10 ms·

The Power of Language

76 points by danielrhodes 14y ago

jfaucett 14y ago
Good article :), here's my dissent... I, like most europeans (or for that matter most of the non anglo-saxon world), speak multiple languages on a daily basis. I think its true that a language forces you to concentrate on certain things i.e. object gender, its relative distance, or shape when counting objects, but it doesn't make you "think" differently in any fundamental way. We all still perceive three chairs, or drei Stuhlen o tres sillas, and I think whatever system we were to develop so long as it allowed one language user to express (in any way) a symbol that could be interpreted by another language user it would suffice (see de Saussure). I agree that language is powerful, I just don't think it hinges on spoken language, just an ability to abstract. I don't believe anyone thinks in sentences or words and for most tasks - especially programming, I visualize in what's happening. That's my two cents :)
- 7952 14y ago
  But doesn't your programming language change how you think about problems? Does a Lisp expert think the same way as a Java expert? Our spoken language is not something that was designed but is an artefact of thousands of years of social interaction. Of course most of the time it doesn't matter, but sometimes it does.
  - glogla 14y ago
    This is sometimes theme in science fiction as well. While for example Snow Crash was a bit cheesy in this regard (reprogramming human brains with special words and similar stuff), the language used plays interesting role in The Culture series as well. EDIT: I would also suggest that Lisp and Java are more different than any two human languages in history. And even then, they are both Turing complete.
- warmfuzzykitten 14y ago
  If I were to heed a recent HN post, I would downgrade you for use of an anecdote in place of scientific data. I would do so, were it not that the article you comment on had not a single reference. So I guess "the state of my mind (as my inconsistency-rejecting brain perceives it) refutes your unfounded theories" is fair game.
  - mintplant 14y ago
    There are, indeed, references -- six of them -- at the bottom of the original post.
gliese1337 14y ago
Not everyone thinks in a language. Language is extremely helpful for conscious thought, but not because language itself has some inherent magical control over our thoughts, but because language embodies certain kinds of cognitive technology. The keystone paper for that point of view is "Number as a cognitive technology: Evidence from Pirahã language and cognition" (http://langcog.stanford.edu/papers/FEFG-cognition.pdf http://langcog.stanford.edu/papers/FEFG-cognition.pdf). Having words for colors makes it easier to remember the specific shades that you have words for, because it's easier to remember the abstract symbol, which you can use to access the concept later, than it is to remember the actual experience of that color. Same with numerical quantities, or anything else for which your language has labels and categories.
uncompetence 14y ago
"For example, infants don't have spacial awareness, or understand how objects can be relative to each other, until they learn the words for describing relativity." Where's the citation on this?
- cafard 14y ago
  Indeed. Infants can home in on a breast or a bottle from the get-go; babies are crawling by about 6 months, and walking at about 1 year. They are able to grasp and manipulate objects around six months, I believe. All these seem to imply spatial awareness.
- wvenable 14y ago
  Quick googling and I didn't find the article but I have read it. Maybe someone can find the magic keywords. The crux of the study was that children who don't know the words left and right don't appear to have an innate ability to understand the relative positions of objects related to other objects. Children with the language for left and right can remember relative positioning but children without those words do not.
Mz 14y ago
My oldest thinks in pictures. Sometimes, it is like speaking to a foreigner in that he makes translation mistakes. He and I have lots of interesting conversations about language and have talked about the blue green issue -- that it is one word in Japanese. One thing we wonder is if having one word says something about their eyesight.
wolfpackk 14y ago
Stephen Pinker from MIT has written some fascinating books on this very subject
akkartik 14y ago
Language isn't an invention, it's co-evolved with Homo Sapiens. I highly recommend The Symbolic Species for the current state of the art in language origin theories. http://www.amazon.com/The-Symbolic-Species-Co-Evolution-Language/dp/0393038386 http://www.amazon.com/The-Symbolic-Species-Co-Evolution-Lang...
- Estragon 14y ago
  Are you kidding? The book is 15 years old. I did enjoy it very much in 1997, though.
  - akkartik 14y ago
    I'd love to hear about recent theories that are substantively different. I'm not aware of any.
    - Estragon 14y ago
      You could check out the first few pages of google scholar for "evolution of language" restricted to "since 2011" for a start. E.g. http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-anthro-081309-145722?journalCode=anthro http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-anthro-...
      - akkartik 14y ago
        I was addressing a lay audience like myself, so I was looking for a big picture, not primary sources. It takes more than a google scholar search to distinguish minor tweaks to our understanding from radical changes. Your example isn't freely available, so I have no basis to judge whether it's paying $20 for. Is Symbolic Species now outdated in some respect? Is there a different theory that better explains observations? Please educate rather than flatly disagree or tell me to go get educated.
        Estragon 14y ago
        Then what was your basis for claiming it's "the current state of the art in language origin theories?"
ethanpoole 14y ago
The relationship between language and thought is unclear. To be polarising, psychologists believe that language influences thought/culture and linguists believe that thought/culture influences language. There are evidence to support both conclusions, but most of the debate in popular media focuses on examples that are severely misinterpreted. For example, if Language A does not distinguish green and blue, it does not necessarily mean that the speakers of Language A cannot distinguish them, but only that Language A does not distinguish them linguistically. A more concrete example: many languages, such as Chinese, lack linguistic tense (e.g. past, present, future)—using instead aspectual markers (e.g. perfective, imperfective)—, but this does not mean that Chinese speakers cannot understand temporal relations (nor that they could not still express such notions linguistically). Similarly, Russian has separate words for light blue and dark blue, but English speakers can still express these two distinct shades despite not having two separate, distinct words. In short, one has to be extremely cautious about making such broad generalisations without fully understanding the empirical data and, ideally, linguistic theory. See the debate in the Economist between Boroditsky and Liberman for more on this topic: http://www.economist.com/debate/overview/190 http://www.economist.com/debate/overview/190
- baddox 14y ago
  If you casually asked a native Chinese speaker "are leaves and the sky the same color?" would they answer differently than if you asked a native English speaker? If so (i.e. if Chinese speakers tend to say Yes while English speakers tend to say No), then I would argue that there's something more going on than simple hue labels, since the labels themselves aren't being asked for or provided.
  - vorg 14y ago
    Chinese don't use 青qing(blue/green) in daily speech, only 蓝lan(blue) and 绿lu(green). The crossover where blue becomes green is different with Chinese than English-speakers, though. If I see a Chinese wearing what I call "aqua-green" clothing, I often ask them "What color sweater are you wearing, blue or green?" They always answer "blue".
  - mc32 14y ago
nerdfiles 14y ago
We think into language. We do not think in language. The former is a more consistent notion than the latter. More consistent with the evidence, etc. cited. Thinking 'in' language implies passivity and representation, thinking into language implies evolutionarily novel linguistic production, autonomy of mind, etc. Please review The Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience.
motters 14y ago
Another observation is that the grammatical structure of language differs between humans and other primates. At some point in human evolution there must have been a transition to a recursively enumerable grammar, which facilitates complex culture and metasystems similar to Wolfram's class 4 automata.
arketyp 14y ago
It's funny that he concludes the post in celebration. I personally find it a scary suggestion that our core perception and being is decided by idiosyncrasies of language and culture.
nemo1618 14y ago
I hope all this recent talk of language and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis spurs interest in lojban. Perhaps it can be further tuned to reduce color/gender bias. http://lojban.org/publications/level0/lojbanLevel0.pdf http://lojban.org/publications/level0/lojbanLevel0.pdf
patrickd 14y ago
This www.radiolab.org/2010/aug/09/transcript/ is a fascinating hour long podcast all about language and words. They show how thought and language _are_ linked. For example, imagine a rectangular room with entirely white walls and an item placed in one corner. Your chances are 50-50 of finding it. Then colour one of the side walls blue. You can then use that as a reference to always choose the correct corner to go to. However, if your language goes to "the white wall" or "the blue wall" you can't do it. Not until you can say/think "left of the blue wall" can you do it. Anyway, podcast explains it far better than I can, well worth a listen. (Radiolab in general is excellent)
iamwil 14y ago
Here's an episode of radiolab, where they talk about language as it relates to color, and how kids don't really ask why the sky is blue, because they don't think it's blue in the first place. http://www.radiolab.org/2012/may/21/ http://www.radiolab.org/2012/may/21/
medwezys 14y ago
I just realized that visible light spectrum, as it is taught in physics classes, is different depending on the language. Of course it is just a gradient and we distinguish 7 colors from it so we could remember the pattern, but those 7 colors differ. In my language, Lithuanian, we have names for light blue and dark blue (just like in Russian, as mentioned by Alex). These two colors sit between green and violet in our simplified 7color spectrum. They do not directly link to blue and indigo in the English spectrum.
ThomPete 14y ago
Some people have a really clear narrative in their mind. I don't. Rather everything is probabilistic and will only be final once I formulate it. Language is a reduction of reality and I realized a long time ago that I would rather keep my options open than let myself be let into narratives with premises that might be deeply flawed. It has it's advantages and dis-advantages of course.
ken 14y ago
Obligatory Wikipedia article with everything you ever wanted to know about blue and green: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinguishing_blue_from_green_in_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinguishing_blue_from_green_... For the remark about word genders, all I could find today was http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html... which doesn't include sources. I'm sure I've seen a different article about it, though, because I've heard of a variation on the experiment where the subjects were people who had learned a non-English language as children, but then moved to America and had spoken English for 10+ years. Even though the entire questionnaire was given in English, people associated a physical object with attributes of its gender in the first language they learned as children.
LeafStorm 14y ago
Again -- if you are interested in this topic, I would recommend reading Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages by Guy Deutscher. It deals with numerous facets of the relationship between language and culture in an accessible and comprehensive manner.
a_bonobo 14y ago
There's a mistake in that article - Japanese does indeed have a word for green (midori, みどり(緑)) it's just relatively young, so especially traffic lights are still referred to as blue in some kind of weird linguistic hangover. All other green things (grass, clothes etc.) are referred to as actually green (midori).
gingerjoos 14y ago
The Guugu Yimithirr are possibly an extreme case, but humans have always relied heavily on directions. The loss of stress on directions seems to be somewhat a modern phenomenon. At least till my grandfather's time it was fairly common for places/land to be associated with directions. For eg. a house would be called "Thekkeparambu" literally Southern field. We have railway stations and bridges that are commonly referred to as South or North. Some cities have places called East End and West End (London comes to mind).
krollew 14y ago
Yeah, that' true. I speak (better or worse) 5 languages and thinking in each of them is pretty different. :) The most interesting thing i found there are very few words that would have exaclty the same meaning in two different language. For instance, even the simpliest english words like "go" or "cat" doesn't have exact translations in polish. The exception i know are slavic languages, they are very similar to each other. Anyway set of available meanings in laguage has pretty big impact on what we think.
- TeMPOraL 14y ago
  I agree. When thinking (or talking with people fluent in both languages) I constantly switch between polish and english, as quite often one language captures intended meaning much better than the other. There are words and phrases that just cannot be translated without loosing some parts of their meaning.
timinman 14y ago
Matz, the creator of Ruby talks about why languages matter: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ix2DeCzuckc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ix2DeCzuckc The basic idea is that the structure of the language determines how you think about the problem and influences what you create.
userulluipeste 14y ago
"For example, green traffic lights in Japan are referred to as blue" That's because in Japan the traffic lights USE BLUE INSTEAD OF GREEN!

76 points by danielrhodes 14y ago

Good article :), here's my dissent... I, like most europeans (or for that matter most of the non anglo-saxon world), speak multiple languages on a daily basis. I think its true that a language forces you to concentrate on certain things i.e. object gender, its relative distance, or shape when counting objects, but it doesn't make you "think" differently in any fundamental way. We all still perceive three chairs, or drei Stuhlen o tres sillas, and I think whatever system we were to develop so long as it allowed one language user to express (in any way) a symbol that could be interpreted by another language user it would suffice (see de Saussure). I agree that language is powerful, I just don't think it hinges on spoken language, just an ability to abstract. I don't believe anyone thinks in sentences or words and for most tasks - especially programming, I visualize in what's happening. That's my two cents :)

7952 14y ago
But doesn't your programming language change how you think about problems? Does a Lisp expert think the same way as a Java expert? Our spoken language is not something that was designed but is an artefact of thousands of years of social interaction. Of course most of the time it doesn't matter, but sometimes it does.
- glogla 14y ago
  This is sometimes theme in science fiction as well. While for example Snow Crash was a bit cheesy in this regard (reprogramming human brains with special words and similar stuff), the language used plays interesting role in The Culture series as well. EDIT: I would also suggest that Lisp and Java are more different than any two human languages in history. And even then, they are both Turing complete.
warmfuzzykitten 14y ago
If I were to heed a recent HN post, I would downgrade you for use of an anecdote in place of scientific data. I would do so, were it not that the article you comment on had not a single reference. So I guess "the state of my mind (as my inconsistency-rejecting brain perceives it) refutes your unfounded theories" is fair game.
- mintplant 14y ago
  There are, indeed, references -- six of them -- at the bottom of the original post.

gliese1337 14y ago

Not everyone thinks in a language. Language is extremely helpful for conscious thought, but not because language itself has some inherent magical control over our thoughts, but because language embodies certain kinds of cognitive technology. The keystone paper for that point of view is "Number as a cognitive technology: Evidence from Pirahã language and cognition" (http://langcog.stanford.edu/papers/FEFG-cognition.pdf http://langcog.stanford.edu/papers/FEFG-cognition.pdf). Having words for colors makes it easier to remember the specific shades that you have words for, because it's easier to remember the abstract symbol, which you can use to access the concept later, than it is to remember the actual experience of that color. Same with numerical quantities, or anything else for which your language has labels and categories.

uncompetence 14y ago

"For example, infants don't have spacial awareness, or understand how objects can be relative to each other, until they learn the words for describing relativity." Where's the citation on this?

cafard 14y ago
Indeed. Infants can home in on a breast or a bottle from the get-go; babies are crawling by about 6 months, and walking at about 1 year. They are able to grasp and manipulate objects around six months, I believe. All these seem to imply spatial awareness.
wvenable 14y ago
Quick googling and I didn't find the article but I have read it. Maybe someone can find the magic keywords. The crux of the study was that children who don't know the words left and right don't appear to have an innate ability to understand the relative positions of objects related to other objects. Children with the language for left and right can remember relative positioning but children without those words do not.

Mz 14y ago

My oldest thinks in pictures. Sometimes, it is like speaking to a foreigner in that he makes translation mistakes. He and I have lots of interesting conversations about language and have talked about the blue green issue -- that it is one word in Japanese. One thing we wonder is if having one word says something about their eyesight.

wolfpackk 14y ago

Stephen Pinker from MIT has written some fascinating books on this very subject

akkartik 14y ago

Language isn't an invention, it's co-evolved with Homo Sapiens. I highly recommend The Symbolic Species for the current state of the art in language origin theories. http://www.amazon.com/The-Symbolic-Species-Co-Evolution-Language/dp/0393038386 http://www.amazon.com/The-Symbolic-Species-Co-Evolution-Lang...

Estragon 14y ago
Are you kidding? The book is 15 years old. I did enjoy it very much in 1997, though.
- akkartik 14y ago
  I'd love to hear about recent theories that are substantively different. I'm not aware of any.
  - Estragon 14y ago
    You could check out the first few pages of google scholar for "evolution of language" restricted to "since 2011" for a start. E.g. http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-anthro-081309-145722?journalCode=anthro http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-anthro-...
    - akkartik 14y ago
      I was addressing a lay audience like myself, so I was looking for a big picture, not primary sources. It takes more than a google scholar search to distinguish minor tweaks to our understanding from radical changes. Your example isn't freely available, so I have no basis to judge whether it's paying $20 for. Is Symbolic Species now outdated in some respect? Is there a different theory that better explains observations? Please educate rather than flatly disagree or tell me to go get educated.
      - Estragon 14y ago
        Then what was your basis for claiming it's "the current state of the art in language origin theories?"

ethanpoole 14y ago

The relationship between language and thought is unclear. To be polarising, psychologists believe that language influences thought/culture and linguists believe that thought/culture influences language. There are evidence to support both conclusions, but most of the debate in popular media focuses on examples that are severely misinterpreted. For example, if Language A does not distinguish green and blue, it does not necessarily mean that the speakers of Language A cannot distinguish them, but only that Language A does not distinguish them linguistically. A more concrete example: many languages, such as Chinese, lack linguistic tense (e.g. past, present, future)—using instead aspectual markers (e.g. perfective, imperfective)—, but this does not mean that Chinese speakers cannot understand temporal relations (nor that they could not still express such notions linguistically). Similarly, Russian has separate words for light blue and dark blue, but English speakers can still express these two distinct shades despite not having two separate, distinct words. In short, one has to be extremely cautious about making such broad generalisations without fully understanding the empirical data and, ideally, linguistic theory. See the debate in the Economist between Boroditsky and Liberman for more on this topic: http://www.economist.com/debate/overview/190 http://www.economist.com/debate/overview/190

baddox 14y ago
If you casually asked a native Chinese speaker "are leaves and the sky the same color?" would they answer differently than if you asked a native English speaker? If so (i.e. if Chinese speakers tend to say Yes while English speakers tend to say No), then I would argue that there's something more going on than simple hue labels, since the labels themselves aren't being asked for or provided.
- vorg 14y ago
  Chinese don't use 青qing(blue/green) in daily speech, only 蓝lan(blue) and 绿lu(green). The crossover where blue becomes green is different with Chinese than English-speakers, though. If I see a Chinese wearing what I call "aqua-green" clothing, I often ask them "What color sweater are you wearing, blue or green?" They always answer "blue".
- mc32 14y ago

nerdfiles 14y ago

We think into language. We do not think in language. The former is a more consistent notion than the latter. More consistent with the evidence, etc. cited. Thinking 'in' language implies passivity and representation, thinking into language implies evolutionarily novel linguistic production, autonomy of mind, etc. Please review The Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience.

motters 14y ago

Another observation is that the grammatical structure of language differs between humans and other primates. At some point in human evolution there must have been a transition to a recursively enumerable grammar, which facilitates complex culture and metasystems similar to Wolfram's class 4 automata.

arketyp 14y ago

It's funny that he concludes the post in celebration. I personally find it a scary suggestion that our core perception and being is decided by idiosyncrasies of language and culture.

nemo1618 14y ago

I hope all this recent talk of language and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis spurs interest in lojban. Perhaps it can be further tuned to reduce color/gender bias. http://lojban.org/publications/level0/lojbanLevel0.pdf http://lojban.org/publications/level0/lojbanLevel0.pdf

patrickd 14y ago

This www.radiolab.org/2010/aug/09/transcript/ is a fascinating hour long podcast all about language and words. They show how thought and language _are_ linked. For example, imagine a rectangular room with entirely white walls and an item placed in one corner. Your chances are 50-50 of finding it. Then colour one of the side walls blue. You can then use that as a reference to always choose the correct corner to go to. However, if your language goes to "the white wall" or "the blue wall" you can't do it. Not until you can say/think "left of the blue wall" can you do it. Anyway, podcast explains it far better than I can, well worth a listen. (Radiolab in general is excellent)

iamwil 14y ago

Here's an episode of radiolab, where they talk about language as it relates to color, and how kids don't really ask why the sky is blue, because they don't think it's blue in the first place. http://www.radiolab.org/2012/may/21/ http://www.radiolab.org/2012/may/21/

medwezys 14y ago

I just realized that visible light spectrum, as it is taught in physics classes, is different depending on the language. Of course it is just a gradient and we distinguish 7 colors from it so we could remember the pattern, but those 7 colors differ. In my language, Lithuanian, we have names for light blue and dark blue (just like in Russian, as mentioned by Alex). These two colors sit between green and violet in our simplified 7color spectrum. They do not directly link to blue and indigo in the English spectrum.

ThomPete 14y ago

Some people have a really clear narrative in their mind. I don't. Rather everything is probabilistic and will only be final once I formulate it. Language is a reduction of reality and I realized a long time ago that I would rather keep my options open than let myself be let into narratives with premises that might be deeply flawed. It has it's advantages and dis-advantages of course.

ken 14y ago

Obligatory Wikipedia article with everything you ever wanted to know about blue and green: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinguishing_blue_from_green_in_language http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinguishing_blue_from_green_... For the remark about word genders, all I could find today was http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html... which doesn't include sources. I'm sure I've seen a different article about it, though, because I've heard of a variation on the experiment where the subjects were people who had learned a non-English language as children, but then moved to America and had spoken English for 10+ years. Even though the entire questionnaire was given in English, people associated a physical object with attributes of its gender in the first language they learned as children.

LeafStorm 14y ago

Again -- if you are interested in this topic, I would recommend reading Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages by Guy Deutscher. It deals with numerous facets of the relationship between language and culture in an accessible and comprehensive manner.

a_bonobo 14y ago

There's a mistake in that article - Japanese does indeed have a word for green (midori, みどり(緑)) it's just relatively young, so especially traffic lights are still referred to as blue in some kind of weird linguistic hangover. All other green things (grass, clothes etc.) are referred to as actually green (midori).

gingerjoos 14y ago

The Guugu Yimithirr are possibly an extreme case, but humans have always relied heavily on directions. The loss of stress on directions seems to be somewhat a modern phenomenon. At least till my grandfather's time it was fairly common for places/land to be associated with directions. For eg. a house would be called "Thekkeparambu" literally Southern field. We have railway stations and bridges that are commonly referred to as South or North. Some cities have places called East End and West End (London comes to mind).

krollew 14y ago

Yeah, that' true. I speak (better or worse) 5 languages and thinking in each of them is pretty different. :) The most interesting thing i found there are very few words that would have exaclty the same meaning in two different language. For instance, even the simpliest english words like "go" or "cat" doesn't have exact translations in polish. The exception i know are slavic languages, they are very similar to each other. Anyway set of available meanings in laguage has pretty big impact on what we think.

TeMPOraL 14y ago
I agree. When thinking (or talking with people fluent in both languages) I constantly switch between polish and english, as quite often one language captures intended meaning much better than the other. There are words and phrases that just cannot be translated without loosing some parts of their meaning.

timinman 14y ago

Matz, the creator of Ruby talks about why languages matter: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ix2DeCzuckc http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ix2DeCzuckc The basic idea is that the structure of the language determines how you think about the problem and influences what you create.

userulluipeste 14y ago

"For example, green traffic lights in Japan are referred to as blue" That's because in Japan the traffic lights USE BLUE INSTEAD OF GREEN!