The Magic of “Untranslatable” Words
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
The fact that the author was able to write this article and convey these concepts in English shows that the idea that vocabulary limits our experience is incoherent.
But what I really think the author is highlighting is a potential difference in perspective that accompanies participating in a culture that uses one set of concepts as 'primitives' and how that might lead to failures to understand another culture with different primitives. Not necessarily "we can't understand them", but "we don't understand them."
I often have thoughts that can't be phrased in language
Is it that they can't be phrased or that you can't phrase them? I often have thoughts that I can't express through drawing, but that doesn't mean it is an impossibility. I think that we often ignore that the act of putting ideas or thoughts to words is a skill that can be made easier through training.
Ok, but now supposed that you never tasted strawberrys. How do I describe in language the flavor of strawberry to someone who never tasted them? I can make an approximation based on flavors you know, but once you taste strawberrys you realize that, although what I said is true, it does not convey the sensation of eating strawberrys at all.
Even more: the less types of fruit you have tasted, the harder it is to convey an approximation of the flavor of strawberrys through language. So a lot hinges on culture and shared experiences.
Languages come from different cultures and sets of shared experiences, so it is natural that they develop more conceptual density in some things than others, and it is also natural that the grammar more naturally fits a certain way of thinking and seeing the world. You can discuss German philosophy in English, but it is a bit clunky. If you ever had the experience of learning a foreign language, you probably felt that you achieved proficiency when you were finally able to "bend" your thought process like the locals do.
I can't turn senses into words. I can't stare at a scene and capture the equivalent of a photograph by talking. But any thoughts I have about the strawberries or the scene, I can put into words.
http://www.maps.org/images/pdf/books/HuxleyA1954TheDoorsOfPe...
As a concrete example, consider mathematics. I can mostly handle the theory behind integration by eyeballing it and using spatial intuition, but I can't get any farther than that without introducing language that allows me to precisely circumscribe concepts and relate them precisely.
edit: also note that "the thoughts that I'm having don't use words" doesn't mean that those thoughts aren't using language. It's just not a language that you could serialize to something that could come out of your mouth - it's some private, unique internal representation that your brain has constructed for it to work with concepts on its own. Still a language, for the purposes of this discussion, since that internal representation will have all the same properties as above - some people have better internal representations for particular topics.
What people actually do in practice in the situation you're describing is to just use the foreign word directly. That's how languages end up filled with loanwords.
For an analogy for this crowd though: All programming languages are Turing complete. Any algorithm can be expressed in any of them.
Would you thus conclude that your choice of programming language does not limit you? Especially when it comes to working in a large team on a complex project? (and there are no larger and more complex projects than human society)
An analogous concept would be Dennetts intuition pumps [2]. An answer that is more idiomatic and more easily expressed will present itself more rapidly. It will be communicated to your teammates more efficiently, and it might win out due to its linguistic superiority rather than its inherent superiority or correctness. Thus it quite literally shapes my world.
None of this requires me to suppose that thoughts outside of language can not be expressed or that I can not extend and develop language to better express my thoughts.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_turn [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intuition_pump
Anyone who spends sufficient time in Australia ends up absorbing the meaning of those words by osmosis but any attempt to communicate the meaning, except via immersion ends up frustratingly not fully capturing the nuance.
As for 'daggy', it strikes me that it's the kind of loosely-defined word that ends up being a useful filler word. Much like 'cool', I suspect you can't really define it without knowing the context in which its used. Would you say daggy has one meaning or multiple overlapping meanings?
Defining the word isn't really the same, since that's English assimilating the word, not translating it. A very simple and classic example is bouquet; a literal translation would be closer to a small collection of plants (not even flowers necessarily, I think it's something like "little wood"); however, if you said "bouquet" in French, it was understood that you weren't talking about bushes or trees, it was specifically a pretty grouping of flowers. Subsequently, when the word gets to English speakers, they don't have a word for it really - a bunch of flowers is just "a bunch of flowers". There's a bush, there's a grove, there's a bundle, and so on, but when you want to talk about a pretty arrangement of flowers, you use bouquet.
But don't mistake assimilation for translating the word, it's just defining it. Look at the list the author compiled on their site:
http://media.wix.com/ugd/ce8de8_70080eab413e468580b0fc37b59d...
Just go and pick some of the words and try to define them as concisely as you can with one English word, or even an idiom/slang/phrase. Some maybe, but most don't really have any simple equivalent or similarity in English. Even with the definition of some of them, quite a few would be hard to use correctly in an English sentence.
Like, consider a few of the russian words:
тоска) (Russian, n.): longing for one’s homeland, with nostalgia and wistfulness.
I think we could call that homesickness, cultural rejection, or a few other English words that are similar (though from the Russians I know that are versed in English, they disagree and say homesick misses how deep of a feeling тоска has.
But then consider авось: (Russian, particle): maybe/what if; faith/trust/hope in luck, serendipity, destiny or fate.
What English particle would convey the same idea here? Better yet, how would you convey such a concept in English with any other word combination?
This is why assimilation comes into play and why translations aren't always reliable. Languages can be vastly different, even if they're categorized the same. Slavic languages rarely (if ever) use "to be" in most of its tenses, and as such, they construct descriptions and ideas far differently than you would in the Germanic based languages - as the languages evolved with different rules, naturally certain words were necessary for either standard communication or for artistic license, words which were not necessary in other languages simply because they didn't evolve that way. Assimilation plays an important part in language even today: Say the English word "Coffee" at a restaurant just about anywhere in the world and odds are you will get a cup of coffee. Say "Computer" or "Phone", and likely they'll know what you mean. But again, that's assimilation - where there was no word, but there was a need, the word was taken. The truth is there are many words in many languages that as English speakers we don't know if we need; the words are foreign to how we think and write and speak.
тоска sounds to me to be a mixture of homesickness and patriotism. I personally suspect your Russian acquaintances that are versed in English are overlooking that homesickness without patriotism can be a deep feeling.
For example, when I've been away from the UK for a long period of time, what I've found I miss the most is the sense of humour. That's not to say other countries are lacking a sense of humour (and there's plenty of other enjoyable facets of all the countries I've been to so far), but there's a particular style of humour that is particularly prominent in the British Isles (including Ireland) where we 'take the piss' out of ourselves as much as each other. To others, that might seem like a strange thing to be homesick about, especially in a deep way, but I assure you that when you're tired of pretense you can miss it a lot, just as much as any wistful dreams of the motherland.
P.S. Google Translate converts тоска into 'yearning', I wonder if that sits better with your Russian acquaintances.
But the point of тоска was more to illuminate the uniqueness of авось, making it stand as a clear example of something that I really feel doesn't have an English equivalent.
And no, I do understand what you're missing - I'm an American working abroad in Russia, and the humor my friends and I use in the US doesn't translate well either, largely because my colleagues, while being very good at English for the purpose of supporting our product, aren't quite fast enough with the language to get wordplay or the sarcastic bits.
Thanks for trying. I suspect you may be right about the stubbornness. Competing on depth of feeling is an easy way to create a sense of distinction between us. In a similar way, the Koreans have a word, Han, that they have set out as describing something uniquely Korean, but from what I can see it's a catch-all term for the feelings that come along with oppression. If you want to highlight a deep sense of oppression not felt elsewhere, of course you're going to try to create a sense of uniqueness for your own word describing these things.
And as you can see after these two long sentences, the lack of a word to describe extensively this experience makes it quite absurd for non-French speakers. Words are such a great way to describe our environment thus I agree with the author that "our world is parsed by the limits of our vocabulary".
If I'm sauntering, enjoying a constitutional, taking some air, or what have you then perhaps these are the things that the French person is trying to express but flâner is the closest that comes to mind [sorry, perhaps ironically, my French is not good enough to realise this analogy precisely].
Somewhat aside to the main point:
>the lack of a word to describe extensively this experience makes it quite absurd for non-French speakers //
In the past, and I'm struggling for an example, people have said things like there's no word for "such-and-such" in English and it's simply been that they don't know that word. This makes it still a limit of vocabulary but not a limit of the particular language: why isn't there a word in English for "bottom shaped", well of course there is, just most people don't know it.
And logically speaking, strong SW makes developing words for concepts impossible since strong SW says that from your perspective there's no perceivable concept you'd need to develop a word for.
Versions weak enough to stand up to empirical evidence tend to be "if your language makes it more complex to express a concept, it'll be more complex for you to express the concept". If you word it up fancy, you can get things like "people who speak language X do this task faster", but that's unsurprising if their language is giving them help at it.
Well yeah, of course. Your eye has blue color receptors that send signals to the brain well below the level of language. Animals don't have language and can distinguish colors, after all. That's just like saying because English doesn't have good words to describe different textures, we can't distinguish the difference.
But the explanation of SW I've always heard is nowhere near that strong. E.g. that because English doesn't have good words for different textures, that information isn't making it to the conscious mind. E.g. we are much more likely to forget texture, not notice it, or not use it to describe things, etc. I don't' see how that's a tautology.
I know I grew up without a really conscious separation between the different tastes. E.g. sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami. Obviously I could taste the difference. But I couldn't describe the type of food I felt hungry for, or explain why something tasted good. As an adult I've found distinguishing these categories consciously is very useful.
However since then there has been a fair amount of research that shows effects which go beyond what you would seem to allow above (e.g. hemispherical effects on color discrimination, http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~kay/tics2.pdf has some examples).
This is not true, from my experiences studying foreign languages. There are many words and idioms/phrases that don't have an accurate translation into any other language. Even a paragraph-long translation fails to translate the nuance and meaning behind the word. The author's list has many Japanese definitions that I don't entirely agree with - or fail to translate the nuance behind the words/phrase.
At best you get a close approximation. This is one of a few reasons why things are "lost in translation". Without an equivalent - the nuance is lost.
Why was it important for same sex couples to be married and not have legally indistinguishable 'civil unions'?
Then why does Orwellian language bother us so much?
I think language matters a lot.
It's common for multi lingual people to feel more direct in one language over another, or for it to influence them in other ways of both mood and thought.
To give, perhaps a somewhat clichéd example, consider the Himba tribe who rather famously do not distinguish linguistically between blue and green[1], only having half the colour groups we do. They do not have words to shape a simple view, and go on to have difficulty telling apart colours we would have no difficulty at all differentiating. But if you were to show them 20 different shades of green that we'd struggle to tell apart they'd clearly see differences.
I'd say that's a reasonable case that language, and use or otherwise of the concept it conveys, can make a rather dramatic difference.
[1] http://6thfloor.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/09/04/its-not-easy-se...
If you need an idea, that affect language far more than language affects ideas.
It was the BBC Horizon from a few years back I got my understanding from, I'd have expected better from them. They have dumbed down quite a bit in recent years though.
An example where language forces our thinking and even actions instead of simply allowing us to express it easily is plurals. Plurals force us to include unneeded number information in a lot of our thinking and talking. We have to have at least 2 cars to say "I have some cars" when showing off, otherwise admit that we only have one. You can see it in writing that uses "I" or "we" too. It reveals how many people it represents. A 2-person company can look much bigger than a 1-person company because it can use "we", "our", etc. just the same as a 1000000 person company does.
There tends to be lot more mental fatigue involved in parsing sentences than there is in picking up a similar meaning from a familiar word. That process of passing meaning from one party to another is what defines an experience. If you miss a joke and someone explains it to you, you may "get it" and at that point understand as it well as the person who "got it" immediately but you would have had totally different experiences.
This topic is related to the question "whether there are prohibitively unthinkable thoughts given a vocabulary". The answer to that is generally shown in no uncertain terms be a strong YES.
The article specifically acknowledges and discusses this in the third paragraph. That means that the fact the parent comment is currently the top voted comment means that very few commenters and voters have read even the beginning of the article.
Even then, programming languages are able to communicate and parse information which one might define as 'beyond the limits of' our collective cultural lexicon and structural rules of communication, which (as far as I know as a layman) are generally linear and include undertones and idioms.
also, as long time fan of meditation, I think I am able to look at the world, turn off that internal voice and view things in a way that's less limited by language.
Superficially yes but it is just a rephrasing of Wittgenstein's "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." which has a proper philosophical foundation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_Investigations
> The fact that the author was able to write this article and convey these concepts in English shows that the idea that vocabulary limits our experience is incoherent.
How so? The author just describes a phenomenon, one he can write about because he experienced those limits and reflected upon them. He never said those limits cannot be pushed or overcome, the point is that experiencing them is what allows us to "learn about the world and ourselves".
However, a limited vocabulary limits one's thinking in the same way that writing everything in assembly will limit how and what you write despite the fact that everything can be written in assembly.
I'm always delighted to discover words (whether or not they're in my native language) that describe really useful concepts that I would have had to describe in much clunkier ways before. It allows me to reason about things involving those concepts much more clearly.
It's not really important that sometimes these useful words are discovered by studying other languages. I get the same benefit when I discover a useful word in my native language that I hadn't heard of before. I'm just more likely to find such words in other languages, because I've known English all my life and therefore am much more likely to already know what I would consider the most useful English words.
Eventually foreign words become useful enough that they get grandfathered into most English-speakers' vocabularies (zeitgeist, faux pas, deja vu, etc.). This happens with all languages of course, but English seems like more of an omnivorous mutt language than the others that I've tried to learn.
I'm not sure I would agree. You said it yourself: "despite the fact that everything can be written in assembly". It does limit your writing and speaking but good vocabulary is not a prerequisite for a good ability to think. People can think differently, some have more language oriented thinking, others visual, abstract or even logical etc, all depending on the areas you are working in.
I wonder if you looked at the space of all word vectors, and found areas where words were missing. Do to some quirk of language, there was no word to represent that point in concept space. You could also compared the vector space for multiple different languages, and automatically determine what words don't have equivalents.
For example, 斯文 from Chinese most directly translates as 'refined' or 'cultured' in English.
In Chinese, the term has a strong positive connotation and can be used an almost any context to compliment any person; it carries the implication that the person is of good character and education.
In American English, 'refined' feels mostly neutral (shading into a pejorative with 'effete') and while 'cultured' has a positive connotation, it doesn't directly speak to the person's character.
What we see is that cultural norms and values become embedded in the vocabulary of languages. Even a directly, literal translation will not capture the same implied attitude. That's why translations of books and the like tend to avoid close word-for-word readings.
Your point still stands I think but it sounds like you're describing "classy" in en-gb.
I am sure gesticulation is much cruder, but it has an advantage too: the signs for toon-squishing don't have to share configuration space with a big vocubulary of ordinary words.
To me, "allegro" is a tempo marking, not a state of being, for the most part.
I'm not actually sure who is getting the short end of the stick, in this particular instance, to tell you the truth.
As a fellow musician, I've wondered the same.
"Take the German noun Treppenwitz, which literally means ‘staircase wit’: that all too common phenomenon of a witty rejoinder that comes to mind just after an interaction!"
Only that's not the meaning in German.
for example - as a developer, I have felt this before about single functions and sometimes entire codebases - I pay a lot of attention to my intuition - and I feel like it's part intuition, part paranoia, part anxiety that maybe you have rushed and done something wrong.
so - kind of like an anxiety resulting from intuition that you have made a mistake, and the feeling is reinforced by previous experiences - and it can be resolved by addressing the issue if you can identify it...
or maybe you sent an email like 5 minutes ago and get the feeling, then realize you forgot to attach a file
"postboding" isn't a word but I think that might capture the feeling. Like in my example of sending an email, feeling uneasy and then the sudden realization that you forgot to attach something - so you fix it and the feeling is changes to relief.
Also, it seems like it is some form of dissonance - I'm going to try to nail it down lol
Surely there must be some... English speakers (especially native ones) just don't consider them to be notable due to familiarity.
solution: propose/coin new word W in language L with meaning M