[HN Gopher] Our language, our world
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Our language, our world
Author : Vigier
Score : 34 points
Date : 2024-01-15 20:08 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (aeon.co)
(TXT) w3m dump (aeon.co)
| icepat wrote:
| Anyone with an interest in language and its function in
| understanding the world, should check out late Wittgenstein.
| Specifically _Philosophical Investigations_. Probably my
| favourite work of Western Philosophy.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| I think it also applies to programming languages.
|
| I went decades with 'objects' being the one and only way. It was
| all I had been taught or had done.
|
| Then when I started learning functional programming. It really
| did take a long time to switch the brain around. Not to learn the
| language, but to re-learn thinking. It changed how I viewed
| problems.
| sctb wrote:
| Emo Philips' joke always comes to mind about stuff like this:
| "The brain is the most important organ in the body... says the
| brain". Linguists and philosophers conclude that language is
| central, physicists conclude that physics is central, and so on.
| earthboundkid wrote:
| As Wittgenstein once said, "Nice to meet you. My name is Ludwig."
| xenocratus wrote:
| > Anyone who has learned a second language will have made an
| exhilarating (and yet somehow unsettling) discovery: there is
| never a one-to-one correspondence in meaning between the words
| and phrases of one language and another. Even the most banal
| expressions have a slightly different sense, issuing from a
| network of attitudes and ideas unique to each language.
|
| Actually, as a native Romanian speaker, it shocked me when I
| moved to the UK and started noticing how many phrases have a
| literal translation along with the same meaning in both
| languages. For example, "straight from the horse's mouth". I can
| only assume it's a modern acquisition in at least one of the two,
| but it's still surprising to see such an unexpected bridge
| between the languages.
|
| Of course there are plenty that don't translate, but even the few
| that do are interesting to see.
| Joeboy wrote:
| These are called calques.
| gumby wrote:
| This is not a bad survey article but strangely misses the deep
| tradition (~700 years at least) of hermaneutic linguistics that
| generalizes the central thesis of the essay. It's not just
| languages themselves that present "unbridgeable gulfs in thinking
| and perception" but the experiences/history of individuals
| themselves even when speaking the _same_ language.
|
| Anyone who speaks more than one language in the home has jumped
| back and forth between languages in a sentence when trying to
| convey something "properly". When you live with a spouse/partner,
| over time you learn to consider your choice of words even in a
| single language in order to make it happen -- individual words
| can have idiosyncratic implications. Over time (decades) you have
| to do this less and less as you form a "household language" with
| your partner.
|
| BTW the origin of the hermaneutic effort comes from aneffort to
| reconcile inconsistencies in the christian texts: if they are
| truly the word of a god then any inconsistency must be due to
| human confusion or imperfection of human language; this was an
| attempt to find the underlying meaning (or as the article says,
| platonic meaning). This led to quite a bit of development in
| linguistic philosophy in the 20th century (some of it quite
| insightful and some of it plainly absurd). Because text cannot
| make the same adaptations one can mid-conversation, it's both
| harder and (to me) more interesting to look into the text itself.
| smitty1e wrote:
| > When you live with a spouse/partner, over time you learn to
| consider your choice of words even in a single language in
| order to make it happen -- individual words can have
| idiosyncratic implications.
|
| A long-term relationship grows its own shared vocabulary and
| idioms that sound idiotic outside of that context.
| Barrin92 wrote:
| I've always had doubts that language is causative when it comes
| to differences in how we see the world but it's at the very least
| reflective of them.
|
| Even between German and English which are quite similar you see
| it in the honorifics, _Du /Sie_ which doesn't just lack a modern
| English equivalent, you see that difference in behavior. When I
| speak German in a German workplace you have to actually often
| think if you're going to "dutz" someone. In English I'm more
| casual because it doesn't even enter your mind. Not to mention if
| you go East Asian cultures where it gets even more complicated as
| age and family relations have their own terminology.
| lmm wrote:
| Moving to Japan convinced me that language is downstream rather
| than upstream of cultural differences. There's a much bigger
| gap talking to a Japanese person in English than talking to a
| British person in Japanese.
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