but also limits it's perspective. In addition, it constrains in way the quality of description when people who come from different (language) backgrounds create or consume the information.