A linguist on Arrival's alien language (2016)
slate.com
slate.com
I've read Chiang's book about two years before the movie aired and it really is top-notch speculative fiction that I highly recommend to any Sci-Fi lover.
Even though Denis Villeneuve, Eric Heisserer and Ted Chiang himself did a wonderful job with the screenplay, while managing to convey the main ideas and emotion of the book, there are quite a few details about the process of translating Heptapod A and B that didn't make it into the movie, details which would have painted a more complete picture of the situation for the interviewed professor of linguistics that was interviewed in this article.
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18626849-stories-of-your...
Masala is a popular indian dish here in the US... so popular in fact that it is expected at any indian restaurant. Because of this, the term can be synonomous with 'run of the mill', 'standard', or even 'safe'.
Huh? Masala just means the dish uses a bunch of spices (ie masala chai is just tea with cardamom, maybe pepper and cinnamon and other things depending on whose making).
I'm pretty sure regarding film its used to say a "standard movie" or even "boring", thats been "spiced" to taste better, with spices being a set of tropes that most people like.
In this context, it would mean spiced up, or exaggerated for entertainment reasons.
I was using it in a sense similar to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masala_film
So start with "one" and "two" or maybe even the concept of nothing vs something. Work your way to vocab words related to space and time (again, I would think these universal concepts considering the aliens traveled with the goal of getting to earth), then get into specific human concepts like me vs you vs third person.
They essentially worked through language in the same way you would work through language with a human baby, which I think would get you no where when talking to an alien race (who are "adults" at this point you would assume, and have their own fully developed world views).
Just my 2 cents though.
No book, sad to say. The movie is based on a Ted Chiang short story named "The story of your life."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Story_of_Your_Life
There are a number of books out there named "The Arrival" or a variation thereof, but they have no connection with the movie.
I only post this to keep people from ordering books with that name, hoping to acquire more depth than the movie provides. Not to disparage the movie, which I regard as first-rate.
Even humans have languages that don't have numbers above of "one, two, three, many"; so long for generalized numbers being a universal concept.
Sure we use letters and numbers to represent them, and words for many musical concepts, but people have been making music without knowing these and since long before they were codified..
The number line is a continuous stream, right? Carrying on from my earlier comment [0], an alien species could use a smooth gradient of colors to represent numbers; their senses may be such that they interpret a distinct shade, or a "step" or "tick", after a small difference in wavelength/frequency, and they use those steps to represent integers, and a transition between two shades to represent fractions..
So if I want to tell you I want 1 of something, I just show you a deep violet. If I want 2, I "say" a ever-so-slightly less saturated violet. Green may mean a million, and reds would be used for astronomical scales. :)
But they may not "think" in terms of "numbers" as we do; they would just see and imagine colors and associate them with a sense of quantity, or comparison..
I'm sure their spaceships will work just fine.
We tend to deal numbers by turning them into symbol sequences and then applying grammatical rules to them --- we're good at grammar, we have hardware acceleration for it. Digital computers work the same way: the quantity is measured, turned into a number, turned into a symbol sequence, then we manipulate those symbols before turning them back into a number.
But analogue computers work by taking a measurement, representing it directly as a potential, and then performing various analogue operations on that potential to yield another potential. At no point during the operation is the potential converted to a number. (Disclaimer: our analogue computers do use numbers for I/O, because they measure the result potential and express it in ways we can understand, but that's just a UI issue.)
So I can totally imagine an alien technology that manipulated quantities using mathematical operations without having any way to express those quantities themselves other than in relation to other quantities. They could use symbol streams to represent the relationships --- if so, they'd probably get on quite well with algebra --- but the idea of representing the potentials themselves as a power series would be completely alien to them.
And before that, the way we write language, numbers, and music is digital, not analog- despite the fact that we seem to think more in an analog way than a digital one. Come to think of it, even our language is digital, despite the fact that our experiences are not and we often struggle to find the combination of words that will better reproduce the meaning we have in our minds.
Come on, this is HN, how can you not see the advantage of calculating with numbers, and writing down numbers, in place of approximate quantities? And why we converted an entire century's worth of audio and photographic recordings to a digital format?
Machines built by people who think differently will work differently.
As for the fact we're "symbolic creatures", perhaps we are, but again- is it because our brains are natively digital or because we really put a lot of effort in trying to be symbolic? (I don't know whether our brains can be called digital- neural networks seem more analog than digital, but there might be quantization going on at some levels to manage the complexity and the noise of handling analog information.) Maybe symbolic reasoning emerges despite being really hard to master, because it actually manages to grasp some fundamental aspect of reality?
You can have logic -binary or not- to define rules of inference, without defining a particular rule of inference for numbers (measuring quantities).
As someone else sort of implied elsewhere [1], if aliens use mathematics at all, it would probably be easier to reason with them in terms of topology rather than number theory.
Was math so universal that any intelligent species discovered the same math as what humans had discovered? Could there be a universe where irrational numbers were the primitives upon which all mathematics was based, in the same way that humans based all of their mathematics on the prime numbers? Was there a “beautiful” universe in which irrational numbers did not exist, and all patterns were simple? Perhaps there was a universe which lacked electromagnetism, and, even as our universe had atoms whose changing bonds explained all physical phenomena, perhaps that other universe had manifields whose changing coordinate systems, mapping one dimension to another, explained all physical phenomena? Our own universe was composed of 3 solid dimensions and then a fractional 4th, but what would life be like in a universe that consisted only of fractional dimensions? How could aliens imagine something whole, if nothing in their universe was whole? How could such aliens imagine a “one”, an integer, something complete? Perhaps in such a universe the integers were the most difficult concept in math, only discovered after thousands of years of careful research. Perhaps there was an alien far smarter than any of his peers, admired even as we admire Einstein, whose greatest accomplishment was the discovery of the formula “1 + 1 = 2”, a formula which, in that universe, was so utterly counter-intuitive that most adults went through their life without ever understanding it.
One of the most talked about examples is Piraha[0], a language which doesn't really represent numbers. This is interesting because a study done by Everett and Frank[1] shows that this can actually have effects on cognition, providing some evidence for the Sapir-Wharf hypothesis[3]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_language
[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0010027708...
If I had to boil it down to a sentence, Everett's claim ultimately was not that the Pirahã can't think recursively, it's that their language reflects a cultural aversion to referring to things that aren't concretely present, and this impacted their grammar for subordinating clauses.
OTOH, and quite separate from the recursion issue, there has been some really interesting research on Pirahã perception of number. The ScienceDirect link/paper in the parent is well worth your time; it's also here https://www.researchgate.net/publication/5308732_Number_as_a... and background at LanguageLog http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=341
The short of it is that Chomskyan hypothesis has a giant edifice built upon a single central idea. A fraca in popular science (i.e., outside academic journals) arises between Chomsky and Pinker over these ideas. Some unknown researcher announces that his obscure language brings the whole edifice crashing down. Add in a touch of Sapir-Whorf to make accusations of racism credible, and Chomsky's well-known fondness for dismissing critics rather than engaging them in scholarly debate.
Basically, there were two debates (did Pirahã have recursion in the sense that Everett meant? and what constitutes proof or disproof of universal grammar?) that went on simultaneously, while someone apparently took the opportunity to smear Everett with the Pirahã study ban.
I don't believe in the existence of a set containing all natural numbers at the same time, except as an idea to talk about.
But I'd bet on the OPs hypothesis as well. At a guess, most space travelling species will have had to climb a similar developmental curve to our own - including agriculture (or whatever passes for it in their biosphere, unless they photosynthesize themselves), tool making, metal smelting, nuclear power, etc. etc.
Given that there is so much of physics that we have yet to understand (assuming what we think to be true is actually true), and given the infinite possibilities of what forms alien life could take, you can't make any assumptions about what sort of language they'd have. This was a point they briefly tried to make in the movie.
One of the things that strikes me, is how we just started with integers and then tried to fit everything into them. I mean they're fine for counting, but kind of a hackjob for measuring. Like sure, integers may exist in reality insofar as there may be one tree, two trees... but what about weight, speed, gravitational acceleration?
An alien species may use entirely different systems for Counting vs. Measuring.
We even found out that numbers may be "complex", have multiple dimensions. Beings exitsting in 4+ spatial dimensions may "write" in 3D; using Platonic solids to represent integers and fractions, and spheres for measurements?
And just as how humans took a while to come up with the concept of zero, could such a hypothetical 4D being have a hard time thinking about the idea of 1?
Symplectic geometry is, similarly, a geometry on differentiable manifolds equipped with a "symplectic form" that generalizes the oriented area spanned by two vectors known in flat structures as the determinant.
Now here's the fun part: Riemannian geometry may exist in 1, 2, 3... dimensions; but symplectic geometry exists in even dimensions only. For example: if you tried to think of a 3D sphere of radius 1, you couldn't pass a 4D sphere through its largest section (a bit like if you couldn't pass a 3D sphere through a circle-shaped hole of same radius.
I forget what was my point initially.
So a funny thing happened. When my eyes first skimmed over that part, I spotted the word "donut". When I read it a second later, it wasn't there.
Something in my brain literally substituted "donut" for "circle-shaped hole" to the extent that it appeared in my vision, for a single processing cycle.
The idea still needs a bit of fleshing out to count for cases when you're working with hundreds of practically identical things, e.g. cells and atoms.
Numbers are more abstract. They couldn't just draw a number "2" for example. Or show 2 apples because it might seem they are just talking about apples and not numbers.
Numbers are probably not a good starting point, because they're surprisingly abstract. For example, there's no such thing as 1. You can have one of something, but you can't just have one. Number is a quality rather than a thing. In order to establish communication, you need to start with something where it is completely unambiguous what you're both referring to. You can do this with concrete things, not so much with qualities.
Numbers above one are even harder. There's no such thing as 2. You have a thing, and you have another thing. In order to get to two, you first have to establish the idea of the one thing and the other thing being similar. Then you have to find a way of making it clear you wish to refer to the collection of things, which is an abstract thing. Then, you need to somehow figure out how to make it clear you wish to refer to this abstract quality of quantity about this abstract thing, rather than some other abstract quality about it such as its permanence or utility or orientation.
Compared to this, talking about objects and actions seems a lot easier.d
"This is eight milk". Cups of milk? Glasses of milk? Cartons of milk? Liters of milk?
Neither dogs (Dogs don't(?) think(!) in that as "walking"). You still walk with your dog, and I think most people see a dog walking, and think: "Is walking!"
Even if the way aliens "walk" were more like "swing" them see us moving from A to B. Maybe them translate them as "Moving from A to B".
The we show them "running", and them translate it as "Moving from A to B faster".
Eventually, them see a dolphin, and is moving more like them. Maybe them translate it as "Moonwalking".
Still, different words and concepts from them eventually must equal to our own, and even if are not a perfect 1:1 translation is enough to convey things.
For example, some ancients languages have different words for "Love" but ours use adjectives for them.
> by using names and human concepts...should start with concepts that are universal: mainly numbers
The way the movie do this make perfect sense.
Some examples:
- Your tribe in a island make first contact with a advanced civilization. You started with 1 coconut. Then you show 2 coconut.
Your advanced emissary think the coconut must the base food of your tribe, and yours is very poor.
Numbers rarely are used in abstract ways. Similar in how (big mistake) people try to push programming as math (because "obviously is math").
- You have a baby. To communicate with him, you start with some universal laws that hold across the universe:
"A monad is just a monoid in the category of endofunctors"
What you consider universal laws, the most important and more universal, maybe are not the first kind of laws others are thinking. And this guys do everything in perl, his civilization have discovered functional programming and discard them 20 centuries ago as annoying.
- Your atlantian civilization, the most advanced that ever existed in earth, make first contact with the atlantian civilization on Andromeda. Both talk in perfect english, obviously. Correctly, you understand this guys must be smart, so you start conversation like this:
"So, do you guy know that the Spirit is the same than the Everything times the light instant and the light instant?, and the light instant is perfect and stay always as before or after?, and you spaceship obviously feed on spirits?"
Both civilization know than E=mc2, but his notations, names and ways to transcribe them not align at all. And probably sound incorrect nonsense.
- You start teaching them your numbering system. Them get confused why 2 + 2 is equal 4.
Your numbering system is decimal, them is not.
Then you try to showcase that exist several systems.
Them start get more confusing. Why your result contradict each time?
----
Not matter how I look at this, walking, eating, you, me, my name, your name look like far more universal and more sensible things to know than anything related to science or tech.
However, a major plot point in the movie is that time does not exist and that there is no such thing as causality. In the world of Arrival, there is not a lot of reason to believe that mathematics, logic, and science are capable of bringing us to a true understanding of the universe. It wouldn't work to teach human mathematics to the aliens because human mathematics is weird and wrong.
True, but there is a bound on how much complexity of a concept can differ across axiom systems. Complexity (up to an additive constant) is an objective fact independent of any particular axiom system.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity#Invarian...
I think the film makers made the right choice artistically.
There's a certain potential, a sort of superpositional value in only filling in the details of a plot device that are absolutely necessary to further the plot (i.e. the flux capacitor).
So long as you don't fill in the answer it could be anything, but as soon as you provide a concrete answer all that sense of wonder and curiosity is paved over with a simple matter of fact answer that may or may not be fully thought out.
And in practical terms the plot becomes more restricted and the odds of creating a continuity error are increased.
I suspect, in short that had they filled in that gap in the movie we'd be reading a rant about how the film maker's answer doesn't hold upon closer examination.
Edited: An interesting novel is The Black Cloud by Hoyle in which the author tries to establish a language between human and an intelligent extraterrestrial electromagnetic cloud.
Probably the most famous attempt to do so:
Any high technology creature able to travel across the universe must have been studying some kind of evolutionary path.
How will the aliens even know they are looking at signals encoding video and audio? Do aliens have technology and knowhow in the RF regime? Will they even be able to receive, store, or analyze the TV waveforms? Do they have the notion of amplitude and frequency modulation? Also, how will they know that the signal encodes video? Absent ground truth, low entropy (or equivalent measures like bigrams, Markov models, etc.) is the only way one can determine that a sequence is a language. Even if they are able to convert the RF signal to some low-entropy sequence of symbols, there is a very real possibility of them going off on a tangent: mapping the information to a completely different language.
A real world example is the symbols of Indus valley civilization. Several decades into the information age, and about a century since the seals were discovered, researchers haven't even conclusively established that the symbols encode a language.
Messages don't exist by themselves, but are layered. Eg. To understand that a radio signal is a video I need to also understand video protocols, RF communication, etc.
In GEB, Hofstadter talks about the Three Layers of Any Message:
1 - The Frame Message
2 - The Outer Message
3 - The Inner Message
He uses the example of a "message in a bottle" washed up on the beach. The "Frame" is the recognition that the bottle is sealed and contains a dry piece of paper. The "Outer Message" would be the fact that the writing on the paper is in French, and the "Inner Message" would be the actual contents of the French writing.
At each stage, the reader needs to have some set of concepts or language with which to grapple with the nested messages, if they have any hope of finally decoding the Inner Message.
For example, a wild boar wouldn't recognise the Frame Message in the first place, while a German person might recognise the Frame Message, and recognise the Outer Message ("This text is definitely French"), but be stymied by an in-ability to actually read French.
The whole point of Arrival was that we had to learn the alien language. The purpose of their arrival was to teach us their language so we could help them in the future.
Had the purpose of the aliens been to spread the knowledge of their culture then it may have made sense for them to analyze and learn our language, but since that wasn't their goal it wouldn't have made much sense.
In pretty much every alien encounter movie it's the humans working out a plan for communication from scratch. You'd think the aliens would put a little more effort into it, especially if they've been spacefaring for years. And if they haven't, wouldn't they be a lot more curious about us?
I would love to see a cinematization of Robert Forward's Dragon's Egg, which I think gets this right.
Which is also something interesting to consider. Death is probably less bothersome if your perception of time is non-linear.
Logograms, although they do not encode the phonological structure of words in a language, nevertheless do correspond to words, and written sentences using logograms mirror the linear syntactic structure of the spoken language. The distinction between Heptapod A and Heptapod B is not merely a matter of discarding phonological representation and using logograms; Heptapod B is intended to have literally no relation whatsoever to the structure of Heptapod A, being a fully 2-dimensional semasiographic system while Heptapod A is a (necessarily, because spoken) linear system.
And while the circular semasiograms developed for the movie certainly look cool, and were probably a good choice for the film-makers to make, they really do not do justice to what's described in the original story, or to the actual real-world 2D writing systems that have been developed (e.g., UNLWS: http://conlang.org/cms/wp-content/uploads/grammar.pdf).
As a Biochemist-- this is not a misunderstanding! Everything in our brain is rewired as we learn things and as we develop heuristics. So of course thinking differently relies on rewiring your brain. There's no spirit or soul hidden in our brain, it's all wires.
This linguist needs a neurobiology course. :3
If we didn't "rewire" as you put it, I think we'd have a very big problem as a species learning new things!
1. Perceptions 2. Constructs 3. Language
For a creature that doesn't have sight at all, they literally can't talk about certain concepts.
Now, does the creature distinguish between objects and actions? If they do, they have a basis to distinguish between Nouns and Verbs.
Finally, humans might be hard wired for some aspects of language. It would be a huge coincidence if aliens had the same hard wiring. (For instance, they could have evolved to give their children negative evidence, rather than pre-constrain grammars.)
Any intelligent species will create instruments for measurement in non-sensory regimes, so they can certainly explore those regimes.
And if you're talking about some kind of qualitative experience, it's conjecture that such experiences aren't reducible to some kind of complex third-person account.
What's more human communication relies on a basic common wiring (e.g. Paus s between words seem to be basically universal regardless of language and culture).
So if an alien landed here what if they didn't perceive sound at all and saw only in the ultraviolet range? I find this subject fascinating and it's certainly rich fodder for sci-fi.
Anyway the article asks how the interviewee would handle this situation without touching on this far more pressing problem.
If they were capable of interstellar travel this would be a trivial problem to solve in comparison so yeah highly implausible plots.
And there are other constraints, too. UV is blocked by water (and our lens material) and can induce chemical changes (read: damage) easier than visible light. Damaging sensitive retina. Not that this is an unsolvable problem (bees see UV), but it is a biochemical constraint. Infrared, especially far infrared, doesn't work too well without a cooled sensor. And the energy per quanta is less, which reduces your options for good, high-sensitivity biomolecules that can detect them, kind of the opposite problem of UV.
So yeah, there are a few reasons why visible light is visible light and why we can't see UV or infrared. It's not entirely arbitrary or random. But "seeing" with sound is also a viable evolutionary approach, but less effective in a low-density medium like air and more effective (even than light) in a medium like water.
Does this mean that our vision system evolved to pick up the most energetic part of the Sun's spectrum that ends up at the surface? Did it evolve this way so our vision systems' cellular agglomerate don't have to expend as much energy gathering that part of the spectrum as opposed to other parts of the spectrum?
If so, then is there any linkage via evolutionary theory that imply our vision system might be among the first vision systems to evolve on the planet, because it filled the most-favored evolutionary niche associated with the lowest energy expenditure to gain a evolutionarily competitive advantage over other pre-human species?
Perhaps in an environment where UV provides the best illumination (due to the star being hotter, etc) creatures would evolve disposable eyes.
Seeing IR difficult because it is blocked by water and our own bodies radiate it, so it would be useless for our retinas to be able to detect it. You need completely different kinds of eyes (hence pit vipers' eponymous pit organs).
IR aside, the visual spectrum is centered where it is because that's where the sunlight that can make it through our atmosphere is brightest. We're adapted to see the light that's actually there, in nature. The range of light that's available actually does include some UV, and the ancestral tetrapod presumably could see that, which is why birds still can; mammals, however, went through a period in our evolution where our primarily-nocturnal ancestors had no need for four-color vision (because there wasn't enough light to support it) and not much UV was available to them, so we lost the UV sensitivity entirely and went down to only 2 kinds of receptors. This is why, e.g., dogs (and most other mammals) are colorblind. Apes eventually independently re-evolved a third color receptor because that was advantageous in things like identifying edible fruit which were important to their lifestyle, but there was never a strong evolutionary pressure to regain UV sensitivity.
After some reminescence and analysis of the discussion I came to bold conclusion that defending strong Sapir-Worf hypothesis is very much akin to racism. Basically, you prohibit someone not fluent in the language of your choice the ability to see the world just like you do or even better.
Just to give one food of thought - most of human languages are two-level (like van Wijngaarden two-level grammar) with the extremely outstanding examples like Nigerian (and I heard there are fixed-grammar languages here and there, but they are rare). Two-level grammars are Turing complete and thusly you can express any concept in most of them. The expression effort will differ at start but if concept is important enough it will be expressed concisely in every one of them.
To quote B.Stroustrup "users require LOUD SYNTAX for new features and succinct syntax for familiar ones". Just like real languages evolve.
In this analogy G is the 'universal Turing machine'
The Algol-68 was specified using two level grammar and if I understand it correctly, the declaration part constrained parsing of the statement part so that only valid expressions can be parsed. Parsed statements are valid in the semantic sense, i.e., the subscription can be applied only to array values and parser will reject subscription for scalar values.
To generate the grammar you need to execute some function. And this function depends on the part of input.
Stack machines = context free languages = primitive recursive functions. (?)
Turingmachines = context sensitive languages = total recursive functions. (?)
Or something like that.
Primitive recursive functions alone are able to recognize formal languages: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PR_(complexity) PR is the complexity class of all primitive recursive functions—or, equivalently, the set of all formal languages that can be decided by such a function.
http://www.pnas.org/content/104/19/7780.full
There are more examples.
"You don’t really pronounce the logogram.
"Right, it’s not phonetic in the way that English is phonetic. So I took the alien language to be that kind of writing system. I still took the visual system to be encoding the same concepts of the oral system so that the aliens would have for any given concept a written version and a spoken version. Logographic systems on Earth are essentially similar. The Japanese have three different writing systems. One of them, Kanji, is shared with Chinese. The spoken languages are very different. The Japanese speaker and the Chinese speaker can’t talk to each other, but they share a writing system because the writing system doesn’t actually match phonetically onto the sounds of the language."
I began to doubt the linguist here. I understand that many people use 'logogram' as a shorthand to describe whatever Chinese is, but she seems to be taking it seriously.
Chinese isn't written with 1 symbol per word (or idea or whatever); it would be more true to say that it is syllabic, where most common Chinese words are one syllable.
Many (most?) Chinese glyphs are made up of a root and a radical, where one part indicates the "class" or "topic" of the symbol and the other indicates the pronunciation (at least at one time).
She seems to be dancing around the idea that a Chinese speaker and a Japanese speaker could communicate by writing, each in their respective languages, and be understood through the magic of Kanji/logograms. That is not the case, too my understanding.
I'm given to understand that one feature of all known natural writing systems is that they are based off of the languages' vocabulary, grammar, etc., however hidden by changes between when the writing system was formalized and now. The idea that a writing system would not record what someone would say is weird.
Neanderthals weren't able to build airplanes, and their language probably didn't have a word for airplane (presumably), but B wasn't the cause of A.
The vedic indians had flying vehicles in their literature and were also not able to build airplanes.
Most cultures that can build flying machines have one or more names for them.
I don't know what it would mean to have the concept for something without having a word (or a sentence) to describe it.
If the S-W claim is that 'it's more common for a concept to underly a word than for a word to exist for a concept', I don't agree with that either -- kids who read a lot will often know the part of speech for a word and its context but not much else.
Are you claiming the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis isn't true on ycombinator?
This is a forum famous for talking about blub languages and lisp. And if it's true for artificial languages, that's a strong indicator that it's true for human ones.
But sadly there are very few studies comparing programming languages and I've never seen one comparing human languages qualitatively.
The problem of Blub is less that people are incapable of understanding concepts, but that the people explaining concepts are incapable of explaining them. I've yet to find a feature that I couldn't explain to a "Blub" programmer. If you take, e.g., call/cc, sure, describing that to a mediocre Java programmer would probably elicit a blank stare. But I could instead describe the yield operator and get excited responses on to where it would be useful, despite it being basically the same thing as a call/cc (modulo issues like saving the call stack).
The evidence for natural languages is equally poor, although it's obfuscated by the extreme difficulty of separating culture from language in early childhood instruction.
Do you have to write a program that operates on lists? Lisp probably is better than Java.
Do you have to write a formal proof? Coq is probably better than Python.
Do you have to write distributed networking code? Erlang is probably better than PHP.
How can the strengths of each language not be direct support for linguistic relativity? All that means is that certain concepts are easier to manipulate and understand in certain languages.
I can agree that different languages are more suitable for different purposes and affect how we express different problems. That is consistent with a very weak form of Sapir-Whorf. If that's the extent of your claim, then I don't think there's much controversy over that specific claim.
If an individual can't express a concept, how can you be sure they 'possess' that concept?
(answer might be found in bilinguals. There was an early saint from capadoccia who was grateful some of the more sophisticated greek heresies couldn't even be expressed in his language).
And, yes, if a concept is hard to express in a language that it, potentially, limits your thinking. If all thought is just language, then it may even bar thinking of concepts. But that gets into another debate, is language the key to thought, or is language an expression of thought. We can all probably conceive of things or maybe even have witnessed things which we are unable to articulate in many or all existing languages, but language expands or we adopt new languages (such as mathematics and calculus in particular to express physics). The precise motion of the planets could be explained in plain English, through complex circumlocutions. But calculus and its derived languages allow us to express this concept far more easily (even if just the English translation of the formulae and expressions, and not the precise notations used by physicists and mathematicians).
The principle of linguistic relativity is that language (particularly L1) influences the thought patterns of those who use it. It does not state that certain thought patterns are easier to express in various languages.
To demonstrate support for linguistic relativity, it's not sufficient to say that Perl is better at text manipulation than C. You'd have to say first that Perl programmers tend to view generic programming problems (say, how to route email messages) as questions of text manipulation rather than other paradigms. You would also have to show that this paradigmatic shift is a result of the language itself, and not other factors including (but not limited to) language instruction or library availability.
In terms of natural language, sure, I can't translate the sentence "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana" effectively into French (since the different senses of "to fly" are «voler» and «mouche»). But that doesn't matter for linguistic relativity. The linguistic relativity argument is over whether or not the difference between English tending to use "do" for its modals precipitates a different worldview than the French «faire» ("make").
Which I think you could actually make a strong case for. It's very natural in Perl to reach for a regular expression instead of other tools, and to join data into and split data out of strings, since the core data types don't distinguish between numerical and string data, the operators do.
The strong form of Sapir-Whorf proposes that language completely determines the scope of cognitive processes. This form is generally considered to be false.
The weak form suggests that language influences thought, but the extent of such influence claimed can vary greatly depending on who is talking.
I would tend to think that might be true in the weaker forms, but at the same time my experience with programming languages is that you can write your desired type of code in any language and many developers do so, so I don't believe there is evidence that the influence is very strong.
E.g. I've written object oriented assembler. Object oriented C is almost a rite of passage. You can implement closures in C (been there done that), or co-operative multitasking (not been there, but others have).
Greenspun's Tenth Rule states:
"Any sufficiently complicated C or Fortran program contains an ad-hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of Common Lisp."
And you can write functional Ruby (you can even write Ruby with immutability by freezing objects, though you'll find a lot of third party code breaking). Back when C was still relatively young and Pascal was still popular, it was not unheard of to come across C code that started something like:
#define begin {
#define end }
If anything, programming languages have a long history of people inventing ways of emulating things they've seen and liked in other languages, but that are foreign to the language they are working in.
So while I do think that language influences thinking to some extent, I also think that influence is weak enough to be easily overridden by other things, such as sufficiently strong zealotery with respect to the advantages of some programming practice or another.
I'm Norwegian, but live in the UK and mostly think in English, and I do occasionally come across things that might qualify as language having influenced my thinking, but they are unremarkable enough most of the time that I rarely take note of it. In fact, trying to think of it now, I can't really come up with any good examples.
For programming languages it is easier. I would not immediatly think "first let's make a class for ..." when programming assembler, for exampl. You may eventually end up with concepts of objects and classes in assembler programs too, but if that's the first tool you think of, you'd probably pick another language. How to structure control flow changes. How to treat variables changes (if things can fit in registers vs. is suitable to push on the stack vs. directly accessing memory suddenly matters much more).
But still, at the same time, you can program assembler the way you program a higher-level language if that is what you want. The language only shapes your thinking as much as you let it. You'll probably be a better programmer in that language if you let it shape how you write code in that language, though.
One famous example is the Guugu Yimithirr language[0], which uses absolute directions (North, South, East, West) instead of relative ones (left, right, in front of, behind). So one would say, "Can you pass me the salt to your North?" As a result, people in these cultures are constantly keeping track of which way North is: their language forces them to.
Interestingly the street grid isn't a language feature.
I live in a grid-based city and I would dispute that. I'm pretty comfortable with cardinal directions but that hasn't been true of nearly anyone I've tried to provide directions to.
As you say, this isn't a language feature. For me the concepts of N,E,W,S and the easy visualization matters more than my language. I picture a map, but not the words on the map.
It sounds like you're not a native -- in your observation, is the ability to navigate easily in the 'rotated downtown' area correlated with having grown up nearby?
That would make a cool study.
There is a link between whether a culture's language requires temporal markers and various economic markers.
"For example, a German speaker predicting rain can naturally do so in the present tense, saying: Morgen regnet es which translates to ‘It rains tomorrow’. In contrast, English would require the use of a future marker like ‘will’ or ‘is going to’, as in: ‘It will rain tomorrow’" [1]. It is found that "speakers of [timeless] languages: save more, retire with more wealth, smoke less, practice safer sex, and are less obese."
[1] http://www.anderson.ucla.edu/faculty/keith.chen/papers/Langu...
Obviously as a species we can develop concepts we have no words for to begin with, this is evolution. But that would also mean that they can evolve separately, which in turn means different languages can have different concepts that can't be translated. At least not without detours, or loss of meaning. Much more abstract concepts than airplanes.
I remember asking my friends the other day: "is there a word for karma, that also encompasses the effects your poor actions have on innocent people around you?"
That is a concept very closely related to a concept we already have a word for, so it wasn't too difficult to explain. What I imagine it really means is that there could be concepts I can't even fathom because my imagination is only articulated in the languages I understand.
Ps. The word we ended up with was "splash karma" or "collateral karma".
—
'I push his head back' and 'I drop it in water and it floats,' though very dissimilar sentences in English, are similar in Shawnee. The point of view of linguistic relativity changes Mr. Everyman's dictum: Instead of saying "Sentences are unlike because they tell about unlike facts," he now reasons: "Facts are unlike to speakers whose language background provides for unlike formulation of them."
We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity, which holds that all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated.
From this fact proceeds what I have called the "linguistic relativity principle," which means, in informal terms, that users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward different types of observations and different evaluations of externally similar acts of observation, and hence are not equivalent as observers but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world.
Concepts of "time" and "matter" are not given in substantially the same form by experience to all men but depend upon the nature of the language or languages through the use of which they have been developed.
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