How the language you speak changes your view of the world

https://agenda.weforum.org/2015/04/how-the-language-you-speak-changes-your-view-of-the-world/

by wpietri • 11 years ago

83 84 11 years ago

agenda.weforum.org

wpietri• 11 years ago

What surprises me about this article is not that worldviews change, but how quickly these experimenters got it to happen. "When we surprised subjects by switching the language of the distracting numbers halfway through the experiment, the subjects’ focus on goals versus process switched right along with it."

I would have expected it was a much slower process. It makes me wonder if we could observe similar effects in multilanguage code bases.

hkarthik• 11 years ago

I took one semester of French in college after 4 years of Spanish in high school.

The most intriguing parts for me were around numbers and counting. For example, the number 80 is "quatre-vingts", which literally means 4 x 20.

I thought maybe this gave French youth an edge with arithmetic, and this slight edge might translate to strong mathematics foundations later in life. I have heard there is a strong emphasis on mathematics in their school curriculums, so maybe there is some correlation there.

TillE• 11 years ago

French numbers are really weird and inconsistent. Swiss French is a little more sensible, so you have for example "septante" for 70 rather than "soixante-dix" (60 + 10).

Hobotron1• 11 years ago

23 auf Deutsch is dreiundzwanzig or "three and twenty-many"

Fun stuff.

Jayd20142• 11 years ago

Fun fact: Its the same in Arabic. Numbers are read from right to left.

cletus• 11 years ago

English is really consistent here. 4321 is four thousand three hundred and twenty one. Probably the biggest inconsistency in English are the numbers 11 to 19.

Many European languages are not. Often with numbers between 11 and 99 are a weird special case. German puts the single digit first. As another poster mentioned 23 is "dreiundzwanzig" (literally "3 and 20"). French is worse where 97 is "quatre-vingts dix-sept" (literally "4 20s 10 7").

These are just the last remnants of a pre-decimal ("vigesimal" specifically) counting system.

I don't really see how weird rule exclusions on certain numbers would give anyone an advantage in math, particularly because even though the word means "4 20s" when you learn it, it's just a word and it may well just lead to questions like "why isn't 40 2 20s?" There is a cognitive cost with exclusions.

I remember reading a study once about how verbs became regular in English. There was a mathematical relationship between how often the word was used and how quickly it became regular. The less used, the quicker it happened.

This is why "to be" is irregular (as its the most common verb) whereas most other verbs (with <100 exclusions) follow a simple pattern.

It's probably the same with numbers. The numbers less than 100 are used far more often so their irregularity is preserved far longer than the less common numbers above 100.

lordnacho2• 11 years ago

But what is causing the irregularity? Is there any benefit to conjugating "to be" differently to everything else?

Dewie3• 11 years ago

I thought maybe this gave French youth an edge with arithmetic, and this slight edge might translate to strong mathematics foundations later in life.

As opposed to regularly "doing the arithmetic" 8 x 10?

lisper• 11 years ago

If you really want to expand your linguistic horizons, study sign language. Sign language is fundamentally different than spoken or written languages. It doesn't just substitute gestures for phonemes or written tokens. Its grammar (and it does have one) is three-dimensional. It also opens you up to the fascinating world of deaf culture, since teaching sign is one of the most popular ways for deaf people to earn extra money.

spiritplumber• 11 years ago

One interesting thing as of late is that there are some deaf people who are against ear implants because, as it solves deafness, it weakens deaf culture.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2013/11/17/1256259/-The-Cochle...

jallmann• 11 years ago

That article isn't really balanced, and is really one person's (rather uninformed) opinion.

The cochlear implant debate is a bit more nuanced than that, and it is centered around children. One argument is that, often, the child may not be given a choice whether to be implanted. There are long-term considerations: the CI destroys any residual hearing and the capability for hearing aids to work so you can't "roll back" after the surgery, you can't do MRIs ever again, you are supposed to avoid high pressure/high impact activities (scuba diving, tackle football, etc) -- although many deaf people with CIs that disregard this advice. It's also a big commitment that requires years of auditory training to master, especially if you received the implant after the language development phase of childhood -- maybe 5 or 6 years of age.

It does seem the CI's effectiveness is inversely proportional to age of implantation, especially if you are going from zero hearing (with hearing aids) to a CI overnight. The younger you are, your brain has a chance to develop into the CI as it would with normal ears, and those kids are often functionally hearing. Which is totally fine with me, by the way.

Source: Deaf, use sign language, have a CI, although I don't wear it anymore. Me and my friends with CIs are no less a part of deaf culture because of it.

msutherl• 11 years ago

Praying that nobody mentions the Sapir-Whorf s/Hypothesis/(Hoax|Strawman)

blowski• 11 years ago

Well given that you _have_ mentioned it, why don't you want anyone else to mention it? It's obviously relevant.

kazinator• 11 years ago

If you know several different languages, the advantage is not that your view is enhanced, but rather you are more aware of the false contributions of language to thought; you are more aware that some pattern of thinking is just really some linguistic convention and not real semantics.

For instance, you are more likely to spot someone's equivocation: confusing multiple meanings of some term in the same argument. Right away you realize: "Doh, in this other language I know, those two concepts are not even the same word; what he's saying doesn't translate."

A_COMPUTER• 11 years ago

I was never that good of a Japanese speaker so someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but to me it felt like there was a lot more ambiguity about things in Japanese than in English. And I definitely found when I used it for long periods of time, even my way of perceiving the world around me changed, in a way that seemed closer to how the Japanese I knew perceived it. I never knew if this was a cause or an effect. And I _definitely_ experienced, as you say, knowing that there was no way to translate something to English without losing its Japanese "feeling".

timewilltell• 11 years ago

I can relate to this by my experience with Romance languages like Spanish and Italian as they employ the subjunctive mode extensively in their semantics and I'd find myself over time this subjunctive mode/mood creeping into my psyche as I master these langs but lucky me this subjectively negative doubt feeling dissipates as long as I switch back to English* or my native language.

PS: The English language employs subjunctives as well albeit to way lesser degree. Constructs like "He said he would come around this time" is subjunctive in nature.

Htsthbjig7• 11 years ago

There are very few differences between German and English, but there are tons of difference between European languages and Asian ones.

I studied in Korea, I was specially interested in Hangul, and found Japanese extremely similar to Korean in the cultural side of things.

For example, there is a iconic concept in the US of "bad guy", "rebel against the world". It simply does not exist in Korea, or in Japan by the way. You can't talk about "bad guys"to them, because it does not exist in their world.

The same happens with different levels of respect and politeness in Japan, it does not match anything the Western world has.

Words are like icons or shortcuts for something the culture has.

The intimate relationships, the families, the social contracts,violence, the way of working... it is simply another world of thinking.

amirouche2• 11 years ago

I would rather say doesn't translate as is, from my experience in French, English and Amazigh languages (order or proheficiency). It very rare to miss a word except specific things like the famous manyfolds words used by iniuits to describe ice.

edit: added language I know

hyperpallium• 11 years ago

\{tangent on semantics} At first, reading your comment, I pictured a graph of English words and a graph of Japanese words. If these relationships between words define them, then differences in the graphs explains differences in meaning.

But, though it would be neater for language to be defined within itself, words are references to concepts. Hence, it may be that it's not so much that the node doesn't exist in the other graph, but that the referent doesn't exist. It's one graph (words) relating to another graph (concepts).

We could describe a referent in English, but if it is a complex object with complex relations to other objects, this couldn't be brief; and even if we coined a neologism for it, that new word and concept wouldn't be familiar and integrated into our knowledge graph (and, we wouldn't have experienced it anyway, only read of it).

Possibly, English-speaking expats in Japan could develop slang for those concepts... which would only make sense to them. So they'd probably just use the Japanese words.

westoncb3• 11 years ago

Here's the kind of thing to expect from the article:

"Research with second language users shows a relationship between linguistic proficiency in such grammatical constructions and the frequency with which speakers mention the goals of events."

—where 'mentioning goals of events' means using the grammatical constructions these people are more proficient with. So, people who are more proficient with X use X more...

But, they're really trying to push their perspective, saying things like:

"The worldview assumed by German speakers is A HOLISTIC ONE – they tend to look at the event as a whole – whereas English speakers tend to zoom in on the event and focus only on the action."

The capital letters are mine, referring to their hypertext connecting to this paper: http://www.degruyter.com/view/j/ling.2012.50.issue-4/ling-20...

—whose abstract makes it clear how much they're stretching it by saying "the worldview assumed by German speakers is a holistic one," and then following up with a section titled "Switch languages, change perspective"

edit: typo

amirouche2• 11 years ago

They don't say what do bilinguals for the same exercice.

julianpye• 11 years ago

I was raised bilingual in German and English, growing up in Germany. For me both languages are very different and to this day I prefer English when I want to talk about ideas and areas where I explore while talking and I use German when I need to be precise. I could never pitch in German and really don't like talking about my projects in German, since everything needs to be exact and committed to.

radicalbyte2• 11 years ago

English is my first language, I learnt Dutch (I'm fluent) as an adult. I have the same experience as you: English is extremely context sensitive, it's for "invention" - it's a very natural language.

Dutch is more precise; there's less ambiguity. You have to think a little more before you speak (thanks to the differing subject-object-verb order). I've become a better engineer since learning it.

We're raising our kids bilingual because the benefits are just so clear; and I figure that if they get English/Dutch for free then German is very cheap so they can learn an east-asian language too..

fnord123• 11 years ago

Dutch is more precise; there's less ambiguity.

Really? I would suggest that Dutch is plenty of ambiguity as you can omit a lot. e.g. "Ik moet naar de tandarts [gaan/rijden/fietsen/lopen/bellen/kijken/wijzen/zoeken]" ("I must [?] to the dentist").

lordnacho2• 11 years ago

Isn't this called the Sapir-Worf hypothesis?

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

I'm not sure I can feel it personally. I suppose as with many polyglots, I tend to speak different languages in specific contexts. So it's hard to compare, which I guess is why these researchers are setting up specific situations to do this.

For instance, I only really know science/business words/ideas in English. I couldn't do a degree in my first language. And it's awkward to talk business in English with my family.

westoncb3• 11 years ago

This is one of a long line of people arguing for or against what's essentially Sapir-Worf—people have been strongly divided on it for a long time. I'm surprised to see that something like this article is getting attention, though. I figured that at this late date you'd have to say something much more compelling/nuanced to be considered as adding to the subject.

learnstats2• 11 years ago

Where I've seen this discussed, most people seem to agree with you - that they don't personally feel any difference.

However, I personally feel a huge difference in how I perceive the world - in the three-ish languages I know, but I also feel some differences in regional variations of British English.

It's for this reason I feel fascinated by language and saddened that people seem to be converging on English as a lingua franca.

Jedd• 11 years ago

This was my first thought, and I was surprised they didn't mention it - perhaps simply because it's allegedly a controversial subject. Regards the controversy - as with many others unburdened by formal training in the area, much of Sapir-Worf 'makes sense to me'.

One area that I don't see discussed so much is variations of fluency within a language, and how that shapes the way a person can internally model, and obviously describe and influence to others, both physical objects as well as more nebulous constructs. Again, anecdotally, I've seen a strong correlation between skills with former and latter, though obviously it's not a simple, one-way, causal relationship.

I vaguely recall an HN story last year, about a school in NY (US), emphasising rigously expanding the students' vocabulary & language skills based on this premise. Might have been the University Prep in Brooklyn, but what I can find of that one now seem to emphasis maths & physics above English.

Htsthbjig7• 11 years ago

I see this a lot in China.

The monolingual people in China that only speak different versions of Chinese have serious difficulty with abstract ideas and concepts because of their language.

Chinese is so outdated and obsolete in so many ways. It has not evolved, yes you could understand today a 4.000 year old writing but at what cost?

It is a socking experience, because as a European I take evolution in languages for granted.

In some ways, Europeans took the Steve Jobs approach of using new tech, outdating the old, even in language, like Carmack saying f&ck you if you wanted to play his games with only a CPU, and then forcing you to buy newer and newer GPUs.

It is hard to read without training things written even 200-400 years ago, but we have powers that Chinese don't have, like using tones for emotions(we used tones for the language 4.000 years ago), flexibility, abstractions.

But you can only see those if you speak multiple languages.

Jimmy3• 11 years ago

Chinese is so outdated and obsolete in so many ways.

This is really interesting. Could you expand on this? Do you find it to be something with the vocabulary, the grammar? What about the writing system? I've always wondered how the Chinese language writes loan words (Japanese handles this by having a system of phonetic spelling that's used alongside traditional Chinese characters).

And before anyone thinks it's absurd that one language could be better at expressing abstract ideas than others, imagine the limit case: a language with only one word. Pretty useless, right? Obviously no natural language is that limited, but that doesn't mean that a range of variation can't exist. It's an empirical matter whether it does.

SilasX• 11 years ago

That hypothetical language wouldn't be more abstract so much as vague and context-dependent which isn't the same thing.

When a language better handles abstraction, that means it's better at expressing common elements across a variety of domains without having to refer to particulars. For example, being able to talk about a relation between some X and Y without having to keep inflecting based on whether X means animals or houses.

One abstraction-helping construction in English is being able to go from "that thing is red" to the concept of redness.

I don't know if English is better or worse at this than other languages except that I remember anecdotes about it being harder to express sentences with unusual referents in Japanese eg "am I wearing the jacket?" vs "are you wearing the jacket.

Htsthbjig7• 11 years ago

"Do you find it to be something with the vocabulary, the grammar? What about the writing system?"

All the above. In everything. There are no tenses in Mandarin for example. The writing system is hell. Most Chinese have different levels of analphabetism because it has so many words.

"I've always wondered how the Chinese language writes loan words"

They have different transcription methods for that. They standardized in Pinyin: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pinyin

It is not for loan words, but THEIR OWN ones. They need this in order to know how something sounds!!. Most of them use memory, but you study pinyin if you are educated.

In fact, the same Chinese character sounds different in different Chinese languages, and even in the same language in different parts of the country!.

getsat• 11 years ago

Could you expand on this?

Chinese is objectively quite bad in terms of language design. It's elaborated on extensively in this rather lengthy article: http://pinyin.info/readings/texts/moser.html

nopinsight2• 11 years ago

Part of your comment may be partially true, but the truth is likely much deeper and subtler. I'd say much of it is a bit Western bias. Abstractions come in different flavors and are tied to worldview. Most people in the West (except learners of Asian traditions) also have problems understanding concepts like Tao, Buddhism's Nirvana, Confucius' filial piety even when they know the words for them. A similar thing may happen in China which compelled the comment of yours.

(My native language is Thai, which is somewhat related to Chinese, and both share many characteristics. I also know a bit of Chinese and Japanese. I think a lot about languages in my job, NLU research)

English might have an advantage representing Western-style abstraction, not because of its inherent linguistic nature, but the culture surrounding its uses. China, Thailand, and many other countries in Asia just started its industrialization recently and one can argue that they have not gone through a European-style Enlightenment. Many of the Western abstract concepts in Chinese and Thai are imported, rather than invented, and thus have shallower roots and limited penetration in societies. Less educated and traditionally educated people might not wholly understand them even if they have heard them mentioned in passing in a documentary or foreign news. Neologisms are invented to represent these concepts, often fairly easily since compound words are in common use in both; but for most people to deeply understand them is a different issue.

So my question is what groups of monolingual population in China do you interact with and draw conclusions from? If they are not the new elites who had much education in Western tradition and worldview, their issues with Western abstract concepts may not really be of linguistic nature, but related to worldview.

Note on representing emotions: Thai and Chinese use tones for meaning, but they have particle words for emotions and social cues. These are more expressive in writing compared to English. Spoken voice usually comes with emotional tones (pitch and loudness vary in these languages too) so people can almost always tell the emotions if the speaker does not hide them. So I disagree with your point about emotional expressiveness.

Htsthbjig7• 11 years ago

"Westerners also have problems understanding Eastern concepts like Tao, Buddhism's Nirvana, Confucius' filial piety even when they know the words for them."

Exactly. I'm talking about people that only speak one language, and had not been exposed to different worldviews.

But you talk about Confucious, Tao or Buddhism... How many years those concepts have? Where are Asian Kant, Ortega or Nietzsche.

In China there is another issue and is that the power bureaucracy simply killed their Kants, as they were dangerous for population control, but that is another issue.

My native languages are Spanish,then learned German and French. But French is very similar to Spanish, German very similar to English, and languages become easier the more you speak.

You go to England, you see Churches, not very different from Spanish or French ones.

In Asia there is another core set of values, but there is a world of difference between China and India.

I don't speak Thai, but I had traveled to Thailand and in my view they have very little in common in the way of thinking and expression. In my view Thailand is more similar to India than China.

This is a highly political issue, it is like saying to Catalan nationalist they are Spanish, because even when they are very similar, they don't want to.

eva19842• 11 years ago

I am curious about what abstract idea referred here exactly, and your level of fluency of your Chinese to convey such abstract idea to the monolingual Chinese audience.

I heard a lot on the internet about how Chinese as a language hinder the modernization of the country itself, however, every time there is only proposition without evidence to back it up.

tokenadult• 11 years ago

I have to strenuously disagree with your description of China (a country I have visited, and a country where many of my friends grew up) and of Chinese (a language I have been speaking since 1975). No, no, no, and no, much of what you say is just flat wrong and it makes me wonder how closely you are observing the environment you live in.

First of all, many people in China that only speak different versions of Chinese are not best described as "monolingual," because they know two languages (Modern Standard Chinese and whatever the local Sinitic language, that is "Chinese dialect is) and have to grapple with language differences in their everyday lives. Southern Min and Mandarin (the two Sinitic languages I speak best, with plenty of monololingual native speakers, but with plenty of bilingual speakers of both) are as different from each other as English is from German or as French is from Spanish. They are cognate languages, yes, but they express many of the same ideas differently both as to vocabulary and as to grammar. I also speak some Cantonese, and I can give an example of language differences between Cantonese and Modern Standard Chinese (Mandarin). Many more examples are possible. How you might write the conversation

"Does he know how to speak Mandarin?

"No, he doesn't."

他會說普通話嗎？

他不會。

in Modern Standard Chinese characters contrasts with how you would write

"Does he know how to speak Cantonese?

"No, he doesn't."

佢識唔識講廣東話？

佢唔識。

in the Chinese characters used to write Cantonese. As will readily appear even to readers who don't know Chinese characters, many more words than "Mandarin" and "Cantonese" differ between those sentences in Chinese characters.

You write, Chinese is so outdated and obsolete in so many ways. It has not evolved, yes you could understand today a 4.000 year old writing but at what cost?

You may have heard some Chinese person say to you that Chinese writing has changed so little that today's literate Chinese people can read 4,000-year-old writing, but there are two problems with that statement. First of all, writing in Chinese is only about 3,000 years old. (Writing originated first in the ancient Fertile Crescent and in Egypt, and only later in China, independently.) Nobody can read 4,000-year-old writings in Chinese, because there aren't any to read. Second, anyone who can read ancient writings in Chinese can read them (as I can) because they have specifically studied the differing vocabulary (see above) and differing grammar (see above) of ancient Chinese written in Chinese characters. Yes, Westerners can learn Latin as a language for reading old books and inscriptions on monuments, and very little has changed about the shape of letters of the Roman alphabet (what I'm typing right now) in a long time. But that doesn't mean that languages of the West that use the Roman alphabet don't experience linguistic change. In fact, ALL languages everywhere experience linguistic change, whether the speakers of those languages admit it or not.

we have powers that Chinese don't have, like using tones for emotions

The statement here seems to say that Chinese doesn't use sentence intonation to indicate the speaker's mood or tone. I can assure that it does, and I wonder how well someone can speak Chinese who has never noticed that.

Htsthbjig7• 11 years ago

Yeah. I agree in most of what you say.

I have only lived in China for 5 years, and most of what I know from China is deeply limited as is such a big country. In particular I have only lived in big cities, not in deep China.

I travel frequently there and could talk to people and read most of the common symbols, but I am not native.

About the 4000 years old, it is a lapsus thinking on Egipt, and then the voice recognition system repeating it. I wanted to express my opinion fast without thinking much about it so I did not spend too much on HN, and it was a big error as at the end I have to spend a lot of time just clearing some of my sloppy writing.

"The statement here seems to say that Chinese doesn't use sentence intonation to indicate the speaker's mood or tone."

True. I did not intended to say that but my intent was talking about the range of emotion in tone, putting for example Italian as a 10 of expression in tones, Chinese is a 3, because of the necessity of using tones for language itself.

In fact this is one of the big issues for me expressing in Mandaring.

Frqy3• 11 years ago

I am a native English speaker, and only a beginner learner of Mandarin (early primary level plus a set of technical words related to my work).

Are you sure you are not conflating monolingual Chinese speakers with the rural or less educated Chinese demographic? Going purely from my own experience of learning the language and interacting with educated Chinese in the major cities, both the language and the people are perfectly capable of abstract ideas and concepts. It is also uncommon to find an educated yet monolingual Chinese speaker.

In fact, there are studies that the tonal nature of the spoken language as well the complex structure of the written characters improve the ability to learn abstract concepts such as occur in mathematics[0].

Finally, regarding classical versus modern written Chinese, while someone who is fluent in modern Chinese can read the individual characters of classic Chinese, unless they have studied it seperately, they will be unable to make much sense of the sentences. Classical Chinese is extremely concise and relies much more on single character words, rather than the multi-character words used in modern Chinese. A lot of the characters in classical Chinese also take on archaic meanings no longer actively associated with that character.

[0] http://languageboat.com/2013/09/07/scientists-claim-learning...

contingencies• 11 years ago

monolingual people in China

Arguably most people understand at least a local dialect, Mandarin and some Cantonese from pop songs. All young people study English also, and many are from cultural groups with additional languages.

serious difficulty with abstract ideas and concepts...

Where did you get that idea? China is one of the world's foremost centers of mathematics, which is pure abstraction.

...because of their language.

Where did you get that idea? Classical Chinese in particular is widely lauded as a perfect language of poetry and thus abstraction.

As a 15 year China veteran who translates classical Chinese, I can't help but feel you have no idea what you are talking about and have come to a negative perspective on the society around you. There are some difficulties in education in China, but the communist period had far more to do with that than Sapir-Whorf. Maybe you need a holiday.

fit2rule2• 11 years ago

I am raising my sons to be multi-lingual (German and English) and it is a wonderful thing indeed to see the mind expansion that occurs on your average code-switch .. especially in very young minds. "Daddy, the erdapfel sind too hot!", and "Das Feur makes me vv-aaaarmm!!" .. ;) Much amusement in such moments.

And socially, I think it sets the kids up a bit as well, because they are quite acclimated to the strange looks from strange people when you switch fluidly, between the languages. There is a huge caché, and the boys seem to be becoming aware of how to spend it.

YAYERKA• 11 years ago

Thanks for your comment. It brings up positive nostalgic memories for me. I grew up speaking, reading and writing three different languages, as well as constantly hearing another being yelled through the phone.

Not sure about the article; personally it's helped me be able to adapt quickly in lots of foreign places and realize that with a little time and enough "banging your head against a desk" anything can be understood (even Cyrillic alphabets).

Jayd20142• 11 years ago

Same here. Fluent in 4 languages. For me the best advantage is not learning just the language, but the whole culture. If you can't laugh to comedy standup stars and understand the culture of other people, it really doesn't help much if you are fluent in one language or more. Languages also promote a more liberal worldview and more tolerance for others.

Soarez• 11 years ago

Steven Pinker has dispelled this notion in his book The Language Instinct.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Language_Instinct

rustynails• 11 years ago

That book makes sense, to a degree. Language does not tell us how to think, but it can constrain what we say. I find that our words reflect what we think, particularly when it comes to our prejudices.

Common indicators are language that is inclusive or exclusive (we/us/I Cs them/they), notions of gender (eg. Feminism indicates a prejudice toward one gender). I have found that when someone has a biased mindset (particularly an exclusive one) and you point out their mindset through their use of language, most moderate people start to think differently and as such, their language changes.

However, I find that emotive people and political correctness break this pattern. This parallels the "faith" gambit - logic never enters the equation.

sukilot3• 11 years ago

The Language Instinct sets up a straw man and then dispels that.

SimpleMinds2• 11 years ago

A little bit related to article, as I'm not bilingual but just speaking English as another language and this come up after conversation with friend (another not native English speaker). I learned my English mostly thanks to computers and playing games, including classical RPGs.

I started to read Malazan Book of the Fallen[0], a very dark and heavy fantasy series. I started in English, then switched to my native language, now to have maximum fun from it (as I like it a lot), I read one book in native and then reread in English.

What I've noticed is that reading in my native language makes me feel much more connected to characters, I see the whole relations between persons more vividly and intensively. Then rereading in English, the same characters (which I already know and like!) feels much more distant and abstract.

But :)

All the fantasy scenes plays much better in my head in English than in my language. For some reasons sentences like "blood dripping from sword", "screams of souls", "massive", "darkness", "spread his wings" etc instantly trigger the feeling of magnificent and out-of-this-world scale of experiences. Even though translation is top-notch, for those parts I prefer the English version.

Very interesting experience.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malazan_Book_of_the_Fallen

johnchristopher• 11 years ago

What about fantasy in your native language ? How does it feel ?

I am of the opinion that translated works are (unintended) betrayals of the original text. And that a `native` author will produce better wording (sigh, sorry about that) than a translator.

SimpleMinds2• 11 years ago

Do you mean originally written in my language? As coming from post soviet block, most of our fantasy is a bit different in a sense that from the beginning it doesn't involve epicness of Tolkien, Malazan, Black Company scale. From the beginning books focus on different things.

I would like to read some of them in English to see how's the difference in perception.

primroot• 11 years ago

There is a linguist (Daniel Everett) who thinks language can make you less prompt to accept a religion https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BNajfMZGnuo

aorth• 11 years ago

On a related note: learning another writing system can also be enlightening. Last year I learned how to read Cyrillic and it was a valuable experience. Now I'll see tidbits on Russian-language forums that I can kinda make sense of, or jokes about people using faux Cyrillic[0] in band names, t-shirts, etc. :P

More practically, it makes you think about coverage of non-Latin characters in fonts! What does a Cyrillic "ya" (я) look like in your font of choice, for example? Also, I'm curious how most peoples' browsers display it here on HN! BTW, Fira Sans[1] and Noto Sans[2] are two open-source fonts with Cyrillic coverage.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faux_Cyrillic [1] http://www.carrois.com/fira-4-1/ [2] https://www.google.com/fonts/specimen/Noto+Sans

mrcactu5• 11 years ago

isn't this the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? I remember in linguistics class my professor spent an entire lecture on how it was so controversial. It's a pretty common-sense idea but neither of the two guys who developed it are linguists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relativism/supplement2.htm...

OvidNaso• 11 years ago

Along these lines, I've often thought about the cognitive paths that could be explored or changed if I were to learn braille or sign language. Neuroscience has recently studied and given legitimacy to the state of 'Flow' or 'the Zone'[0] which has been long been understood in the physical realm, but is probably the same or similar in states of other creative activities, like speech or writing. I wonder if it may be easier to induce if one knew American (or any dialect) sign-language. Could we more readily produce eloquence or insight with the forced physicality athletes and meditation guru's use? And how much beautiful poetry and prose are we missing produced by the deaf community?

0. Popularized in recent books by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi and journalist Steven Kotler.

westoncb3• 11 years ago

From my understanding, 'flow' is basically when your mind has set on and is comfortable with some 'procedure' for doing something; at that point, there's no 'meta process' watching the procedure performed, looking for ways to correct it—the procedure just runs on its own (and it runs much more efficiently that way—kinda like representing a procedure in hardware instead of software). If there's much to that, it probably doesn't matter much whether the procedure has immediate physical consequences or receives data from the physical senses.

thisjepisje• 11 years ago

“Learn a new language and get a new soul” — Czech proverb.

indralukmana• 11 years ago

I will speak with a point of view from Indonesian with Javanese ethnicity.

Most of Indonesian peoples can speak at least 2 languages. Our local or regional language and national language.

Me myself can use 4 languages: Javanese (native), Indonesian (native), English (intermediate), Japanese (beginner), Arabic (beginner). For the Javanese language there some tiers of politeness but the usage in society can be generalized to polite Javanese (kromo) that we use when speaking to elders and rough Javanese (ngoko) that we use with our peers.

I have read some articles that speak about language effects on mind or point of view. But since I was small I learned more than two languages I cannot really differ them. Something a kin to the expression of "asking a fish what is water".

Based on my own feelings and experiences there are some nuances that accompany each language that I have known. I cannot describe them with words yet, but a language would be appropriate on different settings, medias, and intended audiences.

There are some language usages that are not appropriate when used in a different settings but sometimes of course there are some usages that would also help exploring the meanings

tiatia3• 11 years ago

"To speak another language is to possess another soul" Charlemagne

“We inhabit a language rather than a country. “ Emil Cioran

"I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse." Charlemagne

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” Wittgenstein

AlbertoGP• 11 years ago

"I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men and German to my horse." Charlemagne

I had learnt this line as attributed to Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor (king of both Spain as Carlos I, and of Germany as Karl V). Charlemagne could hardly have spoken those languages as they didn't quite yet exist around the year 800 A.D. when he lived, but spoke Rhenish Franconian, Latin, and some Greek [1]. Charlemagne was the first Holy Roman Emperor which could explain the confusion, but Charles V lived around 1500 A.D, seven centuries later.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlemagne#Language

I have quoted those words myself for a number of years, but when checking before commenting I found out that he didn't ever say exactly that, but according to reports some 40 years after his death: https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Charles_V,_Holy_Roman_Emperor#...

"When Emperor Charles V used to say, as I hear, that the language of the Germans was military; that of the Spaniards pertained to love; that of the Italians was oratorical; that of the French was noble".

"Indeed another, who was German, related that the same Charles V sometimes used to say: if it was necessary to talk with God, that he would talk in Spanish, which language suggests itself for the graveness and majesty of the Spaniards; if with friends, in Italian, for the dialect of the Italians was one of familiarity; if to caress someone, in French, for no language is tenderer than theirs; if to threaten someone or to speak harshly to them, in German, for their entire language is threatening, rough and vehement".

Thanks for triggering me into correcting my misunderstanding. :-)

How the language you speak changes your view of the world

Related Stories