

The Power of Language - danielrhodes
http://blog.alexmaccaw.com/the-power-of-language

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ethanpoole
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>

~~~
baddox
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.

~~~
rprospero
The problem with that test is that the notion of "same" is too fuzzy. If you
asked me "are leaves and traffic lights the same color?", I might answer yes.
After all, they're both green. On the other hand, I might say no, since one is
dark green and the other is bright green. To test if something is going on
mentally, it'd be better to take my personal opinions out of the equation. For
instance, show a traffic light colored square on a leaf colored background,
followed by a sky colored circle on a leaf colored background.

~~~
baddox
Absolutely. That's why I mentioned that it was a casual question. Since
everyone presumably has similar hue thresholds regardless of language, I was
wondering if language would effect their answer, according to whatever
definitions of "color" and "sameness" they themselves use.

In English, if you casually ask the color of the sky or the color you would
use for water on a map, most people will simply say "blue" even though they
could probably detect hue difference if presented printed samples of the two.
Accordingly, I think most English speakers would say Yes if casually asked
whether the sky is the same color as water on a map. But is that the same
response and reasoning you would get if you asked a speaker of a language that
doesn't distinguish between blue and green whether the sky and leaves are the
same color?

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gliese1337
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>). 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.

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jfaucett
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
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
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.

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uncompetence
"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
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.

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akkartik
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-Lang...](http://www.amazon.com/The-Symbolic-Species-Co-Evolution-
Language/dp/0393038386)

~~~
Estragon
Are you kidding? The book is 15 years old. I did enjoy it very much in 1997,
though.

~~~
akkartik
I'd love to hear about recent theories that are substantively different. I'm
not aware of any.

~~~
Estragon
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-...](http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-
anthro-081309-145722?journalCode=anthro)

~~~
akkartik
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
Then what was your basis for claiming it's "the current state of the art in
language origin theories?"

~~~
akkartik
That I haven't found anything better or more comprehensive. I think that's
what state of the art means, not "less than 1 year old" or some arbitrary time
horizon like that.

Perhaps I should have said "IMO". I tend to assume that opinion is implied in
most statements, especially for something hard to define like "state of the
art". _Edit_ : you're right, I was misusing the term
(<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_the_art>). It's a lot more concrete
than I realized, and it has nothing to do with lay readers. Apologies.
Unfortunately I can't update the original. If I could I'd rephrase it as "the
most comprehensive story on language evolution for lay readers".

It sounds like you don't actually have a different theory or a substantive
criticism. Is that correct?

~~~
Estragon
Judge for yourself. I think you understand what I was saying.

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patrickd
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)

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krollew
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
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.

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ThomPete
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.

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ken
Obligatory Wikipedia article with everything you ever wanted to know about
blue and green:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinguishing_blue_from_green_...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinguishing_blue_from_green_in_language)

For the remark about word genders, all I could find today was
[http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html...](http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?pagewanted=all)
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.

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motters
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.

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nemo1618
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>

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LeafStorm
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.

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iamwil
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/>

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gingerjoos
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).

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medwezys
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.

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a_bonobo
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).

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timinman
Matz, the creator of Ruby talks about why languages matter:
<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.

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arketyp
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.

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userulluipeste
"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!

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Mz
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.

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nerdfiles
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.

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

