13 ms·

Language Can Give You Super Mind Powers

26 points by samdjohnson 14y ago

spodek 14y ago
From the post: "Speakin' in a different language changes the way you think—it's a well attested phenomenon." A great answer for the perennial questions "why should I learn math or science." It changes the way you think -- only instead of learning about culture you learn about patterns and nature. I got a physics degree before leaving the field. People who didn't take science ask if I still use it. How do I answer so they'll understand that I use it in every thought?
- simonsarris 14y ago
  "A different language is a different version of life" - Fellini I agree completely. And I would certainly agree that learning to think in Math/Biology/Evolution is just as important as learning to think in French. Slightly related, one of the reasons I love English so much is that there are so many words and the creation of new words is not discouraged. There are an enormous amount of ways to describe how a thing is or how we feel and I think a certain level of expressiveness is very important for doing good work. By the same token, knowing the language of say evolution or math - knowing all the terms and how to describe what's going on - can be just as important for say visual or program design as knowing the more 'industrial' words.
- tdr 14y ago
  Every experience changes the way you think. The question is: how and by how much? (could you please post links to best 2-3 studies)
mike_ivanov 14y ago
"Speakin' in a different language changes the way you think—it's a well attested phenomenon." This is wrong. I speak two languages, so I can tell. Learning the second one didn't change the way I think.
- vitno 14y ago
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity what were the languages? they may be very similar.
  - mike_ivanov 14y ago
    Russian and English. They are quite different, although definitely more similar than say Spanish/Vietnamese.
- noahburney 14y ago
  Which two? I'm near-fluent in Korean and I definitely think differently when in "Korean mode" than when I'm speaking English. But when I've studied e.g. Norwegian, it's so similar to English that there's not much of a change.
  - mike_ivanov 14y ago
    Russian and English. They are apparently quite different. Nevertheless, I don't even have separate "modes" for the two. Edit: clarity.
    - ihnorton 14y ago
      It's worth noting that they are from the same linguistic family. Having studied Latin, to me Russian seemed pretty familiar conceptually once I got past the whole cyrillic thing. I am admittedly nowhere near fluent, and I realize the experience would be different for someone without previous 2nd-language exposure. About the modes, did you by chance have Russian exposure during childhood (guessing based on your id)... that might account for some degree of integration even if you only became fluent later.
      - mike_ivanov 14y ago
        Russian is my native language. I picked up English when I was about 30. Also I learned some German in school, but I can't speak it.
seanos 14y ago
Lojban is a constructed, syntactically unambiguous language based on predicate logic that was originally conceived to examine the influence of language on the speaker's thought: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban
- vitno 14y ago
  I spent a little bit of time learning lojban. Although I am in no way proficient, their small community is an interesting place. the more fluent ones sometimes mention this phenomenon (from their personal experience).
tdr 14y ago
From the post I'd conclude that language is the by-product of innovation (and necessity), not the other way around. There is already an artificial language out there: Esperanto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto . From what I remember from language students, it's pretty much a failure. Also, do you have any concrete ideas/point of action to do that? Do they work?
- drostie 14y ago
  Esperanto isn't too much of a failure; at least, it's the most successful a conlang has been -- a couple dozen have learned Elvish or Klingon; a couple hundred thousand have learned Esperanto. And yes, there has been a long and somewhat-pointless philosophical struggle by people who take language as more important, and those who take technology as more important. I remember discussing this with a Swedish man who insisted that we thought of everything in language, and I was insisting instead that I think in thought, which does not necessarily map to language. What finally seemed to make him uncertain about his own hard-line position was to just say, "look, I sometimes have the experience that I don't know how to put my thoughts in words. And I at least appear to be monolingual. It sounds like you're saying that this should be literally impossible. My thoughts are always in English, how could I ever have problems encoding them into English?" Stephen Pinker's works have indirectly shown me one useful thing about these philosophical discussions: it helps to have an idea of Gödel/Turing-completeness[1] in your philosophy of language. The problem with the radical biological innatists[2] and the radical linguistic relativists[3] is that it seems hard to describe how languages evolve under either account. If our languages and proto-languages are in some sense Gödel-complete and can describe anything which is describable, then linguistic evolution just consists of building new language constructs which can more efficiently describe the new technologies -- and these in turn help us in thinking about our new technologies and making even newer technologies. You can also get a good distance in understanding how children acquire language; it's fundamentally similar to the bootstrapping process which gets a computer from being offline to running a modern operating system; a small set of built-in intuitions can construct a model for the entire rest of any logical system. [1] Gödel's completeness theorem, as distinct from his more famous incompleteness theorem, says that a couple basic laws of logic are all you ever need, and any other logical system can be emulated by just constructing new objects whenever the axioms of the basic system call for them. [2] something like, "all the concepts which you find meaningful are somehow indirectly encoded in the genome, your words name just those concepts meaningful to you." [3] something like, "if your language doesn't have a word for X, then you just cannot think about X, full stop."
Produce 14y ago
I've often wondered what it would be like to think in a rational language (i.e. one free of contradictions). I suspect that logic and reasoning would improve as a side effect.
- mike_ivanov 14y ago
  How one can think in a language? Isn't language a product of thinking?
  - ThePawnBreak 14y ago
    This question is a bit funny, given that it's posted on a site with frequent arguing over which programming language is better for certain purposes. You can think in French just like you think in C++ or Python, but I think that what is different about thinking in two natural languages is that they are more alike each other than programming languages are.
    - mike_ivanov 14y ago
      Well, I don't think in C++ or Python when I'm programming. I think in... well, that's probably weird -- in algorithms, flows, bubbles, pocket-like thingies holding values and that stuff. Then I express my thoughts in a programming language. And yes, some languages are definitely better for certain things than others.
tokenadult 14y ago
This is a simplistic restatement (on a rather ugly webpage color scheme) of the strong version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis ("Sapir-Whorf hypothesis"), which is surely wrong. My native language is General American English, and I grew up in what was essentially a monolingual immediate family and neighborhood of English speakers, although both of my parents had had some instruction in other languages. All of my grandparents were born in the United States, but three of the four spoke languages other than English at home, and my two maternal grandparents had all of their schooling in German. German as a second language was mandatory for all elementary pupils in fourth, fifth, and sixth grade in my childhood school district, very unusual for the United States. I had more German in junior high and senior high (in two different states) and then Russian in senior high. I entered university as a Russian major and immediately began taking Chinese, switching my major to Chinese as I grew in delight for that language. I have had formal instruction as an adult in Modern Standard Chinese (a.k.a. Mandarin), Cantonese, Biblical Hebrew, Literary Chinese, Attic Greek, Biblical Greek, Japanese (first in the medium of Chinese, then in English), Taiwanese, and Hakka, and various courses in linguistics (also in the mediums of both English and Chinese). I have engaged in self-study of Biblical Aramaic, Mongolian, Spanish, French, Latin, Hungarian, Malay-Indonesian, Esperanto, Interlingua, etc., etc., etc. I have to respectfully disagree with the strong version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. Within each language grouping, people differ far more in their personal thinking along the dimension of visual thinker or not, or auditory thinker or not, than people differ from one another in thought patterns based on language background. But it is useful to learn another language and to live in another culture for exposure to new basic assumptions, and the same applies to learning computer language paradigms. People who program for a living, or who program just for fun, may like the books http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-Pragmatics-Third-Edition/dp/0123745144/ http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-Pragmatics-Third-... or http://www.amazon.com/Essentials-Programming-Languages-Daniel-Friedman/dp/0262062798/ http://www.amazon.com/Essentials-Programming-Languages-Danie... among other books on programming languages mentioned here on HN as examples of overviews of different approaches to high-level computer programming languages facilitating different kinds of programming problem-solving. The case of human languages is quite a bit different. All human languages are constrained by the biology of the human brain, and human ear and human vocal tract (or hands and arms, in the case of sign languages for the deaf), and all human languages, without exception and even if they are constructed languages, have ambiguities and illogical features inconsistent with other features of the language. Many of the faults of Esperanto are very well documented, http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/ http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/ and the Lojban promoters I have met online since 1994 have repeatedly demonstrated lack of logical capacity (at least in our common language of English) in a manner that puts me off from learning Lojban. Learning a new cultural perspective by living in a new culture and learning the predominant language there is a very good idea, and highly educational. But the incidental features of one language as contrasted with another have no necessary relationship to how speakers of each language think, or how they can think.
khyryk 14y ago
Learning anything changes the way you think: chemistry, physics, biology, astronomy, mathematics, computer science, linguistics, philosophy, literature, etc. I'd place a language somewhere between a science and something like astrology as far as usefulness goes.

26 points by samdjohnson 14y ago

From the post: "Speakin' in a different language changes the way you think—it's a well attested phenomenon." A great answer for the perennial questions "why should I learn math or science." It changes the way you think -- only instead of learning about culture you learn about patterns and nature. I got a physics degree before leaving the field. People who didn't take science ask if I still use it. How do I answer so they'll understand that I use it in every thought?

simonsarris 14y ago
"A different language is a different version of life" - Fellini I agree completely. And I would certainly agree that learning to think in Math/Biology/Evolution is just as important as learning to think in French. Slightly related, one of the reasons I love English so much is that there are so many words and the creation of new words is not discouraged. There are an enormous amount of ways to describe how a thing is or how we feel and I think a certain level of expressiveness is very important for doing good work. By the same token, knowing the language of say evolution or math - knowing all the terms and how to describe what's going on - can be just as important for say visual or program design as knowing the more 'industrial' words.
tdr 14y ago
Every experience changes the way you think. The question is: how and by how much? (could you please post links to best 2-3 studies)

mike_ivanov 14y ago

"Speakin' in a different language changes the way you think—it's a well attested phenomenon." This is wrong. I speak two languages, so I can tell. Learning the second one didn't change the way I think.

vitno 14y ago
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity what were the languages? they may be very similar.
- mike_ivanov 14y ago
  Russian and English. They are quite different, although definitely more similar than say Spanish/Vietnamese.
noahburney 14y ago
Which two? I'm near-fluent in Korean and I definitely think differently when in "Korean mode" than when I'm speaking English. But when I've studied e.g. Norwegian, it's so similar to English that there's not much of a change.
- mike_ivanov 14y ago
  Russian and English. They are apparently quite different. Nevertheless, I don't even have separate "modes" for the two. Edit: clarity.
  - ihnorton 14y ago
    It's worth noting that they are from the same linguistic family. Having studied Latin, to me Russian seemed pretty familiar conceptually once I got past the whole cyrillic thing. I am admittedly nowhere near fluent, and I realize the experience would be different for someone without previous 2nd-language exposure. About the modes, did you by chance have Russian exposure during childhood (guessing based on your id)... that might account for some degree of integration even if you only became fluent later.
    - mike_ivanov 14y ago
      Russian is my native language. I picked up English when I was about 30. Also I learned some German in school, but I can't speak it.

seanos 14y ago

Lojban is a constructed, syntactically unambiguous language based on predicate logic that was originally conceived to examine the influence of language on the speaker's thought: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lojban

vitno 14y ago
I spent a little bit of time learning lojban. Although I am in no way proficient, their small community is an interesting place. the more fluent ones sometimes mention this phenomenon (from their personal experience).

tdr 14y ago

From the post I'd conclude that language is the by-product of innovation (and necessity), not the other way around. There is already an artificial language out there: Esperanto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto . From what I remember from language students, it's pretty much a failure. Also, do you have any concrete ideas/point of action to do that? Do they work?

drostie 14y ago
Esperanto isn't too much of a failure; at least, it's the most successful a conlang has been -- a couple dozen have learned Elvish or Klingon; a couple hundred thousand have learned Esperanto. And yes, there has been a long and somewhat-pointless philosophical struggle by people who take language as more important, and those who take technology as more important. I remember discussing this with a Swedish man who insisted that we thought of everything in language, and I was insisting instead that I think in thought, which does not necessarily map to language. What finally seemed to make him uncertain about his own hard-line position was to just say, "look, I sometimes have the experience that I don't know how to put my thoughts in words. And I at least appear to be monolingual. It sounds like you're saying that this should be literally impossible. My thoughts are always in English, how could I ever have problems encoding them into English?" Stephen Pinker's works have indirectly shown me one useful thing about these philosophical discussions: it helps to have an idea of Gödel/Turing-completeness[1] in your philosophy of language. The problem with the radical biological innatists[2] and the radical linguistic relativists[3] is that it seems hard to describe how languages evolve under either account. If our languages and proto-languages are in some sense Gödel-complete and can describe anything which is describable, then linguistic evolution just consists of building new language constructs which can more efficiently describe the new technologies -- and these in turn help us in thinking about our new technologies and making even newer technologies. You can also get a good distance in understanding how children acquire language; it's fundamentally similar to the bootstrapping process which gets a computer from being offline to running a modern operating system; a small set of built-in intuitions can construct a model for the entire rest of any logical system. [1] Gödel's completeness theorem, as distinct from his more famous incompleteness theorem, says that a couple basic laws of logic are all you ever need, and any other logical system can be emulated by just constructing new objects whenever the axioms of the basic system call for them. [2] something like, "all the concepts which you find meaningful are somehow indirectly encoded in the genome, your words name just those concepts meaningful to you." [3] something like, "if your language doesn't have a word for X, then you just cannot think about X, full stop."

Produce 14y ago

I've often wondered what it would be like to think in a rational language (i.e. one free of contradictions). I suspect that logic and reasoning would improve as a side effect.

mike_ivanov 14y ago
How one can think in a language? Isn't language a product of thinking?
- ThePawnBreak 14y ago
  This question is a bit funny, given that it's posted on a site with frequent arguing over which programming language is better for certain purposes. You can think in French just like you think in C++ or Python, but I think that what is different about thinking in two natural languages is that they are more alike each other than programming languages are.
  - mike_ivanov 14y ago
    Well, I don't think in C++ or Python when I'm programming. I think in... well, that's probably weird -- in algorithms, flows, bubbles, pocket-like thingies holding values and that stuff. Then I express my thoughts in a programming language. And yes, some languages are definitely better for certain things than others.

tokenadult 14y ago

This is a simplistic restatement (on a rather ugly webpage color scheme) of the strong version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis ("Sapir-Whorf hypothesis"), which is surely wrong. My native language is General American English, and I grew up in what was essentially a monolingual immediate family and neighborhood of English speakers, although both of my parents had had some instruction in other languages. All of my grandparents were born in the United States, but three of the four spoke languages other than English at home, and my two maternal grandparents had all of their schooling in German. German as a second language was mandatory for all elementary pupils in fourth, fifth, and sixth grade in my childhood school district, very unusual for the United States. I had more German in junior high and senior high (in two different states) and then Russian in senior high. I entered university as a Russian major and immediately began taking Chinese, switching my major to Chinese as I grew in delight for that language. I have had formal instruction as an adult in Modern Standard Chinese (a.k.a. Mandarin), Cantonese, Biblical Hebrew, Literary Chinese, Attic Greek, Biblical Greek, Japanese (first in the medium of Chinese, then in English), Taiwanese, and Hakka, and various courses in linguistics (also in the mediums of both English and Chinese). I have engaged in self-study of Biblical Aramaic, Mongolian, Spanish, French, Latin, Hungarian, Malay-Indonesian, Esperanto, Interlingua, etc., etc., etc. I have to respectfully disagree with the strong version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. Within each language grouping, people differ far more in their personal thinking along the dimension of visual thinker or not, or auditory thinker or not, than people differ from one another in thought patterns based on language background. But it is useful to learn another language and to live in another culture for exposure to new basic assumptions, and the same applies to learning computer language paradigms. People who program for a living, or who program just for fun, may like the books http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-Pragmatics-Third-Edition/dp/0123745144/ http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-Pragmatics-Third-... or http://www.amazon.com/Essentials-Programming-Languages-Daniel-Friedman/dp/0262062798/ http://www.amazon.com/Essentials-Programming-Languages-Danie... among other books on programming languages mentioned here on HN as examples of overviews of different approaches to high-level computer programming languages facilitating different kinds of programming problem-solving. The case of human languages is quite a bit different. All human languages are constrained by the biology of the human brain, and human ear and human vocal tract (or hands and arms, in the case of sign languages for the deaf), and all human languages, without exception and even if they are constructed languages, have ambiguities and illogical features inconsistent with other features of the language. Many of the faults of Esperanto are very well documented, http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/ http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/ and the Lojban promoters I have met online since 1994 have repeatedly demonstrated lack of logical capacity (at least in our common language of English) in a manner that puts me off from learning Lojban. Learning a new cultural perspective by living in a new culture and learning the predominant language there is a very good idea, and highly educational. But the incidental features of one language as contrasted with another have no necessary relationship to how speakers of each language think, or how they can think.

khyryk 14y ago

Learning anything changes the way you think: chemistry, physics, biology, astronomy, mathematics, computer science, linguistics, philosophy, literature, etc. I'd place a language somewhere between a science and something like astrology as far as usefulness goes.