Lost in Translation
online.wsj.com
online.wsj.com
Perhaps it's time to move beyond the original statement(s) by Sapir and Whorf, beyond the limited interpretation of Linguistic relativity, and to start talking about the bi-directional effects of thought and language.
Those of us who routinely program in significantly different languages know that some languages better suit some tasks. Pure imperative as fundamentally different from pure OO or pure functional. "Thinking in" one langauge colors the way one views/creates solutions and algorithms.
Time to view Chomsky as one, rather limited, point of view, at odds with some of the more recent research.
Some reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
I was wondering how programming languages shape the way programmers think about the world.
For example, does it affect the ways we write?
Slightly off-topic: I made a shortlink doeslanguageinfluence.tk to make it easier to pass this article on.
Has this been considered by linguists?
Pro-tip: if you want a quick way to get more control over your language usage, and a way to escape your national language habits, try to learn Esperanto. It definitely helped me.
And as I know this stuff out of experience for quite some time, you can probably imagine why I don't like Chomsky that much (and for similar reasons, Richard Dawkins... Populistic science sucks :(.)
I am 21 now, I learned Spanish and Portuguese about a year ago, and most languages earlier.
Link to wiki for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pimsleur_method
On the other hand, I think both methods can get at the same aim: massive memorization of both new material and the natural use of patterns.
When we learn a language "from birth" (of course it is more of a 6-year full-time immersion program, which isn't all that amazing in itself than something that happens the day you're born) do we learn the patterns without realizing, or do we literally have to memorize each new adjective ending for nouns in different cases and genders (eg, in German)?
I assume our brains pick up on the patterns, hence why kids make cute mistakes like "I'm the goodest". BUT, as an adult, why not just learn the pattern explicitly AND listen to and participate in lots of conversations AND memorize a lot?
They ALL help. Do as much as you can as often as you can and your learn will spiral out of control awesome ;-)
EDIT: I'm also not sure whether only-memorization to learn patterns works or not. When people say they're "conversational" in 3 months, how much can they achieve in 3 more months? It's a question of whether memorization or whatever process they're using is exponentially scaling. I think that most grammer patterns can be made clear with 3-50 examples, so in the end that doesn't seem that difficult. But I've only had experience memorizing grammer first, with the help of hundreds of examples at the same time, and then producing hundreds of examples myself to become fluid.
Anyway, watch the movie, and pause it whenever something comes up that you don't understand. You can also try watching English movies with French subtitles but it doesn't develop your French ear. Also Google Translate is good practice. Write something in one language and translate back and forth--it does a pretty decent job. Writing in French will force you to use the proper grammer and vocabulary to make the translation come out OK.
I've in my mid 30's and have learned French fluently and advanced Spanish in the past 6 years. Aside from being immersed in the language, finding a girlfriend definitely helps... :)
Finally Meetup.com and Couchsurfing.org can be good resources to meet locals (of both sexes...).
Good luck!
I'm not sure of the reason behind this, but there are also often minor differences in the English audio and subtitles of films, even when the film was originally recorded in English.
The best thing, imo, about this system is that you can forget about it for a month and then, when you try it again, you get back into it in no time. It definitely seems to have the edge over other systems I've tried in getting things into your permanent and automatic memory.
(what does "conversational" even mean? that you've memorized common stranger-conversations, or that you know how to conjugate all present tense verb forms?)
> I'm trying to learn French and it still sucks, after
> almost 3 months in Paris (but not much social contact,
> admittedly, as I came here without knowing any people).
- English from around 10 years, needing about 7 years or more to get to speak it comfortably
- French and German from around 12 years, never liked it really and couldn't speak comfortably yet, only the last 3 years speaking it with more confidence
- Esperanto since about 15 years, got fluent in less than a year and conversational level in a month
- Ido and toki pona in free time online that follows, mostly in mailing list conversations, probably don't really count as they are conlangs
- Spanish and Portuguese since my 20th, both basic conversational level in about a month, my spanish is still conversational but my portuguese is quite reasonable, to the point where non-brazilians accuse me of a brazilian-like accent.
Running my own business, I now find that passive voice is the most diplomatic way to discuss user error. The customer didn't do the wrong thing, e.g., "you made a typo in the shipping address" becomes "the shipping address had a typo". The wrong thing just happened, with no agent bearing direct blame. :)
Great observation. My rule - when I screwed up or something even peripherally related to me got screwed up, I took full accountability. "That's 100% my error, that's not acceptable, and steps A, B, and C are being taken to fix it. Do you think that will fix things?" When a screw up was on the client side, then it was, "Yeah, things get messed up sometimes, things get broken, it happens..." followed by switching to active voice to work it out.
Now I live in a culture where the spoken language is dramatically passive and usually actor-less "Q: walk to the store? "A: Sure, walk together!"
and I am often told that the way I think seems very much like the locals think themselves. But I was already thinking this way in my own language, I was just considered abnormal...
As Charlemagne is quoted in the article to say, "to have a second language is to have a second soul." In a weird way, that's true.
I'm English-Spanish bilingual and I have the same problem. I can chat along in Spanish and then try to translate what was said into English but it doesn't work. I have to rethink it and say it all over again in English.
Spanish and English are a lot closer than English and Korean. Since it happens in both pairs, it's probably a universal problem. Translating is a different skill from bilingualism.
For instance, the statement, "Languages affect how people conceptualize time," is true, according to research, while the statement, "[ethnic group] is the only group of people to feel [some overly specific emotion]," is never true, or at least hasn't been true all the many times I've seen it brought up. (Usually, such claims end up evoking the No True Scotsman fallacy when someone else suggests that maybe members of other ethnic groups are capable of feeling the emotion.) "Cognitive tasks like counting are affected by a person's language," is true, while Orwell's "You can make people more think less by making their language have a staccato rhythm," is not. There's a fine line to walk between recognizing that language and thought are interrelated, and thinking of language as the magical thought-producing-machine that completely determines all mental (and sometimes physiological) functioning.
Finally, a lot of people read "language" and therefore forget the importance of things like dialect and culture. There's a common tendency to become obsessed with 'untranslatability' as a marker of language and forget that a lot of untranslatable utterances are untranslatable not because of an inherent feature of their host language, but because language and culture are also deeply intertwined. If in Russian I made a joke about "preved" or discussed samizdat, and you didn't understand it in translation, it wouldn't be because of any inherent differences in the mental processes of Russian-speakers versus English-speakers, but instead because of cultural differences, which are an incredibly important part of communication.
This is my two cents, I suppose—the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a seductive idea and it's produced a lot of compelling research, but it's very easy to go too far with Sapir-Whorf and turn language into something much more powerful and more magical than it really is.
In recent studies, MIT students were shown dots on a
screen and asked to say how many there were. If they were
allowed to count normally, they did great. [...]
if they did a verbal task when shown the dots—like
repeating the words spoken in a news report—their
counting fell apart. In other words, they needed their
language skills to count.
An important aspect the article doesn't get into is idiomatic languages. English has a rich vocabulary. Some languages with weak vocabulary compensate for this by heavy linking into a story culture. It would be like if we had no word for beautiful, and instead expressed this by saying "your face launches a thousand ships". I'm told Chinese dialects are like this.
I definitely agree on Chomsky. Common structures and dynamics don't necessitate a quasi-Platonic unity.
If the author translated "se le rompío el vaso" then it is not quite "the vase broke itself". The "le" is very important: it indicates who did the breaking, albeit indirectly and indicating an accident. I would translate it as "the vase broke on John" (it broke while he was using it.)
If the author translated "se rompío el vaso", still, "the vase broke itself" is too literal, just as "se venda" is not translated as "it sells itself" (it means "for sale.") "The vase broke" sounds better.
(Also: it's "se vende".)
It seems that in many languages verb tense plops the "when" into one of a few or dozen general buckets. the "when" is then further specified using more words, such as "yesterday" or "next month" or "a long time ago".
I expect Indonesian to simply rely entirely on such "further specification". Or is the sense of time fundamentally different than, say, English? Does anyone know more?
In Dutch (technically not too far from English) we only use past and present tense, and although we can mark the future with a special verb like in English, we often don't do that. It is perfectly possible to mark the time with a time marker then, but often this is not necessary to be understood. Relative time can be enough to be clear for the other. (Like "I am short of bread. So I go to the market and buy some. Then I eat it." is grammatically incorrect English, but easily understood, and a correct formulation in Dutch.)
Esperanto has past, present and future and has the possiblity to note the completeness of an action, but it's not obligatory as in English.
toki pona has no inflection and doesn't indicate time at all. If you want to indicate time, you end up using a complicated grammatical construction of causation. Mostly you just make a general statement or indicate time as something coming before or after something else.
Over time some mark more and others mark less, so what is the trend? How does this stuff arise??
The final position in a Spanish sentence may belong to the subject, an object of any kind, the verb, or a subordinate clause equally easily. Which thing gets that honored position becomes the topic of emphasis for the sentence. Then whichever one comes first (also flexible) gets the second strongest mark. Things that come along in the middle can get much smaller emphasis depending on order. Adjectives and relative pronoun phrases can change emphasis based on order, too.
In Latin, there is almost no natural order needed. Nouns specify their function in the sentence with declension and verbs attach to subjects with their conjugations. Latin poetry can hold a soup of words in almost any order.
In English and Mandarin order matters. But there is little chance to mark the function of words morphologically. Instead the words stay the same and you rearrange them. That means you can't reorder sentences like you could in Spanish or Latin.
Umm.... I disagree. English was around well before I was, and I haven't known anything but it, so to say that I am effecting the language more than it is effecting me seem inherently incorrect.
This article was written on a very different conceptual level than the universal grammar theories so it is really pointless to even mention those theories.
Dr. Chomsky proposed that there is a universal grammar for all human languages - essentially, that languages don't really differ from one another in significant ways. And because languages didn't differ from one another, the theory went, it made no sense to ask whether linguistic differences led to differences in thinking.
I don't see that as bashing. The author is just explaining the chain of reasoning.
Interesting, indeed.