
Lost in Translation - grellas
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703467304575383131592767868.html?mod=WSJ_LifeStyle_Lifestyle_5
======
RiderOfGiraffes
The strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has fallen out of favor, but
research and results like this seem to make it clear that language has an
effect on thought and thinking. Linguistic relativity is a dirty word (well,
dirty term) but there's clearly something going on.

Perhaps it's time to move beyond the original statement(s) by Sapir and Whorf,
beyond the limited interpretation of Linguistic relativity, and to start
talking about the bi-directional effects of thought and language.

Those of us who routinely program in significantly different languages know
that some languages better suit some tasks. Pure imperative as fundamentally
different from pure OO or pure functional. "Thinking in" one langauge colors
the way one views/creates solutions and algorithms.

Time to view Chomsky as one, rather limited, point of view, at odds with some
of the more recent research.

Some reading:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity>

<http://www.google.co.uk/#q=sapir+whorf+hypothesis>

<http://www.enformy.com/dma-chm0.htm>

~~~
kiba
_Those of us who routinely program in significantly different languages know
that some languages better suit some tasks. Pure imperative as fundamentally
different from pure OO or pure functional. "Thinking in" one langauge colors
the way one views/creates solutions and algorithms._

I was wondering how programming languages shape the way programmers think
about the world.

For example, does it affect the ways we write?

~~~
LaPingvino
For sure. Functional programming helps to separate a problem in small elements
and to think of all kinds of creative ways to combine those elements. I
basically came from imperative to functional straight away, so I cannot tell a
lot about OO programming, but I definitely see the consequences of OO thinking
in a lot of code. Clojure was a great way for me to simplify programming in my
mind. Although it's a very capable programming language, the concepts are so
simple that it puts your mind into creative thinking :).

~~~
kiba
So you think about separating problems in small elements in non-programming
contexts?

~~~
LaPingvino
Absolutely. Often I can think of not directly related elements that help to
solve something.

Slightly off-topic: I made a shortlink doeslanguageinfluence.tk to make it
easier to pass this article on.

------
LaPingvino
I speak 9 languages by now, and it's definitely true. I cannot talk well about
feelings in other languages than Portuguese, explaining technical stuff and
counting I do best in Esperanto (it has a very intuitive regular number system
and the agglutinative grammar makes it very convenient to explain the finer
details of complicated stuff), when I'm tired I answer casual stuff in my
native Dutch, philosophy is a lot easier with toki pona and to be short and
clear, English is very useful as it's words generally are very short.

Pro-tip: if you want a quick way to get more control over your language usage,
and a way to escape your national language habits, try to learn Esperanto. It
definitely helped me.

And as I know this stuff out of experience for quite some time, you can
probably imagine why I don't like Chomsky that much (and for similar reasons,
Richard Dawkins... Populistic science sucks :(.)

~~~
HSO
Just out of curiosity, how did you manage to learn 9 languages (and how long
did it take you, if you actually "studied" them explicitly somehow)? I'm
trying to learn French and it still sucks, after almost 3 months in Paris (but
not much social contact, admittedly, as I came here without knowing any
people). Any tips from an actual doer? Anything that is possible to do by
oneself (i.e. not the standard "get a French girlfriend")?

~~~
edanm
I speak 2 languages natively, but have recently studied a third (Spanish) and
speak it at a beginner, but passable level. I really recommend the Pimsleur
method for learning languages. It's a set of audio lessons, where the basic
principle makes a lot of sense: learning the same way you learned your native
language. Simply by hearing things said, over and over, and taking part in
mock conversations. There is exactly _zero_ time spent on teaching you rules,
it's all taught by actual talking.

Link to wiki for more info: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pimsleur_method>

~~~
diN0bot
On the one hand, there's been research showing that people who move to a
foreign country and explicitly learn the grammer learn the language faster
than those who only learn naturally.

On the other hand, I think both methods can get at the same aim: massive
memorization of both new material and the natural use of patterns.

When we learn a language "from birth" (of course it is more of a 6-year full-
time immersion program, which isn't all that amazing in itself than something
that happens the day you're born) do we learn the patterns without realizing,
or do we literally have to memorize each new adjective ending for nouns in
different cases and genders (eg, in German)?

I assume our brains pick up on the patterns, hence why kids make cute mistakes
like "I'm the goodest". BUT, as an adult, why not just learn the pattern
explicitly AND listen to and participate in lots of conversations AND memorize
a lot?

They ALL help. Do as much as you can as often as you can and your learn will
spiral out of control awesome ;-)

EDIT: I'm also not sure whether only-memorization to learn patterns works or
not. When people say they're "conversational" in 3 months, how much can they
achieve in 3 more months? It's a question of whether memorization or whatever
process they're using is exponentially scaling. I think that most grammer
patterns can be made clear with 3-50 examples, so in the end that doesn't seem
that difficult. But I've only had experience memorizing grammer first, with
the help of hundreds of examples at the same time, and then producing hundreds
of examples myself to become fluid.

------
nhebb
What was interesting to me was the use of agents in the English language. In
my English classes, using passive voice would get red marks on your paper. So
even if there were a natural tendency to think in agent-less terms, it would
be drilled out of you in class.

Running my own business, I now find that passive voice is the most diplomatic
way to discuss user error. The customer didn't do the wrong thing, e.g., "you
made a typo in the shipping address" becomes "the shipping address had a
typo". The wrong thing just happened, with no agent bearing direct blame. :)

~~~
crux
I'm afraid I must mention that while that example does indeed demonstrate how
different phrasing can avoid placing blame, it's not a use of the passive
voice. The verb 'to have' is just as active as the verb 'to make'. A passive
construction would be, 'a typo was made in the shipping address.'

------
rmah
Great article. It reminds me of when I was growing up. My parents would often
speak to me in Korean. My (english speaking) friends would sometimes ask me
"what did she say?" Strangely, though I understood clearly in my mind what my
mother said, I could not _translate_ what she said into English. I had to
_describe_ what she said instead. This friction never popped up in my head
until I was explicitly asked to translate.

As Charlemagne is quoted in the article to say, "to have a second language is
to have a second soul." In a weird way, that's true.

~~~
Perceval
"I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to my
horse." —Charles V

------
andolanra
Speaking now as a linguist, I am somewhat bothered by articles of this
type—not because they're inaccurate, because they're entirely accurate, but
because they walk a narrow line between fascination with and fetishization of
language. Research does indicate that language and cognition are linked in a
lot of ways, that's true; but the problem with overly aggressive Sapir-Whorf
pushing is that it becomes all too easy to simplify the "language affects
thought" maxim until it is no longer accurate.

For instance, the statement, "Languages affect how people conceptualize time,"
is true, according to research, while the statement, "[ethnic group] is the
only group of people to feel [some overly specific emotion]," is never true,
or at least hasn't been true all the many times I've seen it brought up.
(Usually, such claims end up evoking the No True Scotsman fallacy when someone
else suggests that maybe members of other ethnic groups are capable of feeling
the emotion.) "Cognitive tasks like counting are affected by a person's
language," is true, while Orwell's "You can make people more think less by
making their language have a staccato rhythm," is not. There's a fine line to
walk between recognizing that language and thought are interrelated, and
thinking of language as the magical thought-producing-machine that completely
determines all mental (and sometimes physiological) functioning.

Finally, a lot of people read "language" and therefore forget the importance
of things like dialect and culture. There's a common tendency to become
obsessed with 'untranslatability' as a marker of language and forget that a
lot of untranslatable utterances are untranslatable not because of an inherent
feature of their host language, but because language and culture are also
deeply intertwined. If in Russian I made a joke about "preved" or discussed
samizdat, and you didn't understand it in translation, it wouldn't be because
of any inherent differences in the mental processes of Russian-speakers versus
English-speakers, but instead because of cultural differences, which are an
incredibly important part of communication.

This is my two cents, I suppose—the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a seductive idea
and it's produced a lot of compelling research, but it's very easy to go too
far with Sapir-Whorf and turn language into something much more powerful and
more magical than it really is.

------
cturner
Interesting:

    
    
        In recent studies, MIT students were shown dots on a
        screen and asked to say how many there were. If they were
        allowed to count normally, they did great. [...]
        if they did a verbal task when shown the dots—like
        repeating the words spoken in a news report—their
        counting fell apart. In other words, they needed their
        language skills to count.
    

I find that external tapping destroys my ability to perform or enjoy listening
to music. Something about the interaction of a rival rhythm shuts down the
part of my brain that handles music. But most other singers I know don't have
any issue with this, and I've wondered for a while what's wrong with me.

An important aspect the article doesn't get into is idiomatic languages.
English has a rich vocabulary. Some languages with weak vocabulary compensate
for this by heavy linking into a story culture. It would be like if we had no
word for beautiful, and instead expressed this by saying "your face launches a
thousand ships". I'm told Chinese dialects are like this.

~~~
maw
If, when my wife tries to wake me up in the morning, I grunt in reply I can
usually fall back asleep. But if I respond using actual words, I'm generally
awake for the day. My hunch is that this phenomenon is somehow related to the
study.

------
all
Very true. I have worked in 15 languages and each one colours the world
differently. It does become a bit of a chicken-and-egg (or nature vs nurture)
question, though.

I definitely agree on Chomsky. Common structures and dynamics don't
necessitate a quasi-Platonic unity.

------
switch007
> In one study, Spanish and Japanese speakers couldn't remember the agents of
> accidental events as adeptly as English speakers could. Why? In Spanish and
> Japanese, the agent of causality is dropped: "The vase broke itself," rather
> than "John broke the vase."

If the author translated "se le rompío el vaso" then it is not quite "the vase
broke itself". The "le" is very important: it indicates who did the breaking,
albeit indirectly and indicating an accident. I would translate it as "the
vase broke on John" (it broke while he was using it.)

If the author translated "se rompío el vaso", still, "the vase broke itself"
is too literal, just as "se venda" is not translated as "it sells itself" (it
means "for sale.") "The vase broke" sounds better.

~~~
maw
Oftentimes, but not always. If John picked it up and it just broke (due to
being fragile, I suppose) he could just as reasonably say "se me rompió" (note
where the accent goes, by the way) and we might translate that is "it broke on
me".

(Also: it's "se vende".)

------
diN0bot
"Take "Humpty Dumpty sat on a..." Even this snippet of a nursery rhyme reveals
how much languages can differ from one another. In English, we have to mark
the verb for tense; in this case, we say "sat" rather than "sit." In
Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can't) change the verb to mark tense."

It seems that in many languages verb tense plops the "when" into one of a few
or dozen general buckets. the "when" is then further specified using more
words, such as "yesterday" or "next month" or "a long time ago".

I expect Indonesian to simply rely entirely on such "further specification".
Or is the sense of time fundamentally different than, say, English? Does
anyone know more?

~~~
LaPingvino
yes and no

In Dutch (technically not too far from English) we only use past and present
tense, and although we can mark the future with a special verb like in
English, we often don't do that. It is perfectly possible to mark the time
with a time marker then, but often this is not necessary to be understood.
Relative time can be enough to be clear for the other. (Like "I am short of
bread. So I go to the market and buy some. Then I eat it." is grammatically
incorrect English, but easily understood, and a correct formulation in Dutch.)

Esperanto has past, present and future and has the possiblity to note the
completeness of an action, but it's not obligatory as in English.

toki pona has no inflection and doesn't indicate time at all. If you want to
indicate time, you end up using a complicated grammatical construction of
causation. Mostly you just make a general statement or indicate time as
something coming before or after something else.

~~~
diN0bot
I've been wondering for some time _why_ some languages 'mark' (eg, verb
tenses, declining nouns, adjectives) more/less than others.

Over time some mark more and others mark less, so what is the trend? How does
this stuff arise??

~~~
WildUtah
Well, Spanish marks subjects of verbs with inflection and requires detailed
accounting of objects with pronouns and clitics. In return Spanish gets the
opportunity to build a subtle set of emphasis points in sentences.

The final position in a Spanish sentence may belong to the subject, an object
of any kind, the verb, or a subordinate clause equally easily. Which thing
gets that honored position becomes the topic of emphasis for the sentence.
Then whichever one comes first (also flexible) gets the second strongest mark.
Things that come along in the middle can get much smaller emphasis depending
on order. Adjectives and relative pronoun phrases can change emphasis based on
order, too.

In Latin, there is almost no natural order needed. Nouns specify their
function in the sentence with declension and verbs attach to subjects with
their conjugations. Latin poetry can hold a soup of words in almost any order.

In English and Mandarin order matters. But there is little chance to mark the
function of words morphologically. Instead the words stay the same and you
rearrange them. That means you can't reorder sentences like you could in
Spanish or Latin.

------
dgudkov
I agree that language influences way of thinking. In Russian language words
(verbs, nouns, etc.) often can freely swap their position in sentence without
changing meaning of the sentence (just slightly changing emphasis). Questions
usually are made using intonation only. English has very rigid structure when
verbs, nouns and other parts must be put in a certain order. This results in
clear, sharp and unambiguous way of expressing thoughts typical for english-
speakers, that always amazes me (native russian).

------
viggity
FTA: "Languages, of course, are human creations, tools we invent and hone to
suit our needs. Simply showing that speakers of different languages think
differently doesn't tell us whether it's language that shapes thought or the
other way around."

Umm.... I disagree. English was around well before I was, and I haven't known
anything but it, so to say that I am effecting the language more than it is
effecting me seem inherently incorrect.

------
hristov
This was interesting except for the pointless Chomsky bashing. The fact that
languages are different does not mean that they do not share a universal
grammar. Languages can be very different and yet still share some underlying
rules.

This article was written on a very different conceptual level than the
universal grammar theories so it is really pointless to even mention those
theories.

~~~
nhebb
Bashing?

 _Dr. Chomsky proposed that there is a universal grammar for all human
languages - essentially, that languages don't really differ from one another
in significant ways. And because languages didn't differ from one another, the
theory went, it made no sense to ask whether linguistic differences led to
differences in thinking._

I don't see that as bashing. The author is just explaining the chain of
reasoning.

~~~
wazoox
It's actually an oversimplified (biased?) view of Chomsky's theories. Chomsky
stated that language acquisition relies upon innate abilities and that all
languages share some basic "structures" (the theory dates back from times when
structuralism was all the rage). The theory has been proven false or
inaccurate in many details, but the driving concept is definitely true.

------
petemc
Heinlein covered this subject in his book 'Stranger in a strange land'

------
moolave
This is actually true. Some languages use passive pronouns to tell a story
while English mostly uses pronouns in the active format. That alone can
transpose a meaning to a whole different level. While English does have a wide
array of lingo to explain ideas and circumstances; languages such as that of
France's can intricately indicate the gender modality of a sentence by the
linking of pronouns and verbs.

Interesting, indeed.

~~~
crux
This is utter gibberish.

~~~
moolave
Kind of odd I got minus points; because some of us speak more than 3
languages. Oh well, lesson learned =)

