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If a concept can be expressed as a sequence of tokens, then bam, we're done. If a concept can't be expressed as a sequence of tokens, then it doesn't really ma

• p-e-w 3y ago
  > everything Ithkuil can express, so can English Imagine there is a concept that no language can express. Now Ithkuil introduces a new word that is defined as that concept. But English (and all other languages) still cannot express that concept. So the idea that all/most languages are expressively equivalent appears to be false. The Chomsky hierarchy is about grammatical expressiveness, not about semantic expressiveness. I see no reason to believe that all languages have the same semantic expressiveness, which is what I understood the above claim to mean.
  • variaga 3y ago
    >Now Ithkuil introduces a new word that is defined as that concept. You are assuming the consequent. How exactly did Ithkuil 'define' a new word as that concept if the concept can't be expressed in Ithkuil ("any language")? Even assuming you could do such a thing, why couldn't every other language define a word to mean that concept in the same way? Why wouldn't English - in particular - just make the new Ithkuil word also an English word?
  • adastra22 3y ago
    That's what the original form of the Sapir-Worf hypothesis was about. IIRC they were studying indigenous languages which lacked a word for numerical concepts. E.g. there's a bunch of languages/cultures which allegedly only have a words for "one", "two", and "many." Do people in these cultures not have a concept of "three"? Early studies suggested that might be the case. Sapir and Worf wondered if perhaps these people would be incapable of understanding the notion of "three", as appeared to be the case, because they lacked the word for it. Turns out the results didn't replicate though, for a variety of reasons. Even in cases where the source languages didn't have higher numbers (which was much less common than originally thought), the speakers of course had a way of referencing numbers. In at least one case I believe the language had no unique number words at all, and what the linguist had thought was the word for "one" was in fact "alone", and the word for two was "couple" (as in "married couple"), and so on. They did indeed have such figurative words for larger numbers, and a place system for speaking of even larger amounts (e.g. a dozen-dozen people). The Sapir-Worf hypothesis also falls flat in another way: if we cannot conceive of a concept without a word for it, then how did language develop? Clearly there must be a way to learn a new concept, think about it, and then be the first to coin a new word for it. The original, strong form of the Sapir-Worf hypothesis is largely discredited today. But not the weak form, which is expressed thusly: "The language we speak influence the ways in which we think." This does seem to be largely true. There are studies but I'd rather point to some anecdotal examples that illustrate more why I find this interesting. Learning math, critical thinking, and engineering has enabled me to reason much more precisely about things than I did as a teenager. Having been through the community college system, I also have observed the great difficulty a lot of people less interested in scientific thinking have had in adopting various concepts in critical thinking. Like the difference between conditional implication (if) and biconditional statements (if and only if). In everyday English we often say "if", when in fact "if and only if" is the more correct statement. Or we say "A or B" when we mean "A or B, but not both" (exclusive-or). In English these longer forms are cumbersome, and the other alternative, "if" or "or", are in fact abbreviations of the longer forms "if and only if" and "A or B, but not both". So we decide that the shorter forms can mean either form, and resort to cumbersome language when clarity is required. If I tell you "I wear a hat if it is sunny" and you see me come indoors with my hat on, can you infer that it is sunny outside? No, because I said nothing about what I do when it is cloudy, not sunny outside. Maybe I wear a hat then too. If I had said "I wear a hat if and only if it is sunny" it'd be a different story. But that doesn't feel right because we know that people often shorten "if and only if" to just "if", and so we might feel justified in assuming the speaker meant they wear a hat if and only if it is sunny outside. But in Lojban, Ithkuil, and Toaq, each truth table possibility is assigned a unique, approximately equal-length and unambiguous word/morpheme to represent it. It's like we coined the word "ba" to mean "if and only if." So the two statements become "I wear a hat if it is sunny" and "I wear a hat ba it is sunny". They are equal length so why wouldn't I pick the one that I mean? Then "if" can go back to meaning "if" exclusively, and never "if and only if". You might say that people aren't used to making such finely tuned logical distinctions, but that sounds a lot like what a Chinese person might say about conjugating for tense and number in English, or for gender in most other Indo-European languages. Why does a verb change form based on the number of thing, its gender, or whether it happened in the past or future, or was an ongoing activity? And how can you possibly keep this all straight while speaking at fluent speeds? But in fact native speakers of English have no trouble doing so. Maybe, just maybe, if we all spoke Lojban or Toaq or Ithkuil or whatever, these fine logical and critical thinking distinctions will be as natural to us as the verb changes in "he went", "she goes", or "I will go" are, which any native speaker gets correct without even consciously having to think about it, yet nevertheless confounds learners of English.
    • TRiG_Ireland 3y ago
      Even the weak Sapir-Worf hypothesis is quite tricky to test in practice. It's likely true, but quite hard to prove. Guy Deutscher's excellent book Through the Language Glass documents much of the work that's been done in that area. Mostly, what's amenable to testing is colour perception and absolute direction, more than anything else.
• adastra22 3y ago
  > since some concepts exist which are not computable Is this true?