Comment by howlgarnish | Hacker News Reader

Comment by howlgarnish | Hacker News Reader

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Sorry for the snark, but if you have even a casual interest in linguistics, the concept of linguistic relativity (aka Sapir-Whorf hypothesis), namely that the language you speak determines/affects your world view, has been done to death: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity

This article presents yet another pop-sci version of this, with a fair dose of the "noble savage" trope to boot:

> Our current climate crisis is the direct result of this unbridled exploitation ... the language had a harmonious relationship with the environment ... Could the rich vocabulary of the Inuit inspire us to redefine our relationship with nature?

No, it doesn't work that way, because the strong version of the hypothesis is essentially disproven (in geek terms, all natural languages are "Turing-complete" and can be used to express anything) and evidence even for the weak version is, well, weak. Correlation does not imply causation, and Western culture won't change if we import a few more Inuit words into it.

This is a much more useful expansion of your original comment, thank you! :)

I think there's strong evidence for weak forms of the hypothesis. For example, the available colour names in a language affects the way people classify colours as measured by the way they perform a task in which language is not used. See Guy Deutscher's "Through the language glass" for an overview of this and many other fun things.

There's also the whole business of how propagandists twist language around in order to influence people. How is that not an example of language affecting people's world view?

Well, I don’t think the point was to “import words from a specific language”. That’s a bit too dismissive IMHO.

Anyhow, as an Italian living in the Netherlands, I can tell that to a certain extent this concept does exist: look, people here use the same words for different meanings “in context”. So guess what? Code written by a Dutch often contains a Context object that affects how a generically named Business object behaves.

I wonder how it is in Germany? I guess they don’t use the 80 col code formatting rule :P

"Sorry, but" is a poor substitute for "my bad". The error being pointed out to you is that your tone is dismissive, which this diatribe did nothing to correct. The culture people are trying to cultivate here is one that actively avoids suppressing ideas, and dismissiveness is antithetical to that end.

Furthermore, the conversation on linguistic relativism is far from done and dusted. The distinction you make between "strong" and "weak" forms sort of shows a loose grasp on the subject matter. I'm also more than a little stumped trying to figure out what correlation you meant.

... that's also not what "Turing complete" means.

Correct, I'm dismissive because I don't think the article is saying anything particularly interesting or even correct. You're welcome to disagree, which is why we're arguing here in the comments section :)

As far as I tell (it's not my story after all), the author appears to be asserting that Inuktitut is somehow uniquely in tune with nature in general (dubious) and that we could change the way the Western world acts by absorbing some of those words (which sounds like linguistic determinism to me, not to mention even more dubious).

As for Turing completeness, my off the cuff analogy is that just like any Turing-complete programming language can implement any algorithm, any natural language can state any expressible human thought.

There's a joke in Greenlandic, closely related to Inuktitut, about polysemy. The joke stems from Greenlandic having very little polysemy when it comes to hunting, nature, practicalities and activities, while European languages is quite a bit more polysemic in nature.

I don't know how well this joke translates into English but it works very well in Danish. Here it goes:

> A Danish police officer gets called on the radio by a Greenlandic hunter who has been in an accident. The hunter tells that his partner have fallen into the water and have been pulled up again but might have died from the freezing water. The officer tells the hunter to "make sure he is dead". Over the radio the officer hears a riffle shot and the hunter replies: "There, he's dead now for sure".

The design of Inuktitut and Greenlandic is very in tune with nature but I agree that it doesn't mean you can absorb it's qualities into other languages. That said, doesn't mean you can't learn anything from them, as the author fo the article claims.

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