

The limits of my language are the limits of my world (2011) - akbarnama
https://geopolicraticus.wordpress.com/2011/06/03/the-limits-of-my-language-are-the-limits-of-my-world/

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falcolas
This is amusing to me, because it nicely encapsulates some recent thoughts.
Note: This is in its application to coding, not my life in general.

I've spent quite a bit of time recently branching out into new programming
languages, writing significant works in each one. And each time I do so, I
come back to my day job and realize just how limiting it is to only work in
one "blessed" language. There are things which are can be eloquently expressed
in Rust or Haskell which do not translate nicely over to Python. Sometimes I
can do in a single expression what it would take an entire module of confusing
metaprogramming to achieve in Python!

Sadly, that street runs both ways. Some of these new languages want to be so
safe that they hobble you down with the chains of explicit types and memory
protection; making you write pages of boilerplate to do some of the simplest
things.

It's true, when writing code, your world is limited by your language. The flip
side of that is also true: by choosing a language, you define the world in
which you live.

~~~
sparkie
We write with lots of DULs (Domain unspecific languages) in our "blessed"
language of Unix, which even Windows speaks a dialect of. The unix language is
the one which speaks of "files" and "processes", with a grammar known as "the
shell", which is what we use to glue together our DULs (which happen to be
files and processes). The reason we need "metaprogramming" in the first place
is because there's this artificial boundary called "runtime" where all code
must be put into a file, because once you warp the file into a process, it's
too late to change the code. Fortunately, some clever people have found a way
around this, by making processes which can read other files and simulate the
operating system.

When writing code, your world is limited by your operating system too. Heck,
we're even limited by the hardware, which hasn't changed conceptually since it
was created in the 1940s. We're all under the spell of "instructions to the
beat of a clock".

------
mpweiher
Sounds like the strong Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis[1]. When I studied linguistics,
back in the 90ies, it was pretty discredited with strong evidence against.

"The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the theory that an individual's thoughts and
actions are determined by the language or languages that individual speaks.
The strong version of the hypothesis states that all human thoughts and
actions are bound by the restraints of language, and is generally less
accepted than the weaker version, which says that language only somewhat
shapes our thinking and behavior." [2]

[1]
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity)

[2] [http://linguistlist.org/ask-ling/sapir.cfm](http://linguistlist.org/ask-
ling/sapir.cfm)

~~~
Bronislaw
I think Wittgenstein's idea maybe more broadly applicable, meaning it isn't
limited to natural languages like the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The author
states: "One way to construe this Wittgensteinism very broadly would be to
think of it as the limits of my idiom are the limits of my world, with “idiom”
construed broadly to include any way of talking about the world, and not
merely a particular language." So e.g. any kind of formal mathematics or
anything that we can somehow represent syntactically and which we can
understand (semantics) could be seen as an idiom.

------
edtechdev
Related to this, there was that recent article about a classical
interpretation of the famous double-slit experiment (pilot wave theory) that
helps bring quantum physics back closer to more intuitive descriptions
[http://www.wired.com/2014/06/the-new-quantum-
reality](http://www.wired.com/2014/06/the-new-quantum-reality)

And this can help for pedagogical purposes, too. Another example is
infinitesimals in calculus, which were dismissed in favor of Weierstrass's
epsilon-delta definitions over a hundred years ago, but found to be more
understandable to students in more recent studies:
[http://academic.brcc.edu/johnson/Projects/Calculus%20with%20...](http://academic.brcc.edu/johnson/Projects/Calculus%20with%20Infinitesimals/Calculus%20with%20Infinitesimals.html)

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mc32
What does this say about the Chinese language, then? Chinese has approx 10,000
words in regular usage. Does the apparent low word count have an impact on
thinking? It would appear to me that the relatively low word count
(ideographs) has not impeded Chinese from thinking about the world around them
in a negative way...

~~~
e3xu
In practice, the Chinese language typically represents concepts in 2 or 4
ideograph segments. Not every possible combination is in regular usage, but
the number of potential linguistic "words" is closer in order of magnitude to
the 10000 choose 2 binomial coefficient, i.e. 49995000.

~~~
mc32
So basically when they don't have a word for a new concept they devise a new
one made of existing radical+ideograph+ideograph.

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PaulHoule
The saphir-worph hypothesis is thoroughly discredited, i.e. psychophysics
shows that your ability to discriminate colors does not depend on the words
you use for them. Language is dynamic and adjusts to reality even if people
use words as weapons (ex. Illegal aliens)

As for interpretations of quantum mechanics that is a topic for 1970s popular
books by drugged out authors and for the marginal fringe of physics journals.

~~~
djokkataja
The hypothesis as a whole is not thoroughly discredited; color is an extremely
specific case: "The main strand of domain centered research has been the
research on color terminology, although this domain according to Lucy and
admitted by color terminology researchers such as Paul Kay, is not optimal for
studying linguistic relativity, because color perception, unlike other
semantic domains, is known to be hard wired into the neural system and as such
subject to more universal restrictions than other semantic domains."[1]

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity#Empirica...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity#Empirical_research)

------
singingfish
(Wittgenstein)++

