9 ms·

Languages That Could Change the Way You See the World (2015)

62 points by ColinWright 6y ago

kris-s 6y ago
When I learned about the cardinal language folks a few years ago I thought it was so cool that I’ve tried to always keep in mind which way is north ever since. Whenever I learn enough of a new language to speak sentences I feel as though the person speaking isn’t quite “me” but rather a remix of me. We all have facets and speaking a different language brings that out.
- estaseuropano 6y ago
  Just to flag that these are not necessarily consensus analysis, I can't speak for the details but there were linguistic papers discussing that these people actually use different directions - cardinal when outside, but simple relational inside. So they are not necessarily all day aware of every direction (which in any case is easier when you live in a small hut and normally are in areas you know well).
- el-salvador 6y ago
  I never worry much about cardinal points when I'm home. But then I spent some months in two countries in which the addressing system does not use street names or house numbers but points of references and cardinal directions [1]. After about a month there, keeping track of the cardinal points became second nature because it was a necessary part of functioning in those countries. Since directions in conversations usually are "Just walk two blocks then one East" However when I'm home, I stop keeping track where the North is, because it is not that necessary. And while we also speak Spanish in my country, we tell directions in a different way, using words like "Turn right, the left, downhill, uphill. [1] Addresses in Nicaragua and Costa Rica are very unusual for the rest of the world. For example "From the Cowboy's Sour Milk, Two Blocks West, Right hand" is a completely valid address in Managua.
- BrandoElFollito 6y ago
  I discovered this in the US. It was either N Main Street, or within a building (west corner). I traveled extensively to the US for 15 years but never managed to subconsciously keep track of the cardinal directions.
frakt0x90 6y ago
I hadn't heard these before and I find that even less exotic languages change they way you think about things. I didn't understand grammar like indirect objects until I studied Spanish. In Vietnamese, every word is a single syllable and you chain them together to make more complex descriptors. They also have no tense. So to say "I went to the store yesterday", you say "I go store yesterday" The form of go does not change depending on the time period. Languages are so cool and if I could make as good a living just studying them I would.
- blacksmith_tb 6y ago
  I remember (vaguely) my year of Mandarin as an undergrad was similar - though to be fair English is also capable of a lot of word-order tricks for a Subject-Verb-Object language, we don't have any trouble with "I went to the store yesterday" vs. "Yesterday I went to the store" or even "I went, yesterday, to the store".
- chris_st 6y ago
  Quite agree -- I really enjoyed my linguistics classes in college, and if I hadn't discovered programming, might have become a linguist.
- yorwba 6y ago
  > In Vietnamese, every word is a single syllable Would you consider "sân bay" to be two words but "airport" to be one? If so, then that's just an artifact of the writing system. After all, it could just be "sânbay" and "air port". There are no spaces in speech.
  - knolax 6y ago
    Yes but what he's really talking about are morphemes. English has many multisyllabic morphemes where as Vietnamese has few.
leto_ii 6y ago
As a layman with a slight interest in linguistics, I keep coming accross the Pirahã language as an example that refutes the Chomskyan idea of universal grammar. As far as I understand it, this is not actually true and the professional community mostly sees Everett as a charlatan. Is this correct? Does anybody know if there are professional linguists who take his theories/observations seriously?
- gshubert17 6y ago
  Chomsky and most of his students call Everett a charlatan. For example, David Pesetsky, whose doctoral advisor was Chomsky, criticized Everett's work in the June 2009 issue of the Journal of the Linguistic Society of America, Language. Chomsky and Pesetsky may not be the most objective critics, though. I read Everett's popular book on the Pirahã, "Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes", and found his descriptions believable, but I'm definitely not a professional linguist. There's a nice interview with Everett in https://www.edge.org/conversation/daniel_l_everett-recursion-and-human-thought https://www.edge.org/conversation/daniel_l_everett-recursion... which includes details on the controversies with Chomsky's ideas. Given Chomsky's refusal to admit he was wrong in his political judgments about Cambodia and Sudan, which some observers go so far as to label hypocrisy, I'm tending to cheer for Everett and hope he is correct.
  - coolgeek 6y ago
    Depending on how you define student, everybody who ever took a linguistics class is a student of Chomsky. But you raise a good point about objectivity. So who/where are the disinterested supporters of Everett's work? What do they believe that the Chomskians are getting wrong about Everett's work? The key word in my query here is disinterested, because almost all criticism of Chomsky is (implicitly or explicitly) based on his political views, rather than his linguistic scholarship.
- meepmorp 6y ago
  He’s not taken too seriously. My experience: several years ago I watched Everett give a talk on Pirahã, with only a quick skim of his paper (the first one that got him attention, forgot the name). He gave a basic talk about his work, with examples and translations, etc. I wasn’t convinced by his argument, and some of his answers to fairly reasonable questions were defensive. Part of the problem is that (at the time, maybe still) all of the data on the language was collected by Everett (maybe with help). I believe he did the the translation, too. It’s reasonable to be skeptical about the data, particularly given the claims based on it. Also, he’s asserting a negative - that Pirahã lacks syntactic recursion, and you can’t prove that adequately with limited data that comes only from you (logical difficulties aside).
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
clavalle 6y ago
Learning about (Ithkuil)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil], a constructed language that incorporates a few of the ideas in the article along with many others has changed the way I see language and the effect it can have on thought. How much of how we construct ideas is constrained by historical accident? This is the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis and a well known question. But Ithkuil makes me wonder, what thought is possible if we build a language with expressiveness that goes beyond anything we have naturally?
Mordisquitos 6y ago
The way the author described the case of Yélî Dnye ("A Language Where Colors Are Metaphors") makes it seem a bit underwhelming to me, and unfortunately the link to the research paper is broken. When she says: >For example, to describe something as red, islanders say “mtyemtye,” which is derived from “mtye,” or “red parrot species.” Another example is “mgîdîmgîdî,” which can be used to say something is black, but is directly derived from the word for night, “mgîdî.” ...all I get is the impression that the names of colours in Yélî Dnye are derived from known objects which happen to be of that colour—an interesting bit of trivia, but nothing shocking. Then: >Not only that, writes Levinson, but the islander’s grammar reinforces this metaphorical slant, saying, “The skin of the man is white like the parrot,” rather than “He is white.” ...I am confused by what is supposed to be that surprising in this way of expressing themselves. Does "is white like the parrot" stand for a literal mention of both the word for white parrot and a word derived from it? Or is it a stand-in for the fact that they don't refer to things being a colour but rather being like specific coloured things? I feel like something has been lost in translation, both literally from Yélî Dnye and metaphorically from the field of linguistics.
- meepmorp 6y ago
  The link to the 2001 article they base it from is broken, but it sounds like all their color words are just derived from nouns, maybe with some affix indicating 'of the color like'. The description is too vague to make a lot of sense. There's lots of really weird and interesting things about Australian languages that would make better subjects for an article, like the avoidance register in Warlpiri. Hard to see why they chose that particular one.
  - rq1 6y ago
    From my understanding the difference lies in the object/animal chosen to describe the colour wrt. to the situation. You’d use the red parrot if I may say to describe an angry wordy person becoming red of anger. And you’d use another object/animal to describe the exact same colour in another context. Say red frog for your shining new prince or whatever.
- feoren 6y ago
908B64B197 6y ago
Leaning a new language might change your perception of the world in different ways too. If you live in a country where several languages are spoken, you might realize some media will happily say two different things on the same subject in different languages! Politicians too!
wenc 6y ago
> Interestingly, the Pirahã don’t seem to have a very high opinion of outsiders. They are monolingual, preferring to stick with their own lexicon rather than borrow words from English or Spanish, and they call all other languages, “crooked head.” A quibble with something in the article -- why would the Pirahã borrow words from Spanish? They're in Brazil. And as it turns out, they do have a few loanwords from Portuguese.
- hinkley 6y ago
  Somewhere I got the notion that if you're doing translations for Brazil you had to support Portuguese and Spanish, which is why you need internationalization instead of localization. It turns out that there are maybe half a million Spanish speakers in Brazil, but plenty of other languages, especially in the western half. > Brazil’s immigrant languages include Catalan, Dutch, Japanese, Korean, North Levantine Spoken Arabic, Turoyo and Vlax Romani, as well as more mainstream European languages like German, Italian, Polish and Ukrainian.
  - wenc 6y ago
    > you had to support Portuguese and Spanish I wonder about that (maybe internationalization for Latin America?). Portuguese, as far as I know, is very dominant in Brazil (spoken by 98% of the population). Spanish might be spoken as an L2 in the border states, but I don't know that there's any significant Spanish internationalization in Brazil. Most Brazilians I know say that whenever they have to communicate with Spanish speakers, they generally muddle through with Portuñol, a made-up pidgin of Portuguese with a few Spanish words thrown in to ease comprehension. Ironically, Spanish isn't a very popular language in Brazil (only 4% of the population speak it). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Brazil#Bilingualism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Brazil#Bilinguali... Come to think of it, I've seen more signage in Spanish in the United States than I've ever seen in Brazil. That said, I've only ever been to Rio and São Paulo. Would be interesting to get thoughts from Brazilians.
    - bluGill 6y ago
      Spanish is spoken by more than 4% of the US. It is an official language of New Mexico, the dominate language of Puerto Rico, and has a significant number of native born speakers in states bordering Mexico (which at one time owned those states). There are also a lot of immigrants (mostly from Mexico - both legal and illegal) who speak Spanish. If you squint hard enough Portuguese is a dialect of Spanish, as is Italian. Native speakers will disagree with that statement, but most non-native speakers who have learned Spanish and one of the other agree that once you know Spanish it isn't a big deal to learn the other.
rfreytag 6y ago
Is there a language with no word for money?
- hinkley 6y ago
  My first thought was some of the gift cultures of First Nations people, but the most obvious group that came to mind is the source of the word 'wampum', so that probably kills that theory. I think we downplay how much 'international trade' went on, and for how long. The Hopewell civilization seems to have flirted with Egyptian levels of long-distance trade. The Mississippi river valley is a hell of a highway system.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    You can't infer anything from anyone who was in the Americas before Europeans. They didn't have a written record to work with, and between disease killing vast numbers; and the introduction of guns and the horse (other European technology too, but those are the big ones): their cultures were all in major change as we observed them. They probably didn't need much money then. Between being a barter society in general, and the affects of a small population relative to what the land could support there just wasn't as much to trade with each other. When someone did want to trade the Europeans had much better goods so even more of their old money wouldn't be used much anymore. Or in different words it is a lot easier to give gifts when almost all your relatives just died each leaving you a large inheritance of things. We can guess that some amount of selfishness would have come [back] to the gift giving cultures if things would have been allowed to return to "normal". That isn't to say gifts wouldn't have been important to the culture, only that they would be relatively rarer as there wasn't as much excess anyone could afford to give.
    - hinkley 6y ago
      Robin Wall Kimmerer (Onondaga) talks a good bit about gift economies, and she ties it all the way back to their oral histories. I doubt very much that you would rewrite your parables to fit the new normal. While that is a very Western thing to do, projecting your own baggage onto others is usually a mistake.
kens 6y ago
The Matses language in the article is interesting, where the verb form indicates how you know the information you are imparting. Something like that would be very useful for HN, making people tag statements to indicate their reliability. Imagine the benefit of verb tenses such as "I am an expert in this area", "I read something about this topic a while ago", "I know nothing about the topic and am confidently speculating", or "I didn't read the article and am commenting off the title." Edit: the key point is that this verb tense is required; you can't say anything without stating your confidence.
- xvedejas 6y ago
  I don't see why I would trust grammatically-required self-assessments of expertise any more than I already do when someone tags one of those phrases (not much).
  - hinkley 6y ago
    I think the effect would be greater than zero, but not as much as some might think. Some people have a pattern of speech that implies a level of authority that they don't actually feel. It's obvious when some people need to 'police their tone', less obvious for others.
    - xvedejas 6y ago
      I'll conjecture that languages will invariably end up with a more neutral option, even when such options seem required. Sometimes it is useful to the speaker to be ambiguous, whether it is to understate something, imply something, or just take a mental load off.
- meepmorp 6y ago
  I would be skeptical of how seriously to take the interpretation in the article. There are huge differences between English and Matses, such that naively talking what's encoded in the verb morphology is misleading at best. If you look at the section on verbs in the thesis on Matses, the author has this to say in the first paragraph: >Epistemic modality (e.g., -chit 'Uncertainty') and evidentiality (e.g., -nëdac 'Distant Past: Inferential', -ash 'Recent Past: Conjecture' and -denne 'Remote Past: Experiential') are coded in Matses by derivational suffixes or as part of the meaning of inflectional suffixes, while English uses adverbs and modals like perhaps, evidently, really, must, etc. Matses actually encodes the same information as English, it just does so through a series of particles attaches to the verb, which is not surprising in a highly synthetic language. Mind you, I haven't read all 1200+ pages, but I'd doubt the article's take on things.
JoeDaDude 6y ago
Side note: I'd like to point out one of the very few science fiction novels about linguistics: The Languages of Pao by Jack Vance [1]. The novel is clearly inspired by the Sapir-Whorf concept that language shapes thought [0]. BTW: Another candidate would be 1984. Though not the main these, that novel introduces Newspeak, a language in which dissent cannot be expressed, thus becoming another tool of oppression. Minor spoiler: In Vance's said novel, the different segments of the population of a planet are taught three separate languages in order to develop and specialize economically, industrially, and militarily. [0]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity [1]. https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Languages_of_Pao/ke1-sQNJxnsC?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Languages_of_Pao/ke...
- haakonhr 6y ago
  Babel 17 by Samuel Delaney is another classic in this genre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babel-17 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babel-17
- rthomas6 6y ago
  It's not really a main plot point, but Iain M. Banks's Culture uses a constructed language that de-emphasizes or lacks easy descriptions of the concepts of possession and ownership, dominance/submission, and aggression.
- Bakary 6y ago
  I've been unable to find a linguistics SF story based on a theory other than Sapir-Whorf
- ozzmotik 6y ago
  i think that Anthem by Ayn Rand also deserves an honorable mention in this list
ColinWright 6y ago
There is a SF novel that taps into these ideas: The Player of Games, by Iain M. Banks

62 points by ColinWright 6y ago

When I learned about the cardinal language folks a few years ago I thought it was so cool that I’ve tried to always keep in mind which way is north ever since. Whenever I learn enough of a new language to speak sentences I feel as though the person speaking isn’t quite “me” but rather a remix of me. We all have facets and speaking a different language brings that out.

estaseuropano 6y ago
Just to flag that these are not necessarily consensus analysis, I can't speak for the details but there were linguistic papers discussing that these people actually use different directions - cardinal when outside, but simple relational inside. So they are not necessarily all day aware of every direction (which in any case is easier when you live in a small hut and normally are in areas you know well).
el-salvador 6y ago
I never worry much about cardinal points when I'm home. But then I spent some months in two countries in which the addressing system does not use street names or house numbers but points of references and cardinal directions [1]. After about a month there, keeping track of the cardinal points became second nature because it was a necessary part of functioning in those countries. Since directions in conversations usually are "Just walk two blocks then one East" However when I'm home, I stop keeping track where the North is, because it is not that necessary. And while we also speak Spanish in my country, we tell directions in a different way, using words like "Turn right, the left, downhill, uphill. [1] Addresses in Nicaragua and Costa Rica are very unusual for the rest of the world. For example "From the Cowboy's Sour Milk, Two Blocks West, Right hand" is a completely valid address in Managua.
BrandoElFollito 6y ago
I discovered this in the US. It was either N Main Street, or within a building (west corner). I traveled extensively to the US for 15 years but never managed to subconsciously keep track of the cardinal directions.

frakt0x90 6y ago

I hadn't heard these before and I find that even less exotic languages change they way you think about things. I didn't understand grammar like indirect objects until I studied Spanish. In Vietnamese, every word is a single syllable and you chain them together to make more complex descriptors. They also have no tense. So to say "I went to the store yesterday", you say "I go store yesterday" The form of go does not change depending on the time period. Languages are so cool and if I could make as good a living just studying them I would.

blacksmith_tb 6y ago
I remember (vaguely) my year of Mandarin as an undergrad was similar - though to be fair English is also capable of a lot of word-order tricks for a Subject-Verb-Object language, we don't have any trouble with "I went to the store yesterday" vs. "Yesterday I went to the store" or even "I went, yesterday, to the store".
chris_st 6y ago
Quite agree -- I really enjoyed my linguistics classes in college, and if I hadn't discovered programming, might have become a linguist.
yorwba 6y ago
> In Vietnamese, every word is a single syllable Would you consider "sân bay" to be two words but "airport" to be one? If so, then that's just an artifact of the writing system. After all, it could just be "sânbay" and "air port". There are no spaces in speech.
- knolax 6y ago
  Yes but what he's really talking about are morphemes. English has many multisyllabic morphemes where as Vietnamese has few.

leto_ii 6y ago

As a layman with a slight interest in linguistics, I keep coming accross the Pirahã language as an example that refutes the Chomskyan idea of universal grammar. As far as I understand it, this is not actually true and the professional community mostly sees Everett as a charlatan. Is this correct? Does anybody know if there are professional linguists who take his theories/observations seriously?

gshubert17 6y ago
Chomsky and most of his students call Everett a charlatan. For example, David Pesetsky, whose doctoral advisor was Chomsky, criticized Everett's work in the June 2009 issue of the Journal of the Linguistic Society of America, Language. Chomsky and Pesetsky may not be the most objective critics, though. I read Everett's popular book on the Pirahã, "Don't Sleep, There Are Snakes", and found his descriptions believable, but I'm definitely not a professional linguist. There's a nice interview with Everett in https://www.edge.org/conversation/daniel_l_everett-recursion-and-human-thought https://www.edge.org/conversation/daniel_l_everett-recursion... which includes details on the controversies with Chomsky's ideas. Given Chomsky's refusal to admit he was wrong in his political judgments about Cambodia and Sudan, which some observers go so far as to label hypocrisy, I'm tending to cheer for Everett and hope he is correct.
- coolgeek 6y ago
  Depending on how you define student, everybody who ever took a linguistics class is a student of Chomsky. But you raise a good point about objectivity. So who/where are the disinterested supporters of Everett's work? What do they believe that the Chomskians are getting wrong about Everett's work? The key word in my query here is disinterested, because almost all criticism of Chomsky is (implicitly or explicitly) based on his political views, rather than his linguistic scholarship.
meepmorp 6y ago
He’s not taken too seriously. My experience: several years ago I watched Everett give a talk on Pirahã, with only a quick skim of his paper (the first one that got him attention, forgot the name). He gave a basic talk about his work, with examples and translations, etc. I wasn’t convinced by his argument, and some of his answers to fairly reasonable questions were defensive. Part of the problem is that (at the time, maybe still) all of the data on the language was collected by Everett (maybe with help). I believe he did the the translation, too. It’s reasonable to be skeptical about the data, particularly given the claims based on it. Also, he’s asserting a negative - that Pirahã lacks syntactic recursion, and you can’t prove that adequately with limited data that comes only from you (logical difficulties aside).

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

clavalle 6y ago

Learning about (Ithkuil)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil], a constructed language that incorporates a few of the ideas in the article along with many others has changed the way I see language and the effect it can have on thought. How much of how we construct ideas is constrained by historical accident? This is the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis and a well known question. But Ithkuil makes me wonder, what thought is possible if we build a language with expressiveness that goes beyond anything we have naturally?

Mordisquitos 6y ago

The way the author described the case of Yélî Dnye ("A Language Where Colors Are Metaphors") makes it seem a bit underwhelming to me, and unfortunately the link to the research paper is broken. When she says: >For example, to describe something as red, islanders say “mtyemtye,” which is derived from “mtye,” or “red parrot species.” Another example is “mgîdîmgîdî,” which can be used to say something is black, but is directly derived from the word for night, “mgîdî.” ...all I get is the impression that the names of colours in Yélî Dnye are derived from known objects which happen to be of that colour—an interesting bit of trivia, but nothing shocking. Then: >Not only that, writes Levinson, but the islander’s grammar reinforces this metaphorical slant, saying, “The skin of the man is white like the parrot,” rather than “He is white.” ...I am confused by what is supposed to be that surprising in this way of expressing themselves. Does "is white like the parrot" stand for a literal mention of both the word for white parrot and a word derived from it? Or is it a stand-in for the fact that they don't refer to things being a colour but rather being like specific coloured things? I feel like something has been lost in translation, both literally from Yélî Dnye and metaphorically from the field of linguistics.

meepmorp 6y ago
The link to the 2001 article they base it from is broken, but it sounds like all their color words are just derived from nouns, maybe with some affix indicating 'of the color like'. The description is too vague to make a lot of sense. There's lots of really weird and interesting things about Australian languages that would make better subjects for an article, like the avoidance register in Warlpiri. Hard to see why they chose that particular one.
- rq1 6y ago
  From my understanding the difference lies in the object/animal chosen to describe the colour wrt. to the situation. You’d use the red parrot if I may say to describe an angry wordy person becoming red of anger. And you’d use another object/animal to describe the exact same colour in another context. Say red frog for your shining new prince or whatever.
feoren 6y ago

908B64B197 6y ago

Leaning a new language might change your perception of the world in different ways too. If you live in a country where several languages are spoken, you might realize some media will happily say two different things on the same subject in different languages! Politicians too!

wenc 6y ago

> Interestingly, the Pirahã don’t seem to have a very high opinion of outsiders. They are monolingual, preferring to stick with their own lexicon rather than borrow words from English or Spanish, and they call all other languages, “crooked head.” A quibble with something in the article -- why would the Pirahã borrow words from Spanish? They're in Brazil. And as it turns out, they do have a few loanwords from Portuguese.

hinkley 6y ago
Somewhere I got the notion that if you're doing translations for Brazil you had to support Portuguese and Spanish, which is why you need internationalization instead of localization. It turns out that there are maybe half a million Spanish speakers in Brazil, but plenty of other languages, especially in the western half. > Brazil’s immigrant languages include Catalan, Dutch, Japanese, Korean, North Levantine Spoken Arabic, Turoyo and Vlax Romani, as well as more mainstream European languages like German, Italian, Polish and Ukrainian.
- wenc 6y ago
  > you had to support Portuguese and Spanish I wonder about that (maybe internationalization for Latin America?). Portuguese, as far as I know, is very dominant in Brazil (spoken by 98% of the population). Spanish might be spoken as an L2 in the border states, but I don't know that there's any significant Spanish internationalization in Brazil. Most Brazilians I know say that whenever they have to communicate with Spanish speakers, they generally muddle through with Portuñol, a made-up pidgin of Portuguese with a few Spanish words thrown in to ease comprehension. Ironically, Spanish isn't a very popular language in Brazil (only 4% of the population speak it). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Brazil#Bilingualism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Brazil#Bilinguali... Come to think of it, I've seen more signage in Spanish in the United States than I've ever seen in Brazil. That said, I've only ever been to Rio and São Paulo. Would be interesting to get thoughts from Brazilians.
  - bluGill 6y ago
    Spanish is spoken by more than 4% of the US. It is an official language of New Mexico, the dominate language of Puerto Rico, and has a significant number of native born speakers in states bordering Mexico (which at one time owned those states). There are also a lot of immigrants (mostly from Mexico - both legal and illegal) who speak Spanish. If you squint hard enough Portuguese is a dialect of Spanish, as is Italian. Native speakers will disagree with that statement, but most non-native speakers who have learned Spanish and one of the other agree that once you know Spanish it isn't a big deal to learn the other.

rfreytag 6y ago

Is there a language with no word for money?

hinkley 6y ago
My first thought was some of the gift cultures of First Nations people, but the most obvious group that came to mind is the source of the word 'wampum', so that probably kills that theory. I think we downplay how much 'international trade' went on, and for how long. The Hopewell civilization seems to have flirted with Egyptian levels of long-distance trade. The Mississippi river valley is a hell of a highway system.
- bluGill 6y ago
  You can't infer anything from anyone who was in the Americas before Europeans. They didn't have a written record to work with, and between disease killing vast numbers; and the introduction of guns and the horse (other European technology too, but those are the big ones): their cultures were all in major change as we observed them. They probably didn't need much money then. Between being a barter society in general, and the affects of a small population relative to what the land could support there just wasn't as much to trade with each other. When someone did want to trade the Europeans had much better goods so even more of their old money wouldn't be used much anymore. Or in different words it is a lot easier to give gifts when almost all your relatives just died each leaving you a large inheritance of things. We can guess that some amount of selfishness would have come [back] to the gift giving cultures if things would have been allowed to return to "normal". That isn't to say gifts wouldn't have been important to the culture, only that they would be relatively rarer as there wasn't as much excess anyone could afford to give.
  - hinkley 6y ago
    Robin Wall Kimmerer (Onondaga) talks a good bit about gift economies, and she ties it all the way back to their oral histories. I doubt very much that you would rewrite your parables to fit the new normal. While that is a very Western thing to do, projecting your own baggage onto others is usually a mistake.

kens 6y ago

The Matses language in the article is interesting, where the verb form indicates how you know the information you are imparting. Something like that would be very useful for HN, making people tag statements to indicate their reliability. Imagine the benefit of verb tenses such as "I am an expert in this area", "I read something about this topic a while ago", "I know nothing about the topic and am confidently speculating", or "I didn't read the article and am commenting off the title." Edit: the key point is that this verb tense is required; you can't say anything without stating your confidence.

xvedejas 6y ago
I don't see why I would trust grammatically-required self-assessments of expertise any more than I already do when someone tags one of those phrases (not much).
- hinkley 6y ago
  I think the effect would be greater than zero, but not as much as some might think. Some people have a pattern of speech that implies a level of authority that they don't actually feel. It's obvious when some people need to 'police their tone', less obvious for others.
  - xvedejas 6y ago
    I'll conjecture that languages will invariably end up with a more neutral option, even when such options seem required. Sometimes it is useful to the speaker to be ambiguous, whether it is to understate something, imply something, or just take a mental load off.
meepmorp 6y ago
I would be skeptical of how seriously to take the interpretation in the article. There are huge differences between English and Matses, such that naively talking what's encoded in the verb morphology is misleading at best. If you look at the section on verbs in the thesis on Matses, the author has this to say in the first paragraph: >Epistemic modality (e.g., -chit 'Uncertainty') and evidentiality (e.g., -nëdac 'Distant Past: Inferential', -ash 'Recent Past: Conjecture' and -denne 'Remote Past: Experiential') are coded in Matses by derivational suffixes or as part of the meaning of inflectional suffixes, while English uses adverbs and modals like perhaps, evidently, really, must, etc. Matses actually encodes the same information as English, it just does so through a series of particles attaches to the verb, which is not surprising in a highly synthetic language. Mind you, I haven't read all 1200+ pages, but I'd doubt the article's take on things.

JoeDaDude 6y ago

Side note: I'd like to point out one of the very few science fiction novels about linguistics: The Languages of Pao by Jack Vance [1]. The novel is clearly inspired by the Sapir-Whorf concept that language shapes thought [0]. BTW: Another candidate would be 1984. Though not the main these, that novel introduces Newspeak, a language in which dissent cannot be expressed, thus becoming another tool of oppression. Minor spoiler: In Vance's said novel, the different segments of the population of a planet are taught three separate languages in order to develop and specialize economically, industrially, and militarily. [0]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity [1]. https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Languages_of_Pao/ke1-sQNJxnsC?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Languages_of_Pao/ke...

haakonhr 6y ago
Babel 17 by Samuel Delaney is another classic in this genre: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babel-17 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babel-17
rthomas6 6y ago
It's not really a main plot point, but Iain M. Banks's Culture uses a constructed language that de-emphasizes or lacks easy descriptions of the concepts of possession and ownership, dominance/submission, and aggression.
Bakary 6y ago
I've been unable to find a linguistics SF story based on a theory other than Sapir-Whorf
ozzmotik 6y ago
i think that Anthem by Ayn Rand also deserves an honorable mention in this list

ColinWright 6y ago

There is a SF novel that taps into these ideas: The Player of Games, by Iain M. Banks