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English tends to have unique words for everything. Basically every difference gets its own word. Jump, hop, skip describe similar movements, but the words are n

English tends to have unique words for everything. Basically every difference gets its own word. Jump, hop, skip describe similar movements, but the words are not related in any way. A different language would use a common noun and add an adjective. Now, this does affect how you think. We need different words (including multi-word combinations) to point to different things. But we also need to see similarities between things and this is how we choose the form for these words or word combinations. To rewrite a problem in different and more generic terms is a know heuristic to get a better understanding of it and maybe gain an insight. (Note that more generic terms mean that you start using more multi-word combinations and will see both differences and similarities.) A different metaphor may also open up different possibilities. E.g we are trying to model a permission system and phrase it in terms of users, groups, and resources. We may come up with a different solution if we switch to users, keys, and rooms. Entities in the model are neither groups nor keys; they have their own nature we try to imperfectly capture with words pointing to things that have a superficially same relationship. The words are not quite good; but we need some pointers. This is why trying to find the perfect name for a variable is a fallacy. There are no perfect names. What helps more are names that are different in one way and similar in another and form a consistent set.

nh23423fefe 1y ago
gpt says jump hop and skip are loan words from french, german, and norse. so there's no reason to expect them to be similar just because "use legs to get in air" i dont see the connection to the structure of thought at all. words are just arbitrary utterances that come after thoughts. how could they possibly affect thought?
bloppe 1y ago
You're talking about very subtle effects that have more to do with an individual than with a speech community. English has so many "standard" words because the speech community became unusually eager to borrow them from other languages after the Norman conquest (The Anglo-Saxons were actually quite reluctant to do so before). Many speakers of other languages are now just as eager to borrow words from English (or other languages). Look at the pervasiveness of Spanglish and Hinglish, even though they are broadly considered non-standard by the speech community. A Spanish speaker will find just as many different words to describe something as an English speaker if they bother to try. The hoax is that a language systematically shapes the patterns of thought of the entire speech community in profound ways. There is actually consensus among linguists that it can shape thinking of very subtle ways, however. Noun-gendering is one. A bridge is masculine in French: "le pont". It's feminine in German: "die Bruecke". A French-speaker is more likely to think of a bridge as "strong" or "sturdy", and a German is more likely to describe it as "elegant". But this does not rise to the level of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis that a language limits its speakers' view of the world.

nh23423fefe 1y ago

gpt says jump hop and skip are loan words from french, german, and norse. so there's no reason to expect them to be similar just because "use legs to get in air" i dont see the connection to the structure of thought at all. words are just arbitrary utterances that come after thoughts. how could they possibly affect thought?

bloppe 1y ago

You're talking about very subtle effects that have more to do with an individual than with a speech community. English has so many "standard" words because the speech community became unusually eager to borrow them from other languages after the Norman conquest (The Anglo-Saxons were actually quite reluctant to do so before). Many speakers of other languages are now just as eager to borrow words from English (or other languages). Look at the pervasiveness of Spanglish and Hinglish, even though they are broadly considered non-standard by the speech community. A Spanish speaker will find just as many different words to describe something as an English speaker if they bother to try. The hoax is that a language systematically shapes the patterns of thought of the entire speech community in profound ways. There is actually consensus among linguists that it can shape thinking of very subtle ways, however. Noun-gendering is one. A bridge is masculine in French: "le pont". It's feminine in German: "die Bruecke". A French-speaker is more likely to think of a bridge as "strong" or "sturdy", and a German is more likely to describe it as "elegant". But this does not rise to the level of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis that a language limits its speakers' view of the world.