6 ms·

There are many concepts in our thought stream without a 'word' or even a simple 'phrase' to label them. A word or a common phrase is coined when a concept is s

There are many concepts in our thought stream without a 'word' or even a simple 'phrase' to label them. A word or a common phrase is coined when a concept is sufficiently common and important enough such that someone comes up with a label to communicate the idea succinctly and the label catches on. We, humanity, have words or common phrases to label the vast majority of significant concepts. However, not every concept is accorded such importance in every language. Some common words in other languages without direct translation in English: * 積ん読 (Tsundoku) (Japanese): Buying books and never reading them, just letting them pile up. * น้ำใจ (Nam-jai) (Thai): Literally "water from the heart". Being very nice and helpful without expecting anything back. * 关系 (Guanxi) (Mandarin): Your network of connections that help you get stuff done in life and business. This is perhaps another line of evidence to support the thesis of the article. Make no mistake though: Language is extremely useful for some types of thoughts, especially more abstract ones. Not everyone, however, uses it as their primary tool for thinking. ----- The above also helps explain some limitations of LLMs, such as their inadequate spatial intelligence. Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) start to address these issues by using much more granular data than language alone.

Swizec 2y ago
> * 关系 (Guanxi) (Mandarin): Your network of connections that help you get stuff done in life and business. I do think in American English at least there is a phrase for this: Your Network. You even used it to explain the word :) Usually the first association to “your/the network” is social. You have to specify if you mean the technical version with computers.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- earth-adventure 2y ago
  The mandarin guangxi encompasses a whole lot more than just your network. That would be considered a very bastardised translation, losing all the extra meanings such as good luck created by having that network, possibilities to fortune, a kind of karma, and more.
  - frutiger 2y ago
    > all the extra meanings such as good luck created by having that network, possibilities to fortune, a kind of karma, and more. In your 20s you might think of your network as people who you went to college with. In your 40s your network takes on a meaning much closer to what you have described. I don’t yet know what happens in your 60s.
  - creamyhorror 2y ago
    Karma aside, "having connections"/being "well-connected" is pretty much the equivalent in English. It's not bastardised at all; terms don't need to have the exact same cultural implications to be basically equivalent.
- bumbledraven 2y ago
  In American English, in the context of people, "network" typically refers to business contacts. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/network https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/network : “To get a job in today's economy, it is important to have a strong network.”
  - lucubratory 2y ago
    In English your family and friends are absolutely part of your network. If I needed a job and someone told me they'd reach out to everyone in their network until they found me one, I'd be very confused if they'd failed without ever speaking to their friends and family about it. "Your network" is definitely related to/aimed at economic productivity and personal productivity, but it is not composed only of people you've met at work.
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  > * น้ำใจ (Nam-jai) (Thai): Literally "water from the heart". Being very nice and helpful without expecting anything back. "Charity"
  - nopinsight 2y ago
    There are many key differences between the two concepts. 'charity' would be a bad translation of 'น้ำใจ'. GPT-4o explains it well: https://chatgpt.com/share/e/987705c8-fcb7-4af3-a8bd-9d7dc228508c https://chatgpt.com/share/e/987705c8-fcb7-4af3-a8bd-9d7dc228...
    - 082349872349872 2y ago
      That "share" link doesn't. Perhaps I should specify: "charity", as used in "faith, hope, and..." (although I generally prefer "charity" as in the computer language)
      - nopinsight 2y ago
        Having lived in Thailand, I am confident that 'น้ำใจ' is still a distinct concept from 'charity' in 'faith, hope, and charity'. They are probably closer in meaning than the most common definition of 'charity' though.
  - sirn 2y ago
    Charity is closer to ใจบุญ (jai-bun) than น้ำใจ (nam-jai). A mixture of "act of kindness" and "good will" would be a more fitting translation, but the interesting part here is that "sportmanship" is also considered an act of น้ำใจ (น้ำใจนักกีฬา nam-jai nak-kee-la or literally. sportman's nam-jai). We also have a word เสียน้ำใจ (sia-nam-jai) for when our nam-jai ended up as a waste, or for when the other party is being ungrateful for the kindness that's being given, and also เลี้ยงน้ำใจ (leang-nam-jai) for when you're doing/accepting nam-jai for the sake of not making the other party sia-nam-jai.
    - lukeschlather 2y ago
- nopinsight 2y ago
  Major differences between them. The concepts are rooted in very different cultures. In-depth explanation by Orlando Yang: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/chinese-guanxi-vs-western-social-network-what-differences-yang/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/chinese-guanxi-vs-western-soc... Easier-to-read one by GPT-4o: https://chatgpt.com/share/e/b2a76479-2950-4aad-ad8e-97e775be654b https://chatgpt.com/share/e/b2a76479-2950-4aad-ad8e-97e775be...
  - _as_text 2y ago
    I really don't think it's all that different, sorry. The difference is that there is a more direct and established way of talking about these things in China, because it has such a long history of bureaucracy and everyone got used to these dnyamics over thousands of years, but even in places like Sweden you can have guanxi. It boils down to doing something for a member of your ingroup strictly because he's in your ingroup. I mean even the word 关系 and "network" have the same etymology. 系 = threads of silk arranged in a pattern.
- thaumasiotes 2y ago
  The Mandarin word literally means "relationships" and the concept is well established in English. When you describe somebody as "connected", that's what you're saying. It's an incredibly poor example of an "untranslatable" phrase.
  - _as_text 2y ago
    The first and only time I've ever felt like I really know Chinese was when I came across the phrase '洋汽扑鼻' in "Fortress Besieged" by Qian Zhongshu. It literally means 'the breath of the sea assaults the nostrils". It's a joke on how fashionable and in demand everything Western was in China in the 1920s. For me it's just laugh-out-loud-for-10-minutes funny. I've tried to explain it to literal dozens of my friends and now I know not to even try.
    - thaumasiotes 2y ago
      Probably worth noting that while 洋 does literally mean "sea", it also means "foreign".
gyomu 2y ago
> * 積ん読 (Tsundoku) (Japanese): Buying books and never reading them, just letting them pile up. i don't speak Thai or Mandarin, so I can't speak to the other 2, but this one is a pun (combining tsundeoku, pile up, and dokusho, book reading) that survived in the language due to its catchiness. A bit like "hangry" (hungry + angry) in English. I have a hard time interpreting the existence of those words as an indication that Japanese culture really values not reading the books you buy, or English speaking culture is irritated due to hunger more so than other cultures. They're just meme-like constructs that caught on due to arbitrary phonetic properties of the language.
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  > arbitrary phonetic properties of the language. Along the lines of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenning#Old_English_and_other_kennings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenning#Old_English_and_other_... , english could contain "book-dragon".
  - laszlojamf 2y ago
    Book-dragon is a fantastic word. Thank you for that!
- nopinsight 2y ago
  Perhaps wabi-sabi (侘び寂び) might be a better example? "wabi-sabi (侘び寂び) is a world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection." (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi)
  - posterboy 2y ago
    there are no good examples. The basic premise in Linguistics these days seems tl be that all languages are potentially equally expressive. Trade-offs in one domain (grammar, lexicon, phonology etc.) afford advantages in another. Which means, there is no need to refer to Japanese at all. You could equally refer to some slur in a lower register to then claim that this doesn't exist in your language and how it can't be translated either. So when Joe Biden said "SoB" on tape once, that was code switching; likewise, when Trump says anything it's all made up and coded and means something entirely different. However, these are bad examples if your target is a monolingual Japanese, obv.
etrvic 2y ago
> There are many concepts in our thought stream without a 'word' or even a simple 'phrase' to label them. If those concepts would exist you wouldn’t be able to explain them using words, no matter how complex the phrase may be. Taking a phrase and expecting it to have a single word replace is unrealistic. You can’t just asign a word to every possible sentence/phrase. Having a direct translation means you don’t necessarily need that word in your language. One might argue that the limit of our language is the limit of our ability to think.
- nopinsight 2y ago
  How did Michelangelo create his masterpieces? Can one describe the process using any verbal language in sufficient detail such that another master or a robot could create David? That's an example of thought processes beyond language. I suspect the same happens in many other fields. Even in an abstract field like mathematics, intuition often forms in the mind before verbal description or articulation.
  - guax 2y ago
    I don't get your point on Michelangelo. We can very easily describe the process if we could see it. We just can't cause he's dead and he was not big on YouTube, even then we can explain a lot from evidence. Its much more complex to explain why we classify them as masterpieces than how he made it.
    - cellu 2y ago
      I’d recommend to read the reflective practitioner, by Donald Schön
  - etrvic 2y ago
    I believe that intuition is often not enough to have a concrete thought. It’s more of a feeling, you can’t reach conclusions based on intuition, you also need reason.
  - tick_tock_tick 2y ago
dejj 2y ago
Brevity is key for words that aid thinking. Consider Chinese 成语 (Chengyu) [1] or Japanese 四字熟語 (Yo Ji Juku Go) [2]: - 指桑骂槐 (Zhi Sang Ma Huai) - Pulling the shoots to make the rice grow = helicoptering - 拔苗助长 (Ba Miao Zhu Zhang) - Point at the mulberry tree to curse the locust tree = deflective criticism These condense a whole story with moral lesson in them, and they facilitate recall of that concept. The trick is omission of everything but 4 characters from the whole story. Sometimes they're just an enumeration: - 柴米油盐（Chai Mi You Yan) Firewood, Rice, Oil, Salt = essential things for everyday life - 都道府県 (To Dou Fu Ken) all 4 types of Jap. prefecture = everywhere I think brevity is key for words that aim at aiding thinking. All languages allow composition; consider "Eierschalensollbruchstellenverursacher". But only if the word is short, can you quickly cast your thought into its form (as if speaking) and proceed to compose it with the next thought. You do this until your individual mental capacity runs out. It's also very important that others know the concept. I find myself often refer to "that scene in Wolf of Wallstreet where Belfort _really safely_ drives his Lamborghini home"[3] to express "power is nothing without control". I wish there was a briefer word for it yet. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chengyu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chengyu 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yojijukugo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yojijukugo 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1huYsSOYlVo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1huYsSOYlVo
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  So you're effectively saying that Chinese is compressed Tamarian? Like, instead of writing "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" you'd put their initials together, so you're saying the Chinese-equivalent of "DJT" and the listener instantly knows the story, and therefore the message, it refers to?
  - 082349872349872 2y ago
    Cap Gets The Reference. (talking about Steve Rogers, but trying to stay in the 4 word format, like "Big Hat No Cattle") in a different vein, "Tony and Manny, at the pool" might refer to: 这个国家：先拿到钱，得到力量，然后淫乐。 [at least in "Antonio Montana's Journey to the West" (1983)]
  - dejj 2y ago
TeMPOraL 2y ago
Interesting examples. For me, a predominantly linguistic thinker, it's actually those concepts having words that make it possible for me to really think about them on their own. So "buying books and never reading them", yes, it's a phenomenon that happens and one could presumably talk about it, but it's hard to even think of in the first place - it's a complex set of ideas joined together in a specific way. Tsundoku, however, is a concept. A single word. A token. A point in the latent space. Something I feel existing independently in my mind, as a node that I can feel emotions about, that grows attachments. That's much easier to access, and thus much more common to talk about. Nam-jai, I already have an English word for this in my mind, "pay -it-forward". Yeah, it's one semantic unit in my mind. Funny enough, I'm ESL and I don't know a word in my native language for this (Polish); the concept exists in my head literally as "pay it forward", and brings up associations with some broken down car story, and Jesus for some reason. Guanxi - in English, isn't that a "social network"? That's another good example of a concept I find much easier to think about once it's pinned down with a name.
- mewpmewp2 2y ago
  And I can definitely think about buying books without reading them. Firstly, coincidentally I thought about this in the morning, but I didn't need a word, but it was still linguistic. I just thought the whole sentence.
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    I can think of that too. But it's not the same. A crude analogy would be to working memory. "Buying books without reading them, as a phenomenon" takes half a dozen or more slots in memory. "Tsundoku" is one slot.
I_o_IllI__o_I 2y ago
[dead]
blueboo 2y ago
I find this unconvincing. Words described those terms just fine as you just proved.
andoando 2y ago
I find language to be worse for abstract thought. Abstract thought to me is shapes and transformations. I then have to put words to them, "Imagine there is a ball here and another ball here and..." I can imagine things transformating in space much faster than thinking it in words.

Swizec 2y ago

> * 关系 (Guanxi) (Mandarin): Your network of connections that help you get stuff done in life and business. I do think in American English at least there is a phrase for this: Your Network. You even used it to explain the word :) Usually the first association to “your/the network” is social. You have to specify if you mean the technical version with computers.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
earth-adventure 2y ago
The mandarin guangxi encompasses a whole lot more than just your network. That would be considered a very bastardised translation, losing all the extra meanings such as good luck created by having that network, possibilities to fortune, a kind of karma, and more.
- frutiger 2y ago
  > all the extra meanings such as good luck created by having that network, possibilities to fortune, a kind of karma, and more. In your 20s you might think of your network as people who you went to college with. In your 40s your network takes on a meaning much closer to what you have described. I don’t yet know what happens in your 60s.
- creamyhorror 2y ago
  Karma aside, "having connections"/being "well-connected" is pretty much the equivalent in English. It's not bastardised at all; terms don't need to have the exact same cultural implications to be basically equivalent.
bumbledraven 2y ago
In American English, in the context of people, "network" typically refers to business contacts. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/network https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/network : “To get a job in today's economy, it is important to have a strong network.”
- lucubratory 2y ago
  In English your family and friends are absolutely part of your network. If I needed a job and someone told me they'd reach out to everyone in their network until they found me one, I'd be very confused if they'd failed without ever speaking to their friends and family about it. "Your network" is definitely related to/aimed at economic productivity and personal productivity, but it is not composed only of people you've met at work.
082349872349872 2y ago
> * น้ำใจ (Nam-jai) (Thai): Literally "water from the heart". Being very nice and helpful without expecting anything back. "Charity"
- nopinsight 2y ago
  There are many key differences between the two concepts. 'charity' would be a bad translation of 'น้ำใจ'. GPT-4o explains it well: https://chatgpt.com/share/e/987705c8-fcb7-4af3-a8bd-9d7dc228508c https://chatgpt.com/share/e/987705c8-fcb7-4af3-a8bd-9d7dc228...
  - 082349872349872 2y ago
    That "share" link doesn't. Perhaps I should specify: "charity", as used in "faith, hope, and..." (although I generally prefer "charity" as in the computer language)
    - nopinsight 2y ago
      Having lived in Thailand, I am confident that 'น้ำใจ' is still a distinct concept from 'charity' in 'faith, hope, and charity'. They are probably closer in meaning than the most common definition of 'charity' though.
- sirn 2y ago
  Charity is closer to ใจบุญ (jai-bun) than น้ำใจ (nam-jai). A mixture of "act of kindness" and "good will" would be a more fitting translation, but the interesting part here is that "sportmanship" is also considered an act of น้ำใจ (น้ำใจนักกีฬา nam-jai nak-kee-la or literally. sportman's nam-jai). We also have a word เสียน้ำใจ (sia-nam-jai) for when our nam-jai ended up as a waste, or for when the other party is being ungrateful for the kindness that's being given, and also เลี้ยงน้ำใจ (leang-nam-jai) for when you're doing/accepting nam-jai for the sake of not making the other party sia-nam-jai.
  - lukeschlather 2y ago
nopinsight 2y ago
Major differences between them. The concepts are rooted in very different cultures. In-depth explanation by Orlando Yang: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/chinese-guanxi-vs-western-social-network-what-differences-yang/ https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/chinese-guanxi-vs-western-soc... Easier-to-read one by GPT-4o: https://chatgpt.com/share/e/b2a76479-2950-4aad-ad8e-97e775be654b https://chatgpt.com/share/e/b2a76479-2950-4aad-ad8e-97e775be...
- _as_text 2y ago
  I really don't think it's all that different, sorry. The difference is that there is a more direct and established way of talking about these things in China, because it has such a long history of bureaucracy and everyone got used to these dnyamics over thousands of years, but even in places like Sweden you can have guanxi. It boils down to doing something for a member of your ingroup strictly because he's in your ingroup. I mean even the word 关系 and "network" have the same etymology. 系 = threads of silk arranged in a pattern.
thaumasiotes 2y ago
The Mandarin word literally means "relationships" and the concept is well established in English. When you describe somebody as "connected", that's what you're saying. It's an incredibly poor example of an "untranslatable" phrase.
- _as_text 2y ago
  The first and only time I've ever felt like I really know Chinese was when I came across the phrase '洋汽扑鼻' in "Fortress Besieged" by Qian Zhongshu. It literally means 'the breath of the sea assaults the nostrils". It's a joke on how fashionable and in demand everything Western was in China in the 1920s. For me it's just laugh-out-loud-for-10-minutes funny. I've tried to explain it to literal dozens of my friends and now I know not to even try.
  - thaumasiotes 2y ago
    Probably worth noting that while 洋 does literally mean "sea", it also means "foreign".

gyomu 2y ago

> * 積ん読 (Tsundoku) (Japanese): Buying books and never reading them, just letting them pile up. i don't speak Thai or Mandarin, so I can't speak to the other 2, but this one is a pun (combining tsundeoku, pile up, and dokusho, book reading) that survived in the language due to its catchiness. A bit like "hangry" (hungry + angry) in English. I have a hard time interpreting the existence of those words as an indication that Japanese culture really values not reading the books you buy, or English speaking culture is irritated due to hunger more so than other cultures. They're just meme-like constructs that caught on due to arbitrary phonetic properties of the language.

082349872349872 2y ago
> arbitrary phonetic properties of the language. Along the lines of a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenning#Old_English_and_other_kennings https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenning#Old_English_and_other_... , english could contain "book-dragon".
- laszlojamf 2y ago
  Book-dragon is a fantastic word. Thank you for that!
nopinsight 2y ago
Perhaps wabi-sabi (侘び寂び) might be a better example? "wabi-sabi (侘び寂び) is a world view centered on the acceptance of transience and imperfection." (Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wabi-sabi)
- posterboy 2y ago
  there are no good examples. The basic premise in Linguistics these days seems tl be that all languages are potentially equally expressive. Trade-offs in one domain (grammar, lexicon, phonology etc.) afford advantages in another. Which means, there is no need to refer to Japanese at all. You could equally refer to some slur in a lower register to then claim that this doesn't exist in your language and how it can't be translated either. So when Joe Biden said "SoB" on tape once, that was code switching; likewise, when Trump says anything it's all made up and coded and means something entirely different. However, these are bad examples if your target is a monolingual Japanese, obv.

etrvic 2y ago

> There are many concepts in our thought stream without a 'word' or even a simple 'phrase' to label them. If those concepts would exist you wouldn’t be able to explain them using words, no matter how complex the phrase may be. Taking a phrase and expecting it to have a single word replace is unrealistic. You can’t just asign a word to every possible sentence/phrase. Having a direct translation means you don’t necessarily need that word in your language. One might argue that the limit of our language is the limit of our ability to think.

nopinsight 2y ago
How did Michelangelo create his masterpieces? Can one describe the process using any verbal language in sufficient detail such that another master or a robot could create David? That's an example of thought processes beyond language. I suspect the same happens in many other fields. Even in an abstract field like mathematics, intuition often forms in the mind before verbal description or articulation.
- guax 2y ago
  I don't get your point on Michelangelo. We can very easily describe the process if we could see it. We just can't cause he's dead and he was not big on YouTube, even then we can explain a lot from evidence. Its much more complex to explain why we classify them as masterpieces than how he made it.
  - cellu 2y ago
    I’d recommend to read the reflective practitioner, by Donald Schön
- etrvic 2y ago
  I believe that intuition is often not enough to have a concrete thought. It’s more of a feeling, you can’t reach conclusions based on intuition, you also need reason.
- tick_tock_tick 2y ago

dejj 2y ago

Brevity is key for words that aid thinking. Consider Chinese 成语 (Chengyu) [1] or Japanese 四字熟語 (Yo Ji Juku Go) [2]: - 指桑骂槐 (Zhi Sang Ma Huai) - Pulling the shoots to make the rice grow = helicoptering - 拔苗助长 (Ba Miao Zhu Zhang) - Point at the mulberry tree to curse the locust tree = deflective criticism These condense a whole story with moral lesson in them, and they facilitate recall of that concept. The trick is omission of everything but 4 characters from the whole story. Sometimes they're just an enumeration: - 柴米油盐（Chai Mi You Yan) Firewood, Rice, Oil, Salt = essential things for everyday life - 都道府県 (To Dou Fu Ken) all 4 types of Jap. prefecture = everywhere I think brevity is key for words that aim at aiding thinking. All languages allow composition; consider "Eierschalensollbruchstellenverursacher". But only if the word is short, can you quickly cast your thought into its form (as if speaking) and proceed to compose it with the next thought. You do this until your individual mental capacity runs out. It's also very important that others know the concept. I find myself often refer to "that scene in Wolf of Wallstreet where Belfort _really safely_ drives his Lamborghini home"[3] to express "power is nothing without control". I wish there was a briefer word for it yet. 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chengyu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chengyu 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yojijukugo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yojijukugo 3: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1huYsSOYlVo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1huYsSOYlVo

TeMPOraL 2y ago
So you're effectively saying that Chinese is compressed Tamarian? Like, instead of writing "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" you'd put their initials together, so you're saying the Chinese-equivalent of "DJT" and the listener instantly knows the story, and therefore the message, it refers to?
- 082349872349872 2y ago
  Cap Gets The Reference. (talking about Steve Rogers, but trying to stay in the 4 word format, like "Big Hat No Cattle") in a different vein, "Tony and Manny, at the pool" might refer to: 这个国家：先拿到钱，得到力量，然后淫乐。 [at least in "Antonio Montana's Journey to the West" (1983)]
- dejj 2y ago

TeMPOraL 2y ago

Interesting examples. For me, a predominantly linguistic thinker, it's actually those concepts having words that make it possible for me to really think about them on their own. So "buying books and never reading them", yes, it's a phenomenon that happens and one could presumably talk about it, but it's hard to even think of in the first place - it's a complex set of ideas joined together in a specific way. Tsundoku, however, is a concept. A single word. A token. A point in the latent space. Something I feel existing independently in my mind, as a node that I can feel emotions about, that grows attachments. That's much easier to access, and thus much more common to talk about. Nam-jai, I already have an English word for this in my mind, "pay -it-forward". Yeah, it's one semantic unit in my mind. Funny enough, I'm ESL and I don't know a word in my native language for this (Polish); the concept exists in my head literally as "pay it forward", and brings up associations with some broken down car story, and Jesus for some reason. Guanxi - in English, isn't that a "social network"? That's another good example of a concept I find much easier to think about once it's pinned down with a name.

mewpmewp2 2y ago
And I can definitely think about buying books without reading them. Firstly, coincidentally I thought about this in the morning, but I didn't need a word, but it was still linguistic. I just thought the whole sentence.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  I can think of that too. But it's not the same. A crude analogy would be to working memory. "Buying books without reading them, as a phenomenon" takes half a dozen or more slots in memory. "Tsundoku" is one slot.

I_o_IllI__o_I 2y ago

[dead]

blueboo 2y ago

I find this unconvincing. Words described those terms just fine as you just proved.

andoando 2y ago

I find language to be worse for abstract thought. Abstract thought to me is shapes and transformations. I then have to put words to them, "Imagine there is a ball here and another ball here and..." I can imagine things transformating in space much faster than thinking it in words.