
Our Language Affects What We See - ALee
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/our-language-affects-what-we-see/
======
IngoBlechschmid
The thesis of this article was also explored in the beautiful, emotional and
brain-twisting short story /Story of your life/ by Ted Chiang, with a
delicious bit of the principle of least action known from modern classical
mechanics mixed in, in which a linguist's perception of time is fundamentally
changing in the course of her studies of an alian language. Very much
recommended. (This story was the basis for the 2016 movie /Arrival/.)

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rdtsc
I speak multiple languages including Russian. I think I discriminate between
more colors, just because for a particular color shade chances are one of the
languages has different adjectives.

Because I distinguish between light blue and blue, I'd keep calling something
"light blue" even when people in my extended family who don't speak Russian
will start saying "this is green now". Sometimes we have silly arguments about
that which is fun.

Another one I like is the color between yellow and green. Russian has the word
"salatoviy" (салатовый) translated as "salad green". I always see it that way
even when not thinking or speaking Russian and I'd tell people something is
"salad green" and they'd respond with "huh? oh you mean yellow..."

~~~
Timpy
I'm a native English speaker, I was learning Russian while dating a native
Russian speaker. One of the lighthearted arguments we got into was whether a
particular towel was green or blue. Color is a really easy-to-illustrate
example of linguistic axioms differing across languages.

~~~
kingofhdds
It's very believable that language plays a role. However, such arguments
happen between people with the same mother tongue. So those color axioms could
be defined on a community, or even a family level. Within a population
speaking one language (and having a uniform education likely plays a big role)
a particular axiom probably has better chances to become more or less
dominant, but still differences are apparently more complex than language ->
color.

~~~
Timpy
You're totally right, this was a formative anecdotal experience for me but
honestly there's absolutely no control for the experiment. I'm sure I've had
the blue vs. green disagreement with non Russian speakers and discarded it. If
it weren't already topical (I'm sure we were exploring синий versus голубой) I
may not have considered the blue/green towel memorable.

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canjobear
Whorfian effects are generally extremely small. If you speak Russian you might
be able to discriminate certain shades of blue around 50 ms faster than if you
speak English. Maybe language has some low-level effects, but there is no
evidence for anything dramatic.

~~~
jcranmer
The real problem with a lot of these studies is that it's difficult to
distinguish between a _linguistic_ effect versus a _cultural_ effect--does the
language distinguish terms because the linguistic community wishes to do so
frequently, or does the distinct terms within the language cause the
linguistic community to distinguish the terminology? It is my opinion that,
most of the time, if not all, it is the culture driving the language.

I think one interesting example of where the linguistic hints is overridden by
the cultural milieu is in the term ski mask. Picture someone wearing a ski
mask; what is he about to do: ski down the mountain, or rob a bank? I suspect
most people associate the ski mask more readily with a bank robber
(particularly the three-hole variant) than a warm weather gear that you might
use if the windchill is going to be below 0°F. (I personally use the term
balaclava instead of ski mask, though I know there's a large segment of the
population who doesn't know what a balaclava is). In that case, the linguistic
clue of "ski" is less important than the fact that the main context people see
it in is when people are concealing their identities to rob banks in movies.

~~~
jonahx
This quote from the article suggests that mechanism involved is specifically
linguistic:

"""

To determine if words were being automatically (and perhaps unconsciously)
activated, the researchers added the following twist: they asked their Russian
participants to perform a verbal task at the same time as making their
perceptual discrimination. This condition eliminated the reaction time
advantage of contrasting goluboy and siniy. However, a nonverbal task (a
spatial task) could be done at the same time while retaining the goluboy/siniy
advantage. The dual task variants indicated that the task of discriminating
color patches was aided by silent activation of verbal categories.

"""

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olive_branch
I have been mildly obsessed with Linguistics over the past few months (to the
point where I decided to double major in it!).

For a while now I thought it was an area I would probably enjoy learning more
about. What really got me going was actually reading the Russian Blues paper
mentioned in the article, after it was featured on Fermat's Library a few
months back([https://fermatslibrary.com/s/russian-blues-reveal-effects-
of...](https://fermatslibrary.com/s/russian-blues-reveal-effects-of-language-
on-color-descrimination)). It is a super interesting intro paper to
linguistics and the methods they used to evaluate differences between
languages are quite clever.

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newman8r
Sounds related to the Baader-Meinhoff effect, where simply having a word in
your vocabulary makes you much more aware of it in the future, to the point
that it feels odd how often you're hearing it.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader%E2%80%93Meinhof_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baader%E2%80%93Meinhof_effect)

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jointhefuture
Only tangentially related but there's a very popular game with intentionally
genderless characters. The creator does not wish it to be translated to
certain languages in which it's difficult to keep things genderless. Some
language choose a gender for all kinds of nouns so apparently it's hard to
keep things genderless in those languages.

~~~
bookishtempacct
Re: unconventional gender depiction in media, and how language and media
affects thinking

By coincidence, I spent a long time reading various sci-fi books consecutively
which each had nonstandard approaches to gender. One book series (Ancillary
Justice) used she/her pronouns for all characters because the protagonist's
culture did not have the social concept of gender, and in-story the
protagonist mentions the choice of using female pronouns when translating the
story into English. In many Greg Egan books, most of the characters are
uploaded human minds or AIs which exist independently of any specific body or
avatar, so traditional gender norms don't necessarily apply. In some Greg Egan
books, the protagonist and some characters were agendered and used
unconventional pronouns such as ve/ver/vis. In another Greg Egan book, none of
the characters had gender, and male and female pronouns were used seemingly
randomly and often changed for individual characters in text and dialog (I
assume there may have been some grammatical, social, or situational pattern or
intention to it).

These books each had interesting worlds that captivated me (for non-gender-
related reasons). I often visualized scenes in my head and day-dreamed about
the possibilities with the stories' technologies and characters. I quickly
noticed that my mind usually wanted to use the characters' genders as the
first step in picturing how a scene would look and play out. These books
rarely answered the question of characters' genders (at least not in a way
that matched up to my cultural expectations), so I had to break that habit in
order to really get into the stories. I had to really think about the dynamics
between the characters in order to imagine the books' scenes instead of doing
my usual pattern-matching of scenes against preconceptions of how male and
female characters interacted.

I think this shift in thinking stuck with me. The "male" and "female" buckets
in my mind became much less defined. I think I truly internalized that those
mental buckets are just shortcuts that we over-rely on. It became increasingly
obvious to me that neither gender had an exclusive claim to any quality that I
previously considered gendered, including qualities that I was attracted to.
Long story short, I'm now in a same-sex relationship and identify as bisexual.
It didn't occur to me as a possibility before these books. I know some people
will read this and decide this all must mean that I was always wired up to be
bisexual and in denial until now, but I don't think it's that. I believe the
mind is much more plastic and malleable than most people think, but our
culture rarely gives the opportunities to put this plasticity to use.

~~~
bloak
I would really like to see some more research done on Whorfian effects of
gendered language. It certainly seems plausible that a language that forces
speakers to remember and pay attention to every person's gender will affect
how its speakers think, and there are plenty of languages that don't do that,
for comparison, so perhaps there are some interesting experiments that could
be done.

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hevi_jos
Speaking several languages gives you some advantages. You need to automate the
distinction of complex sensory patters to the point in which it become
effortless(after lots of practice).

You create complex neural networks that process this sensory data.

It is incredible how we see an image with text on it and text just pop out
effortless in Mandarin or English, Russian or Spanish.

But IMHO, it is not speaking spoken languages that will give you an edge,
because they all are similar, but knowing the different languages of very
different fields.

For example a Musician speak the language of Music, tones,
frequencies,Harmonics. It works in the same way, after lots of practice it
becomes second nature to understand complex patterns in the world.

There is a language of science, understanding orders of magnitude, entropy,
energy, numbers in general, experiments, errors.After lots of practice, it
becomes second nature to you understanding those patterns.

Someone who works with people or animals like dogs could anticipate what they
are thinking (or what they will think in the future), just by looking at the
body language or speech nuances. After lots of practice, it becomes second
nature.

Programmers learn a computer language, and after years of practice, it becomes
part of who they are. There are Holy wars in programming because people that
master a language feel threatened when this language is attacked, is an attack
on themselves.

------
kaolti
When you learn about kerning you notice it everywhere. Was it not there
before? Of course it was you just never noticed because you didn't know it's a
"thing" that has a word for it.

Can we agree that you only notice what you can put into concepts? and concepts
are words that we made up so it follows that a lack of words to describe
something will generally make it go unnoticed.

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SamReidHughes
When I was a kid, the first times I saw a rainbow was in a cartoon like
Fantasia, or with crayons or other drawings, where it was drawn with stripes.
Then, when I finally saw a real rainbow (as a young child), it looked like a
smooth gradient! But nowadays, I see stripes.

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dpau
There’s an analogous situation with the Chinese color “qing” (青), a complex
and nuanced issue debated by antique collectors and linguists alike.

There was an interesting discussion on reddit a while back in regards to
Chinese colors (including “qing”) and a really nice data visualization project
that attempted to compare Chinese colors with English:
[http://muyueh.com/greenhoney/](http://muyueh.com/greenhoney/)
[https://reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/4i9ko5/visuali...](https://reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/4i9ko5/visualization_of_color_names_in_chinese_and/)

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jasode
A supplemental fyi to the article...

Lera Boroditsky (who is mentioned in the SA article) gave a short TED talk
about language affecting thinking. In addition to the "Russian blue" anecdote,
she also talks about language usage causing heightened perceptions of cardinal
directions.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKK7wGAYP6k](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKK7wGAYP6k)

(It's an interesting talk but I have no idea how other cognitive scientists
judge her research findings.)

~~~
dorchadas
Boroditsky should not be trusted. Her research is highly flawed and has many
issues. And one of her most 'impactful' studies relies on data that has been
'publication forthcoming' since 2002! I'll edit/add another comment with more
detail and links to some linguistic rebuttal when I'm on a computer

~~~
x3tm
Please do. I was also impressed recently by her Ted talk and bookmarked some
of her publications to read later.

~~~
dorchadas
Sure. First off, note that if you read her 2002 work about gender, it often
relies on a(n in) famous "bridge study". In 2002, she mentioned it as
"publication forthcoming"; 17 years later, it still hasn't been published.

But a general good overview of her statements regarding to blame, and why they
fail, can be found on LanguageLog [1]. I'd also recommend searching
LanguageLog, as there's other articles discussing how she often overstates the
conclusions, and how the media takes it ever farther. If you're on Reddit
(can't access it currently on work WiFi), search in /r/linguistics and
/r/badlinguistics to find even more criticisms of it (and other Linguistic
Relativity research).

[1]
[http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2592](http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=2592)

------
AdieuToLogic
My favourite quote related to this topic is one a friend of mine enlightened
me with years ago:

"Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about."[0]

0 - Benjamin Lee Whorf,
[http://izquotes.com/quote/355169](http://izquotes.com/quote/355169)

~~~
dorchadas
It'd be great...if it hadn't been fairly thoroughly discredited, especially
the strong form he seems to be suggesting.

------
LawnboyMax
Related TED talk _How language shapes the way we think_ by Lera Boroditsky:
[https://youtu.be/RKK7wGAYP6k](https://youtu.be/RKK7wGAYP6k)

Difference in color perception ability is mentioned towards the end.

------
godelmachine
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity)

For those seeking a prior introduction

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YouKnowBetter
This is why I have come to the (anecdotal) conclusion that one can only
integrate into a group / society / culture when one learns / masters the
language.

There are many nuances that imply the importance of particular details in the
hidden meaning of the wording. These get easily lost when one does not fully
comprehend the language used.

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cypherg
Seems like re-hashed linguistic-relativism here. Steven Pinker has carefully
debunked sapir-whorf time and time again.

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jcranberry
Pretty good article from PLOS Blogs on how languages affects your sense of
smell:

[https://blogs.plos.org/neuroanthropology/2015/09/10/asifa-
ma...](https://blogs.plos.org/neuroanthropology/2015/09/10/asifa-majid-
language-olfaction/)

------
ohduran
Shameless plug, but the book 'Through the Language Glass', by Guy Deutscher
covers this and more about language and thought in a very entertaining way.
Check out the book, or find my notes about it here: alvaroduran.me/through-
the-language-glass

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Causality1
The researches seriously acted like it was a surprise that discrimination
between light blue and dark blue is faster than between two shades of light
blue or two shades of dark blue.

~~~
limbicsystem
No. They were surprised that the exact same light/dark blue discrimination was
faster for Russian speakers.

------
amelius
I guess a similar thing holds for people who program in functional programming
languages versus imperative languages.

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DyslexicAtheist
despite my love for languages I find that the only advantage it gives me is a)
social b) ability to digest more information. What is missing is the ability
to make deep sense of it. Recently read some of Heidegger's early work (he
seems to have created his own language just to say what he wanted to say) and
I think his concept of _Enframing_ [1] has something to do with it:

 _> Heidegger also referred to the metaphysical manner of thinking in our age
as a "one-track thinking," a term which he explicitly associated with
technology. (27) In a similar spirit, he called it a "one-sided thinking" that
tends towards a "one-sided uniform view" in which "[everything] is leveled to
one level," and "[our] minds hold views on all and everything, and view all
things in the same way." (28) There is, to be sure, a kind of language that,
as the expression of this form of thinking, is itself one-track and one-sided.
Heidegger finds one "symptom" of the growing power of the technological form
of thinking in our increased use of designations consisting of abbreviations
of words or combinations of their initials. (29) It is thus a technological
form of language in the sense that it heralds that order in which everything
is reduced to the univocity of concepts and precise specifications.

Heidegger labels such interpretations "technological" while remarking that
they are a given only "insofar as technology is itself understood as a means
and everything is conceived only according to this respect." (30) If our way
of thinking is one that values only that which is immediately useful, then
language is only conceived and appreciated from this perspective of its
usefulness for us. More importantly, this suggests it is the essence of
technology as Enframing that somehow determines what he calls the
"transformation of language into mere information." (31)_

... and ...

 _> It is within Enframing, then, that "speaking turns into information."
Heidegger also spoke of the "language machine" [Sprachmaschine] as "one manner
in which modern technology controls the mode and the world of language as
such." (33) We can infer that the language machine is one crucial way in which
this language of Enframing speaks. (34) With the construction of what
Heidegger called electronic brains, calculating, thinking and translating
machines, the language machine is made possible insofar as their activities
take place in the element of language. The term "language machine" should not
be taken as if Heidegger were merely taking about calculators and computers.
He referred to machine technology itself as "the most visible outgrowth of the
essence of modern technology," (35) and he insisted that the fact ours was the
age of the machine was due to the fact it is the technological age, and not
vice versa. (36) More importantly, Enframing itself is not anything
technological in the sense of mechanical parts and their assembly. Thus, the
language of Enframing cannot itself be reduced to anything technological in
this narrow sense. Moreover, Heidegger explicitly characterized the language
machine as the "technical complex of calculating and translating machines."
(37) He also distinguished it from what he called the "speaking machine" or
recording apparatus. The distinction is important because he does not see the
latter as "intruding into the speaking of language itself." The language
machine, on the other hand, does intrude by regulating and adjusting through
its mechanical energies and functions how we can use language. (38)_

[1]
[https://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Cont/ContGreg.htm](https://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Cont/ContGreg.htm)

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whatshisface
Everyone says that language shapes your thinking, but there isn't a single
fundamental discovery in physics that even had words for it beforehand.
Thought is far enough ahead of language for it to be hard for language to have
any influence on it, unless you're talking about these studies which aren't
really thought.

~~~
alboy
Developing an understanding of quantum mechanics landed Heisenberg the Nobel
prize, whereas nowadays thousands of students manage to work through their
textbooks just fine. Having information expressed in human language, a form
highly optimized for our understanding, is a huge step down from pulling
yourself by your bootstraps outside of any familiar conceptual framework.

~~~
whatshisface
I would argue that quantum mechanics is actually not expressed in textbooks.
Instead, they have exercises and sufficient hints. Try learning QM without
doing any of the exercises and you will see what I mean. On the contrary, I
bet you could learn QM just fine with just a few definitions and a series of
well-designed problems.

~~~
alboy
"Starting with definitions" is the opposite of the language-less, intuitive
way of understanding something. It means precisely that one has been provided
with an effective formal language for the domain. The fact that you rederive
some minor parts surely helps, but students don't routinely rediscover QM from
scratch.

------
austincheney
* Linguistic Determinism - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_determinism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_determinism)

* Neural Darwinism - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_Darwinism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_Darwinism)

* Eskimo words for snow - [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow)

It has been largely established that language structures shape how the brain
organizes cognitive reasoning, which in turn shapes the brain and vise versa.

It is less well established that language shapes the data processing of the 5
senses. This is largely due to the trouble of defining what is a distinctive
_word_ when comparing languages and relating the resulting vocabulary
distinctions to perceptual distinctions in an objective way.

~~~
enriquto
If anything, your link to "exkimo words for snow" seems to mostly disprove
what you are stating in your message.

~~~
austincheney
How so?

~~~
enriquto
It explains that inuit languages do not actually have more words for snow than
other languages. The other link explains that linguistic determinism is a
superseded theory that can not be used to accurately model language. The "X
words for snow" is even a sort of running joke as the cliché example of
crackpot theory among linguists (see snowclone).

~~~
bloak
It's a cliché among journalists rather than a theory among linguists.

According to that Wikipedia article, it's the Sami languages that have lots of
words for snow, though it all critically depends on what you mean by "word",
"snow", "language", "have", ... The question "How many words for snow does
language X have?" is impossible to answer for many different reasons.

~~~
toolslive
You're right: the answer for Dutch or German would be 'infinite' because these
languages allow you to compose (new) words on the fly, using other nouns as
prefix. The first example I came up with after 0.05s of thought was
"autosneeuw" (car snow) which could mean the snow you find on top of a car.

