Our Language Affects What We See
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
Because I distinguish between light blue and blue, I'd keep calling something "light blue" even when people in my extended family who don't speak Russian will start saying "this is green now". Sometimes we have silly arguments about that which is fun.
Another one I like is the color between yellow and green. Russian has the word "salatoviy" (салатовый) translated as "salad green". I always see it that way even when not thinking or speaking Russian and I'd tell people something is "salad green" and they'd respond with "huh? oh you mean yellow..."
In English this is often called chartreuse or pear. (Ignore the web/CSS color “chartreuse” which is hilariously terrible, like pretty much all of the named web colors.)
Although I know what both of these objects are, and think it seems like an accurate descriptor, I have honestly never once heard those used as colors (so I'd hesitate to say "often"). Wikipedia agrees on this usage though, so maybe it's just me who hasn't heard it...
And English has "mint green" and "lime green", "sea foam green" "neon green" all representing different variants of green. For blue we have aqua, royal blue, periwinkle, powder blue, baby blue etc.
The perceptual difference is microscopic, and I certainly wouldn't take it as far as the statement in the headline, but it does seem like the difference is there.
* Russian has two words, goluboy for light blue and siniy for dark blue.
I think one interesting example of where the linguistic hints is overridden by the cultural milieu is in the term ski mask. Picture someone wearing a ski mask; what is he about to do: ski down the mountain, or rob a bank? I suspect most people associate the ski mask more readily with a bank robber (particularly the three-hole variant) than a warm weather gear that you might use if the windchill is going to be below 0°F. (I personally use the term balaclava instead of ski mask, though I know there's a large segment of the population who doesn't know what a balaclava is). In that case, the linguistic clue of "ski" is less important than the fact that the main context people see it in is when people are concealing their identities to rob banks in movies.
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To determine if words were being automatically (and perhaps unconsciously) activated, the researchers added the following twist: they asked their Russian participants to perform a verbal task at the same time as making their perceptual discrimination. This condition eliminated the reaction time advantage of contrasting goluboy and siniy. However, a nonverbal task (a spatial task) could be done at the same time while retaining the goluboy/siniy advantage. The dual task variants indicated that the task of discriminating color patches was aided by silent activation of verbal categories.
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To determine if words were being automatically (and perhaps unconsciously) activated, the researchers added the following twist: they asked their Russian participants to perform a verbal task at the same time as making their perceptual discrimination. This condition eliminated the reaction time advantage of contrasting goluboy and siniy. However, a nonverbal task (a spatial task) could be done at the same time while retaining the goluboy/siniy advantage. The dual task variants indicated that the task of discriminating color patches was aided by silent activation of verbal categories.
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The point is that influence is there, working away all the time in thousands of ways we don't understand. Maybe it all adds up to nothing. But the "small differences" in experiments like these don't prove that. You could have hugely important global effects while still seeing small experimental differences for something like reaction time to shades of blue.
Maybe the tiny, inconsistent effects do add up to something. Maybe there are hugely important global effects. But no one has ever identified them in a reproducible way.
So is it your opinion that Sapir Whorf is fundamentally just not true? What is happening when we learn a new concept or new word and start seeing things differently or noticing something more often? In your opinion what is the correct way to think about that if it's not language influencing thought/perception?
So when you learn a new concept via language, it can have a dramatic effect on your life. But whether you learn it in English or Russian isn't going to make a huge difference, because they aren't that different in terms of what they can express easily.
For example, if you take examples of so-called "untranslateable" words, usually you can translate them pretty easily. German has the word "Fernweh" which means longing for a distant place in the same way that nostalgia means longing for home. No direct English equivalent, yet I was able to express it in English in a few words with no trouble. We have yet to find a word which is completely untranslateable, or a word in one language which could only be translated into another language by means of hundreds and hundreds of words.
So language can have a big effect without the differences between human languages being so important.
Similar logic to the Invariance Theorem for Kolmogorov complexity[0], which essentially states that the programming language you use to calculate the complexity (description length) of an object doesn't matter much, because Turing-complete languages can all simulate each other. Human languages are capable of simulating each other very well.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity#Invarian...
> German has the word "Fernweh" which means longing for a distant place in the same way that nostalgia means longing for home.
While I agree almost any concept can be translated in a phrase or sentence, I do still wonder if the difference between a single word and a phrase can be substantial. In the sense that you are more likely to use and think of a single word that really nails the description of a feeling or situation.
To take the canonical example of schadenfreude, I definitely "saw" that situation more often after learning the word, even though the concept, expressed less succinctly, wasn't novel to me. Poetic or catchy phrases can have the same effect. Or an undue persuasive effect: "If the gloves don't fit, you must acquit."
For me it's "homesickness." People might ask me if I'm feeling homesick, but the concept just doesn't click for me. I can use the word in a sentence but it somehow feels made up.
But what if it's between very different languages like English and Hopi, or some tribal tongue from the depths of the Amazon?
Russian and English have quite a lot of cultural mixing. The strong claims I or hear are that some tribe has no concept of time or counting, or that the Ancient Greeks didn't have a word for blue, and thus Homer talked about the sea being the color of blood wine, or whatever it was.
A really interesting one that I only vaguely recall is a tribe that always specified the direction they were coming from when meeting someone. An anthropologist studying them had to learn to be able to always know what direction, and she claimed that eventually she acquired something like a bird's eye view in her mind of the area in order to accomplish that. Which was second nature to the natives. Not that it was mystical, but just some mental ability to conceptualize direction from a different perspective.
No need to go that far. How many people know the difference between machine code and assembly? Between an interpreter and a compiler? Between iteration and recursion? All of those are English words, and yet you'd see a stark difference between the ability of a programmer and a layperson to make use of these concepts.
The problem with theories of linguistic relativism is that they tend to ignore that humans will create new words for themselves when they really need to. When a group of people performs badly at a task they don't have the words to describe, it's more likely that the task hasn't been important enough for them to come up with the words, than that they're actually limited by their current vocabulary.
Talk of tribes not having words for time has not been substantiated. Time is a very useful concept no matter how you are living.
It is true that there are tribes without number words, and indeed they don't know how to count and have trouble differentiating quantities above like 5. This is the most dramatic Whorfian effect I know of. Paper: http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Mail/xmcamail.2014-12.dir/pdf2Yb7JA...
(But if you put Westerners through verbal interference, so they can't count sub-vocally, their behavior patterns look similar!)
And there are languages where direction is always expressed in terms of an absolute north-south-east-west grid rather than relative left-right: the Whorfian effects from these languages are more controversial.
Even when the language you speak doesn't have this requirement, you can still pick up this skill. When you live for a few years in a cold square-grid city like those of northern China, you learn to always know which way is north so you don't lose direction walking around connector overpasses and subway tunnels in the winter.
"Beware of the Turing tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy." Alan Perlis [1]
Do we? How do you explain the existance of words like "get", "fuck", "buffalo", "dharma", "karma", "tao", "таковам"?
Each of these have numerous meanings, which could individually be translatable in another language with very short phrases, but if you want to translate the general cluster you will need pages and pages in a dictionary I think ...
With no trouble, or with a single word? In a way you didn't translate the word, you translated the definition, but even apart from mixing up nostalgia and homesickness, it's still far from making the meaing clear IMO. I would describe Fernweh more for longing for not being where you are, wanting to be where it's very different (you wouldn't have Fernweh for an exact clone of your current surroundings no matter how far away it is).. I can't define it well, but I know it's not longing for some specific distant place, and the way you phrased it, it could be understood that way. Some interwebs use "wanderlust" as the English translation for Fernweh, but in German, at least to me, Wanderlust and Fernweh don't mean quite the same thing, though even that would be better than leaving it at "longing for a distant place".
Sure, you can explain every word with hundreds of words if need be, but even then that's not the same.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7k3lOLV0Des
Ich hab Heimweh / Fernweh? / Sehnsucht / Ich weiß nicht, was es ist
And how can you ever know for sure you grok it all, and not just what fits into the toolset you have? I'm not even sure two random people can necessarily meaningfully communicate about the actual depths of their experiences, even if it's in their native language.
> How could the idea come up that humans can communicate with each other through letters! One can think of a person that is far away, or touch a person that is close by, everything else is above the power of humans.
-- Franz Kafka
Nevermind letters and the other technology he was on about there, are even spoken words really that different? How can language achieve what even science can't?
> The modern astrophysical world view, which began with Galileo, and its challenge to the adequacy of the senses to reveal reality, have left us a universe of whose qualities we know no more than the way they affect our measuring instruments, and — in the words of Eddington — "the former have as much resemblance to the latter as a telephone number has to a subscriber." Instead of objective qualities, in other words, we find instruments, and instead of nature or the universe — in the words of Heisenberg — man encounters only himself.
-- Hannah Arendt, "Vita Activa"
> If I express a feeling with a word, let us say, if I say "I love you," the word is meant to be an indication of the reality which exists within myself, the power of my loving. The word "love" is meant to be a symbol of the fact love, but as soon as it is spoken it tends to assume a life of its own, it becomes a reality. I am under the illusion that the saying of the word is the equivalent of the experience, and soon I say the word and feel nothing, except the thought of love which the word expresses.
-- Erich Fromm
Even if you add body language to it, pheromones, so-called shared experiences (you can't share experiences, nothing can occupy the same space at the same time), and so on, I don't think it fundamentally changes. With good friends, people who spend a lot of time in physical vicinity, it quickly approaches something that feels very intimate, where you can communicate a LOT with just a nod or a grunt and actually know how it will be understood. But "a lot" isn't "everything". Simulating "very well" isn't actually "being interchangeable".
I think there is no harm in accepting that. There is a lot of demonstrable harm of confusing symbols and things, on the other hand. That's why, even though as usual I don't really understand what Kafka is talking about (at least I would never be sure I do), I think he is on to something here:
> When you stand before me and look at me, what do you know of the pain in me, and what I do I know of yours. And if I threw myself to the ground before you and cried and told you, what would you know more of me than of hell, if somebody told you that it is hot and terrible. For that reason alone we humans should should face each other so reverend, so thoughtful, so loving as if facing the gates of hell.
-- Franz Kafka
But it is not hard to translate between languages within the same epsilon of error that holds for translation between speakers within a language.
Though I haven't heard of (or looked for) whether this affects recognition to any extent.
not sure how it gives me super powers that there are different words for different shades
I guess the difference is what is considered a shade and what is considered a separate color?
In my native Polish we have siny (same root as the Russian word, but it's a rarely used word), niebieski (general word for blue), granatowy (navy blue - sometimes considered a separate color).
If you asked me to describe a light blue car I would more likely say "niebieski" than "siny". But if it was a dark blue car I would likely call it "granatowy", not "niebieski".
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigo , especially https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indigo#Classification_as_a_spe...
Really the named rainbow colors should just end at “blue”, or if you like can include one more color name for very dark and intense “indigo” or “violet” or “purplish blue” (pick your favorite one extra name) but Newton wanted to have 7 color names for aesthetic/numerological reasons.
The best we can do at rendering a spectrum on a computer display is something like https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/3/3f/Jacobolus_spe... but the far ends of the spectrum are not possible to render very accurately.
To a Russian speaker, calling these colors by the same name seems absurd.
put another way, one can easily counter that the flag and the sky handily share similar saturation of the same hue, differentiated only by the value of darkness.
take it one step further, and the sky at dusk will drop its brightness, and even if only for a moment, match the flag’s deeper blue, until the sun completely sets and the night sky becomes black, when not contaminated by light pollution.
Even if you limit the discussion to cloudless skies between an hour after dawn to an hour before dusk, there is extreme variation.
"Did you see that cyan car that drove by?" is not something the majority of people in US might say while in Russia they will use the adjective goluboy and would say it is a completely different color from dark blue.
Printers needed a technical term for this color which they wanted to distinguish from common blue pigments used in painting so they pulled the Greek word for blue.
It shouldn’t be used to refer to a broader color category, and definitely should not be used to refer to blue–green colors. For that stick to blue–green, greenish blue, or teal.
Similarly magenta is a colorful moderately purplish red color, again of medium lightness (named for a famously bloody battle). Again printers adopted this as a technical term because it is a bit different than the “red” pigments commonly used in painting.
The names “cyan” and “magenta” really should not be used to refer to additive mixtures like sRGB #00FFFF or #FF00FF. These colors are unrecognizably far away from printing ink colors.
For a while now I thought it was an area I would probably enjoy learning more about. What really got me going was actually reading the Russian Blues paper mentioned in the article, after it was featured on Fermat's Library a few months back(https://fermatslibrary.com/s/russian-blues-reveal-effects-of...). It is a super interesting intro paper to linguistics and the methods they used to evaluate differences between languages are quite clever.
In college, I took a course on Chinese literature, translated into English. A couple of the stories relied on a plot twist regarding the gender of one of the main characters. Unfortunately, the plot was given away early in both because it was obvious the translator was going through great pains to avoid gendered pronouns in English.
By coincidence, I spent a long time reading various sci-fi books consecutively which each had nonstandard approaches to gender. One book series (Ancillary Justice) used she/her pronouns for all characters because the protagonist's culture did not have the social concept of gender, and in-story the protagonist mentions the choice of using female pronouns when translating the story into English. In many Greg Egan books, most of the characters are uploaded human minds or AIs which exist independently of any specific body or avatar, so traditional gender norms don't necessarily apply. In some Greg Egan books, the protagonist and some characters were agendered and used unconventional pronouns such as ve/ver/vis. In another Greg Egan book, none of the characters had gender, and male and female pronouns were used seemingly randomly and often changed for individual characters in text and dialog (I assume there may have been some grammatical, social, or situational pattern or intention to it).
These books each had interesting worlds that captivated me (for non-gender-related reasons). I often visualized scenes in my head and day-dreamed about the possibilities with the stories' technologies and characters. I quickly noticed that my mind usually wanted to use the characters' genders as the first step in picturing how a scene would look and play out. These books rarely answered the question of characters' genders (at least not in a way that matched up to my cultural expectations), so I had to break that habit in order to really get into the stories. I had to really think about the dynamics between the characters in order to imagine the books' scenes instead of doing my usual pattern-matching of scenes against preconceptions of how male and female characters interacted.
I think this shift in thinking stuck with me. The "male" and "female" buckets in my mind became much less defined. I think I truly internalized that those mental buckets are just shortcuts that we over-rely on. It became increasingly obvious to me that neither gender had an exclusive claim to any quality that I previously considered gendered, including qualities that I was attracted to. Long story short, I'm now in a same-sex relationship and identify as bisexual. It didn't occur to me as a possibility before these books. I know some people will read this and decide this all must mean that I was always wired up to be bisexual and in denial until now, but I don't think it's that. I believe the mind is much more plastic and malleable than most people think, but our culture rarely gives the opportunities to put this plasticity to use.
You create complex neural networks that process this sensory data.
It is incredible how we see an image with text on it and text just pop out effortless in Mandarin or English, Russian or Spanish.
But IMHO, it is not speaking spoken languages that will give you an edge, because they all are similar, but knowing the different languages of very different fields.
For example a Musician speak the language of Music, tones, frequencies,Harmonics. It works in the same way, after lots of practice it becomes second nature to understand complex patterns in the world.
There is a language of science, understanding orders of magnitude, entropy, energy, numbers in general, experiments, errors.After lots of practice, it becomes second nature to you understanding those patterns.
Someone who works with people or animals like dogs could anticipate what they are thinking (or what they will think in the future), just by looking at the body language or speech nuances. After lots of practice, it becomes second nature.
Programmers learn a computer language, and after years of practice, it becomes part of who they are. There are Holy wars in programming because people that master a language feel threatened when this language is attacked, is an attack on themselves.
Can we agree that you only notice what you can put into concepts? and concepts are words that we made up so it follows that a lack of words to describe something will generally make it go unnoticed.
There was an interesting discussion on reddit a while back in regards to Chinese colors (including “qing”) and a really nice data visualization project that attempted to compare Chinese colors with English: http://muyueh.com/greenhoney/ https://reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/4i9ko5/visuali...
Lera Boroditsky (who is mentioned in the SA article) gave a short TED talk about language affecting thinking. In addition to the "Russian blue" anecdote, she also talks about language usage causing heightened perceptions of cardinal directions.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKK7wGAYP6k
(It's an interesting talk but I have no idea how other cognitive scientists judge her research findings.)
But a general good overview of her statements regarding to blame, and why they fail, can be found on LanguageLog [1]. I'd also recommend searching LanguageLog, as there's other articles discussing how she often overstates the conclusions, and how the media takes it ever farther. If you're on Reddit (can't access it currently on work WiFi), search in /r/linguistics and /r/badlinguistics to find even more criticisms of it (and other Linguistic Relativity research).
"Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about."[0]
0 - Benjamin Lee Whorf, http://izquotes.com/quote/355169
Difference in color perception ability is mentioned towards the end.
For those seeking a prior introduction
There are many nuances that imply the importance of particular details in the hidden meaning of the wording. These get easily lost when one does not fully comprehend the language used.
https://blogs.plos.org/neuroanthropology/2015/09/10/asifa-ma...
> Heidegger also referred to the metaphysical manner of thinking in our age as a "one-track thinking," a term which he explicitly associated with technology. (27) In a similar spirit, he called it a "one-sided thinking" that tends towards a "one-sided uniform view" in which "[everything] is leveled to one level," and "[our] minds hold views on all and everything, and view all things in the same way." (28) There is, to be sure, a kind of language that, as the expression of this form of thinking, is itself one-track and one-sided. Heidegger finds one "symptom" of the growing power of the technological form of thinking in our increased use of designations consisting of abbreviations of words or combinations of their initials. (29) It is thus a technological form of language in the sense that it heralds that order in which everything is reduced to the univocity of concepts and precise specifications.
Heidegger labels such interpretations "technological" while remarking that they are a given only "insofar as technology is itself understood as a means and everything is conceived only according to this respect." (30) If our way of thinking is one that values only that which is immediately useful, then language is only conceived and appreciated from this perspective of its usefulness for us. More importantly, this suggests it is the essence of technology as Enframing that somehow determines what he calls the "transformation of language into mere information." (31)
... and ...
> It is within Enframing, then, that "speaking turns into information." Heidegger also spoke of the "language machine" [Sprachmaschine] as "one manner in which modern technology controls the mode and the world of language as such." (33) We can infer that the language machine is one crucial way in which this language of Enframing speaks. (34) With the construction of what Heidegger called electronic brains, calculating, thinking and translating machines, the language machine is made possible insofar as their activities take place in the element of language. The term "language machine" should not be taken as if Heidegger were merely taking about calculators and computers. He referred to machine technology itself as "the most visible outgrowth of the essence of modern technology," (35) and he insisted that the fact ours was the age of the machine was due to the fact it is the technological age, and not vice versa. (36) More importantly, Enframing itself is not anything technological in the sense of mechanical parts and their assembly. Thus, the language of Enframing cannot itself be reduced to anything technological in this narrow sense. Moreover, Heidegger explicitly characterized the language machine as the "technical complex of calculating and translating machines." (37) He also distinguished it from what he called the "speaking machine" or recording apparatus. The distinction is important because he does not see the latter as "intruding into the speaking of language itself." The language machine, on the other hand, does intrude by regulating and adjusting through its mechanical energies and functions how we can use language. (38)
* Neural Darwinism - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_Darwinism
* Eskimo words for snow - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eskimo_words_for_snow
It has been largely established that language structures shape how the brain organizes cognitive reasoning, which in turn shapes the brain and vise versa.
It is less well established that language shapes the data processing of the 5 senses. This is largely due to the trouble of defining what is a distinctive word when comparing languages and relating the resulting vocabulary distinctions to perceptual distinctions in an objective way.
According to that Wikipedia article, it's the Sami languages that have lots of words for snow, though it all critically depends on what you mean by "word", "snow", "language", "have", ... The question "How many words for snow does language X have?" is impossible to answer for many different reasons.
Linguistic determinism doesn't seek to model language.