[HN Gopher] Languages That Could Change the Way You See the Worl...
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Languages That Could Change the Way You See the World (2015)
Author : ColinWright
Score : 50 points
Date : 2021-02-22 13:15 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (nautil.us)
(TXT) w3m dump (nautil.us)
| 908B64B197 wrote:
| Leaning a new language might change your perception of the world
| in different ways too.
|
| If you live in a country where several languages are spoken, you
| might realize some media will happily say two different things on
| the same subject in different languages! Politicians too!
| [deleted]
| leto_ii wrote:
| As a layman with a slight interest in linguistics, I keep coming
| accross the Piraha language as an example that refutes the
| Chomskyan idea of universal grammar. As far as I understand it,
| this is not actually true and the professional community mostly
| sees Everett as a charlatan. Is this correct? Does anybody know
| if there are professional linguists who take his
| theories/observations seriously?
| gshubert17 wrote:
| Chomsky and most of his students call Everett a charlatan. For
| example, David Pesetsky, whose doctoral advisor was Chomsky,
| criticized Everett's work in the June 2009 issue of the Journal
| of the Linguistic Society of America, Language. Chomsky and
| Pesetsky may not be the most objective critics, though.
|
| I read Everett's popular book on the Piraha, "Don't Sleep,
| There Are Snakes", and found his descriptions believable, but
| I'm definitely not a professional linguist.
|
| There's a nice interview with Everett in
| https://www.edge.org/conversation/daniel_l_everett-recursion...
| which includes details on the controversies with Chomsky's
| ideas.
|
| Given Chomsky's refusal to admit he was wrong in his political
| judgments about Cambodia and Sudan, which some observers go so
| far as to label hypocrisy, I'm tending to cheer for Everett and
| hope he is correct.
| wenc wrote:
| > Interestingly, the Piraha don't seem to have a very high
| opinion of outsiders. They are monolingual, preferring to stick
| with their own lexicon rather than borrow words from English or
| Spanish, and they call all other languages, "crooked head."
|
| A quibble with something in the article -- why would the Piraha
| borrow words from Spanish? They're in Brazil. And as it turns
| out, they do have a few loanwords from Portuguese.
| hinkley wrote:
| Somewhere I got the notion that if you're doing translations
| for Brazil you had to support Portuguese _and_ Spanish, which
| is why you need internationalization instead of localization.
| It turns out that there are maybe half a million Spanish
| speakers in Brazil, but plenty of other languages, especially
| in the western half.
|
| > Brazil's immigrant languages include Catalan, Dutch,
| Japanese, Korean, North Levantine Spoken Arabic, Turoyo and
| Vlax Romani, as well as more mainstream European languages like
| German, Italian, Polish and Ukrainian.
| wenc wrote:
| > you had to support Portuguese and Spanish
|
| I wonder about that (maybe internationalization for Latin
| America?). Portuguese, as far as I know, is very dominant in
| Brazil (spoken by 98% of the population). Spanish might be
| spoken as an L2 in the border states, but I don't know that
| there's any significant Spanish internationalization in
| Brazil. Most Brazilians I know say that whenever they have to
| communicate with Spanish speakers, they generally muddle
| through with Portunol, a made-up pidgin of Portuguese with a
| few Spanish words thrown in to ease comprehension.
| Ironically, Spanish isn't a very popular language in Brazil
| (only 4% of the population speak it).
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Brazil#Bilinguali.
| ..
|
| Come to think of it, I've seen more signage in Spanish in the
| United States than I've ever seen in Brazil. That said, I've
| only ever been to Rio and Sao Paulo. Would be interesting to
| get thoughts from Brazilians.
| hinkley wrote:
| It is possible they or I got our wires crossed about the
| fact that South America > Brazil. This story has been
| retold so many times that it is starting to become myth.
| Typically I use Switzerland as my go-to example of "Even if
| it's one country you can't assume one language." But Quebec
| is also next door - and to be perfectly cynical, you can
| count on people who only care about English and don't give
| a damn about anybody outside their bubble to have a
| politically incorrect Quebecois joke pop into their heads.
| They get it, even if they don't like it.
| bluGill wrote:
| Spanish is spoken by more than 4% of the US. It is an
| official language of New Mexico, the dominate language of
| Puerto Rico, and has a significant number of native born
| speakers in states bordering Mexico (which at one time
| owned those states). There are also a lot of immigrants
| (mostly from Mexico - both legal and illegal) who speak
| Spanish.
|
| If you squint hard enough Portuguese is a dialect of
| Spanish, as is Italian. Native speakers will disagree with
| that statement, but most non-native speakers who have
| learned Spanish and one of the other agree that once you
| know Spanish it isn't a big deal to learn the other.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Nah, if you go into a borderline city, odds are almost 1
| that you'll signage in Portuguese at the Spanish side of
| the border. Brazilian speak Portuguese, there's no details
| to add.
|
| Those 2% (that feels way too high, I don't trust this
| number) are insulated immigrants (probably speaking German,
| Japanese, or Italian) or native communities speaking their
| own language. Those are very small and fringe communities,
| most first generation immigrants and natives speak
| Portuguese too (but as a second language).
| rfreytag wrote:
| Is there a language with no word for money?
| hinkley wrote:
| My first thought was some of the gift cultures of First Nations
| people, but the most obvious group that came to mind is the
| source of the word 'wampum', so that probably kills that
| theory.
|
| I think we downplay how much 'international trade' went on, and
| for how long. The Hopewell civilization seems to have flirted
| with Egyptian levels of long-distance trade. The Mississippi
| river valley is a hell of a highway system.
| bluGill wrote:
| You can't infer anything from anyone who was in the Americas
| before Europeans. They didn't have a written record to work
| with, and between disease killing vast numbers; and the
| introduction of guns and the horse (other European technology
| too, but those are the big ones): their cultures were all in
| major change as we observed them.
|
| They probably didn't need much money then. Between being a
| barter society in general, and the affects of a small
| population relative to what the land could support there just
| wasn't as much to trade with each other. When someone did
| want to trade the Europeans had much better goods so even
| more of their old money wouldn't be used much anymore.
|
| Or in different words it is a lot easier to give gifts when
| almost all your relatives just died each leaving you a large
| inheritance of things. We can guess that some amount of
| selfishness would have come [back] to the gift giving
| cultures if things would have been allowed to return to
| "normal". That isn't to say gifts wouldn't have been
| important to the culture, only that they would be relatively
| rarer as there wasn't as much excess anyone could afford to
| give.
| hinkley wrote:
| Robin Wall Kimmerer (Onondaga) talks a good bit about gift
| economies, and she ties it all the way back to their oral
| histories. I doubt very much that you would rewrite your
| parables to fit the new normal. While that is a very
| Western thing to do, projecting your own baggage onto
| others is usually a mistake.
| clavalle wrote:
| Learning about (Ithkuil)[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ithkuil],
| a constructed language that incorporates a few of the ideas in
| the article along with many others has changed the way I see
| language and the effect it can have on thought.
|
| How much of how we construct ideas is constrained by historical
| accident? This is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and a well known
| question. But Ithkuil makes me wonder, what thought is possible
| if we build a language with expressiveness that goes beyond
| anything we have naturally?
| kens wrote:
| The Matses language in the article is interesting, where the verb
| form indicates how you know the information you are imparting.
| Something like that would be very useful for HN, making people
| tag statements to indicate their reliability.
|
| Imagine the benefit of verb tenses such as "I am an expert in
| this area", "I read something about this topic a while ago", "I
| know nothing about the topic and am confidently speculating", or
| "I didn't read the article and am commenting off the title."
| Edit: the key point is that this verb tense is required; you
| can't say anything without stating your confidence.
| 1-6 wrote:
| Ancient Greek words did that. For example, the word "know" has
| various forms:
|
| Verbs: Ginosko, oida, epiginosko, proginosko, epistamai,
| sunoida, agnoeo, gnorizo
|
| Nouns: Gnosis, epignosis, agnosia
|
| https://sweeterthanhoneyministry.com/2016/02/25/greek-words-...
| meepmorp wrote:
| I would be skeptical of how seriously to take the
| interpretation in the article.
|
| There are huge differences between English and Matses, such
| that naively talking what's encoded in the verb morphology is
| misleading at best. If you look at the section on verbs in the
| thesis on Matses, the author has this to say in the first
| paragraph:
|
| >Epistemic modality (e.g., -chit 'Uncertainty') and
| evidentiality (e.g., -nedac 'Distant Past: Inferential', -ash
| 'Recent Past: Conjecture' and -denne 'Remote Past:
| Experiential') are coded in Matses by derivational suffixes or
| as part of the meaning of inflectional suffixes, while English
| uses adverbs and modals like perhaps, evidently, really, must,
| etc.
|
| Matses actually encodes the same information as English, it
| just does so through a series of particles attaches to the
| verb, which is not surprising in a highly synthetic language.
| Mind you, I haven't read all 1200+ pages, but I'd doubt the
| article's take on things.
| samatman wrote:
| This depends on information I don't have access to.
|
| In Chinese, one may of course indicate the gender of a third
| party, but this isn't mandatory, where in Romance languages,
| it is.
|
| If evidentiary particles are mandatory grammar, and that is
| the claim, then uttering a sentence without including those
| particles would just sound wrong, the way the Russian
| tendency to leave off the article of a noun when speaking
| English sounds wrong to us. Native speakers simply wouldn't
| do so.
| meepmorp wrote:
| > In Chinese, one may of course indicate the gender of a
| third party, but this isn't mandatory, where in Romance
| languages, it is
|
| Romance languages have gender as a grammatical category,
| and it exists on all nouns. Semantically, gender is
| arbitrary, except in the case of natural gender on animate
| nouns. The need to express the gender of a noun is a purely
| syntactic requirement, which Chinese does not have. It
| seems like a valid comparison, but it's not really.
|
| > If evidentiary particles are mandatory grammar, and that
| is the claim
|
| And that's probably not really true. Instead, there's a
| conflation of epistemic mode and tense (and maybe aspect
| because why not) the verb system, and that's all tangled up
| with the other affixes. It's not clear from the article,
| (or the paper I don't have time to wade through) if there's
| a default mode/tense that speakers use, and then only
| clarify when necessary.
|
| I get your point, but I think the actual facts are probably
| much less stark or interesting than the article makes out.
| xvedejas wrote:
| I don't see why I would trust grammatically-required self-
| assessments of expertise any more than I already do when
| someone tags one of those phrases (not much).
| hinkley wrote:
| I think the effect would be greater than zero, but not as
| much as some might think.
|
| Some people have a pattern of speech that implies a level of
| authority that they don't actually feel.
|
| It's obvious when some people need to 'police their tone',
| less obvious for others.
| xvedejas wrote:
| I'll conjecture that languages will invariably end up with
| a more neutral option, even when such options seem
| required. Sometimes it is useful to the speaker to be
| ambiguous, whether it is to understate something, imply
| something, or just take a mental load off.
| ThinkingGuy wrote:
| The linguistic term for this, as I recently learned from the
| Lingthusiasm podcast, is "evidentiality" and apparently a
| number of languages have it as a feature. Some languages get
| really granular with it, having different forms of expression
| depending on whether you've seen something, done something,
| overheard it, etc.
|
| https://lingthusiasm.com/post/184928796346/change-the-audio-...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evidentiality
| ColinWright wrote:
| There is a SF novel that taps into these ideas:
|
| The Player of Games, by Iain M. Banks
| frakt0x90 wrote:
| I hadn't heard these before and I find that even less exotic
| languages change they way you think about things. I didn't
| understand grammar like indirect objects until I studied Spanish.
| In Vietnamese, every word is a single syllable and you chain them
| together to make more complex descriptors. They also have no
| tense. So to say "I went to the store yesterday", you say "I go
| store yesterday" The form of go does not change depending on the
| time period. Languages are so cool and if I could make as good a
| living just studying them I would.
| blacksmith_tb wrote:
| I remember (vaguely) my year of Mandarin as an undergrad was
| similar - though to be fair English is also capable of a lot of
| word-order tricks for a Subject-Verb-Object language, we don't
| have any trouble with "I went to the store yesterday" vs.
| "Yesterday I went to the store" or even "I went, yesterday, to
| the store".
| chris_st wrote:
| Quite agree -- I really enjoyed my linguistics classes in
| college, and if I hadn't discovered programming, might have
| become a linguist.
| yorwba wrote:
| > In Vietnamese, every word is a single syllable
|
| Would you consider "san bay" to be two words but "airport" to
| be one? If so, then that's just an artifact of the writing
| system. After all, it could just be "sanbay" and "air port".
| There are no spaces in speech.
| knolax wrote:
| Yes but what he's really talking about are morphemes. English
| has many multisyllabic morphemes where as Vietnamese has few.
| Mordisquitos wrote:
| The way the author described the case of Yeli Dnye ( _" A
| Language Where Colors Are Metaphors"_) makes it seem a bit
| underwhelming to me, and unfortunately the link to the research
| paper is broken. When she says:
|
| >For example, to describe something as red, islanders say
| "mtyemtye," which is derived from "mtye," or "red parrot
| species." Another example is "mgidimgidi," which can be used to
| say something is black, but is directly derived from the word for
| night, "mgidi."
|
| ...all I get is the impression that the names of colours in Yeli
| Dnye are derived from known objects which happen to be of that
| colour--an interesting bit of trivia, but nothing shocking. Then:
|
| >Not only that, writes Levinson, but the islander's grammar
| reinforces this metaphorical slant, saying, "The skin of the man
| is white like the parrot," rather than "He is white."
|
| ...I am confused by what is supposed to be that surprising in
| this way of expressing themselves. Does _" is white like the
| parrot"_ stand for a literal mention of _both_ the word for white
| parrot and a word derived from it? Or is it a stand-in for the
| fact that they don 't refer to things _being_ a colour but rather
| being _like_ specific coloured things? I feel like something has
| been lost in translation, both literally from Yeli Dnye and
| metaphorically from the field of linguistics.
| meepmorp wrote:
| The link to the 2001 article they base it from is broken, but
| it sounds like all their color words are just derived from
| nouns, maybe with some affix indicating 'of the color like'.
| The description is too vague to make a lot of sense.
|
| There's lots of really weird and interesting things about
| Australian languages that would make better subjects for an
| article, like the avoidance register in Warlpiri. Hard to see
| why they chose that particular one.
| kris-s wrote:
| When I learned about the cardinal language folks a few years ago
| I thought it was so cool that I've tried to always keep in mind
| which way is north ever since.
|
| Whenever I learn enough of a new language to speak sentences I
| feel as though the person speaking isn't quite "me" but rather a
| remix of me. We all have facets and speaking a different language
| brings that out.
| estaseuropano wrote:
| Just to flag that these are not necessarily consensus analysis,
| I can't speak for the details but there were linguistic papers
| discussing that these people actually use different directions
| - cardinal when outside, but simple relational inside. So they
| are not necessarily all day aware of every direction (which in
| any case is easier when you live in a small hut and normally
| are in areas you know well).
| el-salvador wrote:
| I never worry much about cardinal points when I'm home. But
| then I spent some months in two countries in which the
| addressing system does not use street names or house numbers
| but points of references and cardinal directions [1].
|
| After about a month there, keeping track of the cardinal points
| became second nature because it was a necessary part of
| functioning in those countries. Since directions in
| conversations usually are "Just walk two blocks then one East"
|
| However when I'm home, I stop keeping track where the North is,
| because it is not that necessary. And while we also speak
| Spanish in my country, we tell directions in a different way,
| using words like "Turn right, the left, downhill, uphill.
|
| [1] Addresses in Nicaragua and Costa Rica are very unusual for
| the rest of the world. For example "From the Cowboy's Sour
| Milk, Two Blocks West, Right hand" is a completely valid
| address in Managua.
| JoeDaDude wrote:
| Side note: I'd like to point out one of the very few science
| fiction novels about linguistics: The Languages of Pao by Jack
| Vance [1]. The novel is clearly inspired by the Sapir-Whorf
| concept that language shapes thought [0]. BTW: Another candidate
| would be 1984. Though not the main these, that novel introduces
| Newspeak, a language in which dissent cannot be expressed, thus
| becoming another tool of oppression.
|
| Minor spoiler: In Vance's said novel, the different segments of
| the population of a planet are taught three separate languages in
| order to develop and specialize economically, industrially, and
| militarily.
|
| [0]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
|
| [1].
| https://www.google.com/books/edition/The_Languages_of_Pao/ke...
| haakonhr wrote:
| Babel 17 by Samuel Delaney is another classic in this genre:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babel-17
| rthomas6 wrote:
| It's not really a main plot point, but Iain M. Banks's Culture
| uses a constructed language that de-emphasizes or lacks easy
| descriptions of the concepts of possession and ownership,
| dominance/submission, and aggression.
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