

Language Can Give You Super Mind Powers - samdjohnson
http://weblog.noahburney.com/language-scripts/mind-powers-via-language

======
tokenadult
This is a simplistic restatement (on a rather ugly webpage color scheme) of
the strong version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis ("Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis"), which is surely wrong. My native language is General American
English, and I grew up in what was essentially a monolingual immediate family
and neighborhood of English speakers, although both of my parents had had some
instruction in other languages. All of my grandparents were born in the United
States, but three of the four spoke languages other than English at home, and
my two maternal grandparents had all of their schooling in German.

German as a second language was mandatory for all elementary pupils in fourth,
fifth, and sixth grade in my childhood school district, very unusual for the
United States. I had more German in junior high and senior high (in two
different states) and then Russian in senior high. I entered university as a
Russian major and immediately began taking Chinese, switching my major to
Chinese as I grew in delight for that language. I have had formal instruction
as an adult in Modern Standard Chinese (a.k.a. Mandarin), Cantonese, Biblical
Hebrew, Literary Chinese, Attic Greek, Biblical Greek, Japanese (first in the
medium of Chinese, then in English), Taiwanese, and Hakka, and various courses
in linguistics (also in the mediums of both English and Chinese). I have
engaged in self-study of Biblical Aramaic, Mongolian, Spanish, French, Latin,
Hungarian, Malay-Indonesian, Esperanto, Interlingua, etc., etc., etc.

I have to respectfully disagree with the strong version of the linguistic
relativity hypothesis. Within each language grouping, people differ far more
in their personal thinking along the dimension of visual thinker or not, or
auditory thinker or not, than people differ from one another in thought
patterns based on language background. But it is useful to learn another
language and to live in another culture for exposure to new basic assumptions,
and the same applies to learning computer language paradigms. People who
program for a living, or who program just for fun, may like the books

[http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-Pragmatics-
Third-...](http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-Pragmatics-Third-
Edition/dp/0123745144/)

or

[http://www.amazon.com/Essentials-Programming-Languages-
Danie...](http://www.amazon.com/Essentials-Programming-Languages-Daniel-
Friedman/dp/0262062798/)

among other books on programming languages mentioned here on HN as examples of
overviews of different approaches to high-level computer programming languages
facilitating different kinds of programming problem-solving.

The case of human languages is quite a bit different. All human languages are
constrained by the biology of the human brain, and human ear and human vocal
tract (or hands and arms, in the case of sign languages for the deaf), and all
human languages, without exception and even if they are constructed languages,
have ambiguities and illogical features inconsistent with other features of
the language. Many of the faults of Esperanto are very well documented,

<http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/>

and the Lojban promoters I have met online since 1994 have repeatedly
demonstrated lack of logical capacity (at least in our common language of
English) in a manner that puts me off from learning Lojban.

Learning a new cultural perspective by living in a new culture and learning
the predominant language there is a very good idea, and highly educational.
But the incidental features of one language as contrasted with another have no
necessary relationship to how speakers of each language think, or how they can
think.

~~~
httpitis
I'm impressed by your vast experience with different languages! I'm also
curious to learn why one language contrasted with another language have no
necessary relationship to how speakers of each language think. The authors
post seem to prove the opposite:

>An Australian Aboriginal tribe, The Guugu Yimithirr, famously have no words
for left, right, in front of or behind. They use north, east, west, and south
instead. And as a result: they develop an internal compass—always knowing
which way is north, even if you blindfold them and spin them around.

I for sure don't know the direction after being spun blindfolded :)

(edit: grammar)

~~~
klenwell
Heard this story on RadioLab recently. Very interesting but it's hard to see
how language itself was the mechanism behind their unusually sensitive
internal compass.

More like they're acutely sensitive to external cues like their shadow
(position of the sun) and other subtle details of the landscape. Their
language just seems to reinforce that more subliminal attentiveness to these
cues.

I found this to be one of the more interesting points made in the RadioLab
story: while the majority of the limited number of modern languages in use
today do not have this spatial-directional feature, it seems to have been a
feature of a large number of the languages that have ever existed. (Edit: per
Dr. Lera Boroditsky [great website: <http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~lera/>],
it's a third of the world's (current?) languages, though not speakers.)

Which makes sense. Imagine our unsettled, migratory ancestors trying to keep
their bearings without the aid of compasses or standardized maps. One of the
first features you'd probably ask for in your language is a feature that helps
you keep track of your approximate location.

Radiolab link: <http://www.radiolab.org/2011/jan/25/birds-eye-view/>

~~~
jkn
_More like they're acutely sensitive to external cues like their shadow
(position of the sun) and other subtle details of the landscape._

That's confusing how they achieve it (the cues) with why they developed the
ability (need to know for proper communication, maybe for the reason you
mention).

------
spodek
From the post: "Speakin' in a different language changes the way you
think—it's a well attested phenomenon."

A great answer for the perennial questions "why should I learn math or
science." It changes the way you think -- only instead of learning about
culture you learn about patterns and nature.

I got a physics degree before leaving the field. People who didn't take
science ask if I still use it. How do I answer so they'll understand that I
use it in every thought?

~~~
simonsarris
"A different language is a different version of life" - Fellini

I agree completely. And I would certainly agree that learning to think in
Math/Biology/Evolution is just as important as learning to think in French.

Slightly related, one of the reasons I love English so much is that there are
so many words and the creation of new words is not discouraged. There are an
enormous amount of ways to describe how a thing is or how we feel and I think
a certain level of expressiveness is very important for doing good work.

By the same token, knowing the _language_ of say evolution or math - knowing
all the terms and how to describe what's going on - can be just as important
for say visual or program design as knowing the more 'industrial' words.

------
tdr
From the post I'd conclude that language is the by-product of innovation (and
necessity), not the other way around.

There is already an artificial language out there: Esperanto
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto> . From what I remember from language
students, it's pretty much a failure.

Also, do you have any concrete ideas/point of action to do that? Do they work?

~~~
drostie
Esperanto isn't too much of a failure; at least, it's the most successful a
conlang has been -- a couple dozen have learned Elvish or Klingon; a couple
hundred thousand have learned Esperanto.

And yes, there has been a long and somewhat-pointless philosophical struggle
by people who take language as more important, and those who take technology
as more important. I remember discussing this with a Swedish man who insisted
that we thought of everything in language, and I was insisting instead that I
think in _thought_ , which does not necessarily map to language. What finally
seemed to make him uncertain about his own hard-line position was to just say,
"look, I sometimes have the experience that _I don't know how to put my
thoughts in words_. And I at least appear to be monolingual. It sounds like
you're saying that this should be literally impossible. My thoughts are always
_in_ English, how could I ever have problems encoding them _into_ English?"

Stephen Pinker's works have indirectly shown me one useful thing about these
philosophical discussions: it helps to have an idea of Gödel/Turing-
completeness[1] in your philosophy of language. The problem with the radical
biological innatists[2] and the radical linguistic relativists[3] is that it
seems hard to describe how languages evolve under either account. If our
languages and proto-languages are in some sense Gödel-complete and can
describe anything which is describable, then linguistic evolution just
consists of building new language constructs which can more efficiently
describe the new technologies -- and these in turn help us in thinking about
our new technologies and making even newer technologies. You can also get a
good distance in understanding how children acquire language; it's
fundamentally similar to the bootstrapping process which gets a computer from
being offline to running a modern operating system; a small set of built-in
intuitions can construct a model for the entire rest of any logical system.

[1] Gödel's completeness theorem, as distinct from his more famous
_incompleteness_ theorem, says that a couple basic laws of logic are all you
ever need, and any other logical system can be emulated by just constructing
new objects whenever the axioms of the basic system call for them.

[2] something like, "all the concepts which you find meaningful are somehow
indirectly encoded in the genome, your words name just those concepts
meaningful to you."

[3] something like, "if your language doesn't have a word for X, then you just
cannot think about X, full stop."

------
khyryk
Learning anything changes the way you think: chemistry, physics, biology,
astronomy, mathematics, computer science, linguistics, philosophy, literature,
etc. I'd place a language somewhere between a science and something like
astrology as far as usefulness goes.

------
mike_ivanov
"Speakin' in a different language changes the way you think—it's a well
attested phenomenon."

This is wrong. I speak two languages, so I can tell. Learning the second one
didn't change the way I think.

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

what were the languages? they may be very similar.

~~~
mike_ivanov
Russian and English. They are quite different, although definitely more
similar than say Spanish/Vietnamese.

------
seanos
Lojban is a constructed, syntactically unambiguous language based on predicate
logic that was originally conceived to examine the influence of language on
the speaker's thought:

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

~~~
vitno
I spent a little bit of time learning lojban. Although I am in no way
proficient, their small community is an interesting place. the more fluent
ones sometimes mention this phenomenon (from their personal experience).

------
Produce
I've often wondered what it would be like to think in a rational language
(i.e. one free of contradictions). I suspect that logic and reasoning would
improve as a side effect.

~~~
mike_ivanov
How one can _think_ in a language? Isn't language a product of thinking?

~~~
ThePawnBreak
This question is a bit funny, given that it's posted on a site with frequent
arguing over which programming language is better for certain purposes. You
can think in French just like you think in C++ or Python, but I think that
what is different about thinking in two natural languages is that they are
more alike each other than programming languages are.

~~~
mike_ivanov
Well, I don't think in C++ or Python when I'm programming. I think in... well,
that's probably weird -- in algorithms, flows, bubbles, pocket-like thingies
holding values and that stuff. Then I express my thoughts in a programming
language. And yes, some languages are definitely better for certain things
than others.

