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Your view even of human languages is simplistic. Forgive me, I don't mean to be rude, I'm just trying to explain. You might think that languages are just have

by t43562 2y ago

Your view even of human languages is simplistic. Forgive me, I don't mean to be rude, I'm just trying to explain. You might think that languages are just have different words for the same things. In reality the problems are where the same things don't exist. People don't view the world the same way and don't have an equivalent word. In Turkish it's very important whether your aunt is on your mother's side or your father's side so there are different words for each....but there's no words for "he" or "she" as they don't bother with gender in sentences. So for example every conversation converted from Turkish to English loses an important bit of meaning about relationships and the sex of a person has to be inferred from context which is not easy to do automatically. Similarly computer software....and there's a lot of it.

numpad0 2y ago
It's interesting that many with CS/CE background believes in irreversible death of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and victory of the Universal Grammar Theory, while many from the exact same cohort are able to trivially explain how tightly coupled ISA and CPU implementation are and how mutually incompatible different ISAs can be. I mean, it's most likely overlaps and not actually the same set of people, but I find it ironic and funny.
- t43562 2y ago
  I suspect that it's an argument about nothing. e.g. I can think about my "mother's sister" but I don't care about it enough to invent a shortcut word for it like "teyze". To Turks I think it means something because in some families there's great emphasis on the connections with one or other side of the family. It's rather a brutal and dismissive attitude sometimes. So I personally think that groups of people have a common understanding and some commonly accepted attitude that make up their culture. The purpose of words is to reference those feelings. An outsider can understand to a degree because we are all human but they usually get the emphasis wrong and also tend to miss lots of implications. Of course you as an entrant to a culture (e.g. a kid) are going to get educated over time about what it all means and you're going to be discouraged from expressing alternate cultural values because overall not enough people feel like that to have invented convenient ways of expressing it. So language is going to affect you but as some idea becomes popular and needs expression people do invent new words. So you can affect it - if you can get enough people to pick up on your invention by adding a new idea to their mental model of life.

by t43562 2y ago

numpad0 2y ago

It's interesting that many with CS/CE background believes in irreversible death of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and victory of the Universal Grammar Theory, while many from the exact same cohort are able to trivially explain how tightly coupled ISA and CPU implementation are and how mutually incompatible different ISAs can be. I mean, it's most likely overlaps and not actually the same set of people, but I find it ironic and funny.

t43562 2y ago
I suspect that it's an argument about nothing. e.g. I can think about my "mother's sister" but I don't care about it enough to invent a shortcut word for it like "teyze". To Turks I think it means something because in some families there's great emphasis on the connections with one or other side of the family. It's rather a brutal and dismissive attitude sometimes. So I personally think that groups of people have a common understanding and some commonly accepted attitude that make up their culture. The purpose of words is to reference those feelings. An outsider can understand to a degree because we are all human but they usually get the emphasis wrong and also tend to miss lots of implications. Of course you as an entrant to a culture (e.g. a kid) are going to get educated over time about what it all means and you're going to be discouraged from expressing alternate cultural values because overall not enough people feel like that to have invented convenient ways of expressing it. So language is going to affect you but as some idea becomes popular and needs expression people do invent new words. So you can affect it - if you can get enough people to pick up on your invention by adding a new idea to their mental model of life.