7 ms·

Does Your Language Shape How You Think?

62 points by GiraffeNecktie 16y ago

RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
There's been a lot written recently about language and its interaction with thinking processes. Here are a few related references here on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1595991 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1595991 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1576971 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1576971 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1556443 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1556443 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1551052 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1551052 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1543871 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1543871 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1505365 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1505365
- shawndumas 16y ago
  And http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1583995 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1583995 too
  - RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
    Thank you - I missed that one (obviously).
aggelosmp 16y ago
What about development languages?
- siglesias 16y ago
  a fascinating thought: worth looking into.
quant18 16y ago
I get quite suspicious when a linguist claims that there's some language where you can't possibly give directions by reference to your body orientation. What's more likely is that giving directions that way is stigmatised very strongly, so that the linguist never hears anyone do it, and if he accidentally did it himself, it would confuse his interlocutor. To give an analogy: if a linguist from Mars gathered a corpus of business English conversation, he'd notice that men refer to something 36 inches off the ground as "desk height" rather than "penis height", and call a sphere an inch or so in diameter "ping pong ball size" rather than "testicle size". Similarly a small discus is "penny sized" (adjusting for your local currency) rather than "anus sized", a small stone is "fist-sized" rather than "ballsack-sized", etc. Is this because in English it's linguistically impossible to make comparisons to your genital or excretory organs? No, it's because it's socially unacceptable at work; someone may complain to HR and get you fired if you make that comparison. Similarly, the reason the egocentric direction system is so dominant in Western (and Chinese, Japanese, etc.) culture is because of habit and custom --- urban civilians don't usually see sunrise or sunset from inside the office buildings and malls in which they're most likely to give these kinds of directions, so they never get instinctively oriented and the habit of giving directions by compass points never takes off. It has nothing to do with linguistics. And in the right situation, giving east-west-north-south style directions actually can take hold (which is helpful when you've got two sets of elevators and telling someone to "turn left" after getting off will send them walking in a fairly random direction). At certain times in my life, all my colleagues knew their north from their south. Were we all members of a sensitive indigenous tribe with a deep connection to nature due to our special mother tongue? No, we were stock traders; we knew which way was east in the building because our asses were in our seats before dawn and we watched the sun rise through the same window every day and set through the opposite one. Put us in a different building (e.g. due to switching jobs) and we'd be confused for a few days, just like the Bali kid who tried to get dance lessons from a teacher in another village.
- felxh 16y ago
  Your reasoning doesn't work if the language in question really doesn't have a word for 'left' or 'right'. Whether this is the case because they never though of it or because it was strongly stigmatized in the past and as a result these words came out of use and eventually were forgotten, the result is the same: Present day speakers truly have no possible way to say 'left' or 'right' without making up new words or describing it in some way.
  - ithkuil 16y ago
    I was always intrigued by the fact that some languages (especially ancient ones) appear to miss the word for "yes" and "no". I've heard that gaelic and latin for example don't have a real word for "yes", but instead the answer repeated the affirmative form of the verb or similar. Many argue that latin did indeed have the word for yes, namely "ita", but all the dictionaries I looked at translate it as "so; thus; indeed; ..." Other languages like japanese rely much on repetition of the verb but do have words for yes and no (hai to iie). I wonder if it really makes a difference to think in a language which doesn't have a word for yes and no (for whatever reasons is not present in the language, historical stigma etc). I see how it can change your way to discuss with people: "don't be tricky! answer simply, ehm uhm" but I feel this doesn't count as a major mind shaping issue. Don't get me wrong, I was intrigued as anyone with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis but I'm aware that sometimes some intriguing memes get more resonance than they deserve.
    - cynicalkane 16y ago
      I can understand lack of "yes", but lack of "no" seems pretty strange. What do babies in these cultures shout when they don't want something? The idea of "do not want" seems to be one of the most basic things a human will want to express, starting from a very early age.
      - mahmud 16y ago
        Classic Arabic has few words for "no", each expressing refusal/denial/rejection of a different sort: la, kalaa, balaa, lam, laysa, lan, etc. la no kalaa definitely not balaa but not lam did not laysa is not lan will not However, colloquial arabic just uses the ma- prefix and collapses all those different words into one: maa/mish/mush/makoo, depending on the dialect. E.g. "I will not try": mish hagarrab (Egyptian) maa `amjarab (Levantian) makoo nijarib (Iraqi/Kuwaiti) maabaa nijarib/nigarib (Yemeni, North/South)
RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
Single Page: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html...
instakill 16y ago
Not sure if the article mentions the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis but I completely agree with it and as a polyglot can attest to this theory.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
lee 16y ago
I think it does, and this even extends to programming languages! I've noticed that C++ developers think differently than Lisp developers, and same with Java and Python developers. Languages have subtle biases that totally effect the way you look at things.
- nck4222 16y ago
  I don't think that's the complete picture with programming languages. People already bring biases with them when they start using a programming language. They're more likely to become an expert in a language that agrees with the way they already think. So just because c++ developers think alike, it's not necessarily because the language influenced them to think that way. That doesn't really happen with spoken languages. You're born and have to learn the one (or maybe two) languages your parents speak. So the language influences you at a much earlier age.
georgecmu 16y ago
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a hundred years old. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity Among Whorf's well known examples of linguistic relativity are examples of instances where an indigenous language has several terms for a concept that is only described with one word in English and other European languages (Whorf used the acronym SAE "Standard Average European" to allude to the rather similar grammatical structures of the well-studied European languages in contrast to the greater diversity of the less-studied languages). One of Whorf's examples of this was the supposedly many words for 'snow' in the Inuit language, which has later been shown to be a misrepresentation[13] but also for example how the Hopi language describes water with two different words for drinking water in a container versus a natural body of water. These examples of polysemy served the double purpose of showing that indigenous languages sometimes made more fine grained semantic distinctions than European languages and that direct translation between two languages, even of seemingly basic concepts like snow or water, is not always possible. Another example in which Whorf attempted to show that language use affects behavior came from his experience in his day job as a chemical engineer working for an insurance company as a fire inspector[13]. On inspecting a chemical plant he once observed that the plant had two storage rooms for gasoline barrels, one for the full barrels and one for the empty ones. He further noticed that while no employees smoked cigarettes in the room for full barrels no-one minded smoking in the room with empty barrels, although this was potentially much more dangerous due to the highly flammable vapors that still existed in the barrels. He concluded that the use of the word 'empty' in connection to the barrels had led the workers to unconsciously regarding them as harmless, although consciously they were probably aware of the risk of explosion from the vapors. This example was later criticized by Lenneberg[14] as not actually demonstrating the causality between the use of the word empty and the action of smoking, but instead being an example of circular reasoning. Steven Pinker in The Language Instinct ridiculed this example, claiming that this was a failing of human sight rather than language. Whorf's most elaborate argument for the existence of linguistic relativity regarded what he believed to be a fundamental difference in the understanding of time as a conceptual category among the Hopi.[15] He argued that in contrast to English and other SAE languages, the Hopi language does not treat the flow of time as a sequence of distinct, countable instances, like "three days" or "five years" but rather as a single process and consequentially it does not have nouns referring to units of time. He proposed that this view of time was fundamental in all aspects of Hopi culture and explained certain Hopi behavioral patterns.
maw 16y ago
The bit about specifying the gender of one's neighbor sounds like the work of somebody who knows just enough to be really wrong. My French and German are weak, but Spanish has vecino/vecina, and you can equivocate easily enough by saying that you spent the evening with "una persona que vive cerca", and I'd be very surprised if you can't do similar in French or German. ("Une personne qu'habite ne pas loin" in French?)
- mahmud 16y ago
  Arabic: jaari(m)/jaarati(f) Somali: ninka dariskeenaa (m)/naagta dariskeenaa(f). Literally, "the man who is our neighbor", "the woman who is our neighbor". The somali is complicated because "neighbor" is never a singular person, always plural. The concept of a person living alone is unheard of, and people are usually suspicious of bachelors.
  - maw 16y ago
    But in Arabic and Somali is it possible to talk about people who live nearby while obscuring whether they're male or female?
    - mahmud 16y ago
      Yes, Arabic (juwaar/jiraan) and Somali (daris/jaar/jiraan) None of those words carry gender because they're plural. In the singular, Arabic uses the male "jaar" word for both genders. While the same word is plural in northern Somali, since, as mentioned, it has no singular word. Arabic also has the dual (jaaraan/jaarataan) our two neighbors (m/f)
timwiseman 16y ago
This was one of the main topics of Orwell's 1984 as well as some of his essays. If you restrict a language, you make it harder to think about certain topics. Making it impossible is far too strong a statement. Even very rudamentary languages can express virtually any concept. But it can certainly make it harder to think about those concepts, especially highly nuanced ones, with precise words fitted for it. Mathematical history provides a good example of this. There is nothing you can express with Hindu-Arabic numerals that you cannot express with Roman numerals. Yet, the Hindu-Arabic numerals we vastly easier to work with and think about, and their importation into Europe facilitated mathematical development there.
- Someone 16y ago
  Your argument is flawed, but the example is fine. Roman numerals are restricted in comparison with Arabic ones. AFAIK, there is no way to write "zero" or negative numbers in Roman numerals. Zero, in particular, was a major innovation.
  - ithkuil 16y ago
    Roman numerals are now dead, nobody would be taken seriously if he extended the roman numeral system in order to prove that the roman numerals could have a zero (or negatives). Right? But when cultural systems were alive, they routinely changed, adapted, imported concepts. Sometimes they were replaced, but not simply because they lacked something that could be added One could simply add "N" as nulla and invent something for negative numbers or spell it as a full word. The key point in the arabic/hindi zero is not the 'zero' value of the symbol, but the positional feature of the numbering system. The zero just turns out to be useful to express a lot of numbers in a positional system. Zero by himself is probably less useful and as a concept can be expressed as a full word "nulla" if needed. Indeed I just found out that medieval extension of the roman numeral system included 'nulla': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Zero http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Zero If only Romans had to calculate complicated feast dates like Easter, perhaps they'd found the need to include a zero as the medieval computists did. (honestly I have no idea of either the Ancient Rome festivities nor exactly what they used the numbers for, just guessing)
siglesias 16y ago
So apparently the Guugu Yimithirr have a pitch-pefect conception of cardinality at all times, because they describe space in north-south-east-west, which probably depends somehow on a periodic synchronization with the position of the sun. Would be curious to see how they'd thrive in Alaska.
shawndumas 16y ago
so what happens if one of your most used languages is a programming language?
fauigerzigerk 16y ago
Consider: "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. " and: "It was impossible to teach the boy anything, because he simply did not understand any of the instructions. When told to take “three steps east” or “bend southwest,” he didn’t know what to do. The boy would not have had the least trouble with these directions in his own village" and then: "This habit of constant awareness to the geographic direction is inculcated almost from infancy: studies have shown that children in such societies start using geographic directions as early as age 2 and fully master the system by 7 or 8" That makes me a little skeptical but it's still an interesting article.
c00p3r 16y ago
Cursing is a good example. Some low level subcultures are using high amount of sex/genital related cursing and word substitutes. (Russian underclass is the most famous example) while other cultures (say, Indian) aren't. Of course, language usage shapes what you thing and by which chains of associations your mind wanders along. If you're able to switch your mind's language for at least several minutes (naming and calling things on your second language) you will have a different projection of the same reality and your behavior will also be changed.

There's been a lot written recently about language and its interaction with thinking processes. Here are a few related references here on HN: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1595991 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1595991 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1576971 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1576971 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1556443 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1556443 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1551052 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1551052 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1543871 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1543871 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1505365 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1505365

shawndumas 16y ago
And http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1583995 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1583995 too
- RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
  Thank you - I missed that one (obviously).

aggelosmp 16y ago

What about development languages?

siglesias 16y ago
a fascinating thought: worth looking into.

quant18 16y ago

I get quite suspicious when a linguist claims that there's some language where you can't possibly give directions by reference to your body orientation. What's more likely is that giving directions that way is stigmatised very strongly, so that the linguist never hears anyone do it, and if he accidentally did it himself, it would confuse his interlocutor. To give an analogy: if a linguist from Mars gathered a corpus of business English conversation, he'd notice that men refer to something 36 inches off the ground as "desk height" rather than "penis height", and call a sphere an inch or so in diameter "ping pong ball size" rather than "testicle size". Similarly a small discus is "penny sized" (adjusting for your local currency) rather than "anus sized", a small stone is "fist-sized" rather than "ballsack-sized", etc. Is this because in English it's linguistically impossible to make comparisons to your genital or excretory organs? No, it's because it's socially unacceptable at work; someone may complain to HR and get you fired if you make that comparison. Similarly, the reason the egocentric direction system is so dominant in Western (and Chinese, Japanese, etc.) culture is because of habit and custom --- urban civilians don't usually see sunrise or sunset from inside the office buildings and malls in which they're most likely to give these kinds of directions, so they never get instinctively oriented and the habit of giving directions by compass points never takes off. It has nothing to do with linguistics. And in the right situation, giving east-west-north-south style directions actually can take hold (which is helpful when you've got two sets of elevators and telling someone to "turn left" after getting off will send them walking in a fairly random direction). At certain times in my life, all my colleagues knew their north from their south. Were we all members of a sensitive indigenous tribe with a deep connection to nature due to our special mother tongue? No, we were stock traders; we knew which way was east in the building because our asses were in our seats before dawn and we watched the sun rise through the same window every day and set through the opposite one. Put us in a different building (e.g. due to switching jobs) and we'd be confused for a few days, just like the Bali kid who tried to get dance lessons from a teacher in another village.

felxh 16y ago
Your reasoning doesn't work if the language in question really doesn't have a word for 'left' or 'right'. Whether this is the case because they never though of it or because it was strongly stigmatized in the past and as a result these words came out of use and eventually were forgotten, the result is the same: Present day speakers truly have no possible way to say 'left' or 'right' without making up new words or describing it in some way.
- ithkuil 16y ago
  I was always intrigued by the fact that some languages (especially ancient ones) appear to miss the word for "yes" and "no". I've heard that gaelic and latin for example don't have a real word for "yes", but instead the answer repeated the affirmative form of the verb or similar. Many argue that latin did indeed have the word for yes, namely "ita", but all the dictionaries I looked at translate it as "so; thus; indeed; ..." Other languages like japanese rely much on repetition of the verb but do have words for yes and no (hai to iie). I wonder if it really makes a difference to think in a language which doesn't have a word for yes and no (for whatever reasons is not present in the language, historical stigma etc). I see how it can change your way to discuss with people: "don't be tricky! answer simply, ehm uhm" but I feel this doesn't count as a major mind shaping issue. Don't get me wrong, I was intrigued as anyone with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis but I'm aware that sometimes some intriguing memes get more resonance than they deserve.
  - cynicalkane 16y ago
    I can understand lack of "yes", but lack of "no" seems pretty strange. What do babies in these cultures shout when they don't want something? The idea of "do not want" seems to be one of the most basic things a human will want to express, starting from a very early age.
    - mahmud 16y ago
      Classic Arabic has few words for "no", each expressing refusal/denial/rejection of a different sort: la, kalaa, balaa, lam, laysa, lan, etc. la no kalaa definitely not balaa but not lam did not laysa is not lan will not However, colloquial arabic just uses the ma- prefix and collapses all those different words into one: maa/mish/mush/makoo, depending on the dialect. E.g. "I will not try": mish hagarrab (Egyptian) maa `amjarab (Levantian) makoo nijarib (Iraqi/Kuwaiti) maabaa nijarib/nigarib (Yemeni, North/South)

RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago

Single Page: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?_r=2&pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html...

instakill 16y ago

Not sure if the article mentions the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis but I completely agree with it and as a polyglot can attest to this theory.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

lee 16y ago

I think it does, and this even extends to programming languages! I've noticed that C++ developers think differently than Lisp developers, and same with Java and Python developers. Languages have subtle biases that totally effect the way you look at things.

nck4222 16y ago
I don't think that's the complete picture with programming languages. People already bring biases with them when they start using a programming language. They're more likely to become an expert in a language that agrees with the way they already think. So just because c++ developers think alike, it's not necessarily because the language influenced them to think that way. That doesn't really happen with spoken languages. You're born and have to learn the one (or maybe two) languages your parents speak. So the language influences you at a much earlier age.

georgecmu 16y ago

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a hundred years old. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity Among Whorf's well known examples of linguistic relativity are examples of instances where an indigenous language has several terms for a concept that is only described with one word in English and other European languages (Whorf used the acronym SAE "Standard Average European" to allude to the rather similar grammatical structures of the well-studied European languages in contrast to the greater diversity of the less-studied languages). One of Whorf's examples of this was the supposedly many words for 'snow' in the Inuit language, which has later been shown to be a misrepresentation[13] but also for example how the Hopi language describes water with two different words for drinking water in a container versus a natural body of water. These examples of polysemy served the double purpose of showing that indigenous languages sometimes made more fine grained semantic distinctions than European languages and that direct translation between two languages, even of seemingly basic concepts like snow or water, is not always possible. Another example in which Whorf attempted to show that language use affects behavior came from his experience in his day job as a chemical engineer working for an insurance company as a fire inspector[13]. On inspecting a chemical plant he once observed that the plant had two storage rooms for gasoline barrels, one for the full barrels and one for the empty ones. He further noticed that while no employees smoked cigarettes in the room for full barrels no-one minded smoking in the room with empty barrels, although this was potentially much more dangerous due to the highly flammable vapors that still existed in the barrels. He concluded that the use of the word 'empty' in connection to the barrels had led the workers to unconsciously regarding them as harmless, although consciously they were probably aware of the risk of explosion from the vapors. This example was later criticized by Lenneberg[14] as not actually demonstrating the causality between the use of the word empty and the action of smoking, but instead being an example of circular reasoning. Steven Pinker in The Language Instinct ridiculed this example, claiming that this was a failing of human sight rather than language. Whorf's most elaborate argument for the existence of linguistic relativity regarded what he believed to be a fundamental difference in the understanding of time as a conceptual category among the Hopi.[15] He argued that in contrast to English and other SAE languages, the Hopi language does not treat the flow of time as a sequence of distinct, countable instances, like "three days" or "five years" but rather as a single process and consequentially it does not have nouns referring to units of time. He proposed that this view of time was fundamental in all aspects of Hopi culture and explained certain Hopi behavioral patterns.

maw 16y ago

The bit about specifying the gender of one's neighbor sounds like the work of somebody who knows just enough to be really wrong. My French and German are weak, but Spanish has vecino/vecina, and you can equivocate easily enough by saying that you spent the evening with "una persona que vive cerca", and I'd be very surprised if you can't do similar in French or German. ("Une personne qu'habite ne pas loin" in French?)

mahmud 16y ago
Arabic: jaari(m)/jaarati(f) Somali: ninka dariskeenaa (m)/naagta dariskeenaa(f). Literally, "the man who is our neighbor", "the woman who is our neighbor". The somali is complicated because "neighbor" is never a singular person, always plural. The concept of a person living alone is unheard of, and people are usually suspicious of bachelors.
- maw 16y ago
  But in Arabic and Somali is it possible to talk about people who live nearby while obscuring whether they're male or female?
  - mahmud 16y ago
    Yes, Arabic (juwaar/jiraan) and Somali (daris/jaar/jiraan) None of those words carry gender because they're plural. In the singular, Arabic uses the male "jaar" word for both genders. While the same word is plural in northern Somali, since, as mentioned, it has no singular word. Arabic also has the dual (jaaraan/jaarataan) our two neighbors (m/f)

timwiseman 16y ago

This was one of the main topics of Orwell's 1984 as well as some of his essays. If you restrict a language, you make it harder to think about certain topics. Making it impossible is far too strong a statement. Even very rudamentary languages can express virtually any concept. But it can certainly make it harder to think about those concepts, especially highly nuanced ones, with precise words fitted for it. Mathematical history provides a good example of this. There is nothing you can express with Hindu-Arabic numerals that you cannot express with Roman numerals. Yet, the Hindu-Arabic numerals we vastly easier to work with and think about, and their importation into Europe facilitated mathematical development there.

Someone 16y ago
Your argument is flawed, but the example is fine. Roman numerals are restricted in comparison with Arabic ones. AFAIK, there is no way to write "zero" or negative numbers in Roman numerals. Zero, in particular, was a major innovation.
- ithkuil 16y ago
  Roman numerals are now dead, nobody would be taken seriously if he extended the roman numeral system in order to prove that the roman numerals could have a zero (or negatives). Right? But when cultural systems were alive, they routinely changed, adapted, imported concepts. Sometimes they were replaced, but not simply because they lacked something that could be added One could simply add "N" as nulla and invent something for negative numbers or spell it as a full word. The key point in the arabic/hindi zero is not the 'zero' value of the symbol, but the positional feature of the numbering system. The zero just turns out to be useful to express a lot of numbers in a positional system. Zero by himself is probably less useful and as a concept can be expressed as a full word "nulla" if needed. Indeed I just found out that medieval extension of the roman numeral system included 'nulla': http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Zero http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_numerals#Zero If only Romans had to calculate complicated feast dates like Easter, perhaps they'd found the need to include a zero as the medieval computists did. (honestly I have no idea of either the Ancient Rome festivities nor exactly what they used the numbers for, just guessing)

siglesias 16y ago

So apparently the Guugu Yimithirr have a pitch-pefect conception of cardinality at all times, because they describe space in north-south-east-west, which probably depends somehow on a periodic synchronization with the position of the sun. Would be curious to see how they'd thrive in Alaska.

shawndumas 16y ago

so what happens if one of your most used languages is a programming language?

fauigerzigerk 16y ago

Consider: "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. " and: "It was impossible to teach the boy anything, because he simply did not understand any of the instructions. When told to take “three steps east” or “bend southwest,” he didn’t know what to do. The boy would not have had the least trouble with these directions in his own village" and then: "This habit of constant awareness to the geographic direction is inculcated almost from infancy: studies have shown that children in such societies start using geographic directions as early as age 2 and fully master the system by 7 or 8" That makes me a little skeptical but it's still an interesting article.

c00p3r 16y ago

Cursing is a good example. Some low level subcultures are using high amount of sex/genital related cursing and word substitutes. (Russian underclass is the most famous example) while other cultures (say, Indian) aren't. Of course, language usage shapes what you thing and by which chains of associations your mind wanders along. If you're able to switch your mind's language for at least several minutes (naming and calling things on your second language) you will have a different projection of the same reality and your behavior will also be changed.