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Comment by sorokod | Hacker News Reader

The article is to a large extent about cause and effect, that the basic assumption is that the cause may be linguistic is odd to me.

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It makes sense to me. It matches my experience. I can't think of examples, sorry, but I do know there have been times I've learnt new categories by words (and of course an explanation of where they differed; the semantics of the words), suddenly distinctions became obvious that weren't before.

I wish I could recall examples, so this is just a vague statement of 'in my experience' but that linguistic distinction creates categories that allow easier 'recognition' of different concepts I'd lumped together before.

I think that a relevant example here would be categorizing "red" and " green" to a colour blind person.

I don't think so, as that categorisation can't be perceived by them. Like, they can't see it.

I'm saying that once 2 categories had been conceptually distinguished, I could split them apart immediately because the difference had been explain, whereas they were amorphously lumped together in my head before. Typically those categories had different words, but even without that the distinction became evident.

It's besides the point, but that's actually not how typical red-green colorblindness works.

We can see both red and green as separate colors, it's just much harder to distinguish them than it is for other people (especially if they are mixed in with other colors).

As far as I understand the physiology, our eyes are much less sensitive to green light, so it just doesn't stand out as much.

Very much on point, and I learned something. Ta.

How could it be something other than linguistic? Do you think it's genetic?

Well, biological.

You're suggesting koreans may be biologically different enough that they see more shades of green than everyone else?

Perception is trained, whether visual, auditory, etc. It's true that people who live next to the sea/ocean are trained to differentiate shades of blue and green much more than people who live in woody areas — shades of greens and yellows become much more sophisticated in such cases. Musicians tends to isolate sounds and timbers better (e.g. with a noisy background, or identifying precise instruments and effects in complex multi-instrumental pieces).

Painters are typically a bunch of good examples of our very subjective color perception.

So, language develops due to the environment it is in, which also affects people's perception? That still doesn't sound biological

human biology adapts to the environment and forms the basic primitive culture. technology for over 10,000 years rapidly mixed cultures and to a lesser extent biologies forming: languages, empires, religions, and ages. the technological process is far more efficient at shaping our cognition than the slower evolutionary one which works through intergenerational selection events. this is a cumulative runaway event which makes sense- given that human intellect is probably a bad mutation for long term fitness and survival, as humans wiped out all of the other humanlike species (and dangerous megafauna) which might have kept us in some ecological niche like the other animals. all living things head towards extinction, but our strategy is to burn up rather than fade away.

Language has nothing to do with biology except in the purest form of it resulting in different meat shapes in your brain. As far as I'm aware, there is absolutely 0 evidence that language can be inherited - anecdotally at least because both my parents can speak French and I can't.

specific languages are the result of history and territory. Language is an innate human capacity. the speed, breadth and depth of acquisition is measured relative to other humans. less methodical than athletics, art, music or mathematics- which are easier to measure. but definitely not as nebulous as influence, attraction, art or leadership- which are just now becoming measurable with proto artificial brains.

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