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Comment by Clewza313 | Hacker News Reader

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is that language either influences or constrains the speaker's world view. I don't see the author claiming this: English speakers are perfectly capable of seeing the difference between light blue and dark blue, we just happen to use the same basic word for both.

The bit about words not mapping 1:1 across languages is something every learner will run into though, and it's perhaps most obvious in loanwords, which tend to bring across only one meaning of many. For example, in Japanese handoru (handle) refers exclusively to a car's steering wheel, kanningu (cunning) is cheating on a test, and a beisu-appu (base up) is a salary increase.

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> English speakers are perfectly capable of seeing the difference between light blue and dark blue, we just happen to use the same basic word for both.

The idea is that English speakers identify light and dark as a variation of the same thing.

Are red and pink the same colour or different colours? What if you call "pink" something like "light red" instead? Are they now classified in your brain as two different things or the same one.

Is dark blue and light blue two colours or one? Does "light blue" become a different colour in a person's brain if it's label as azure as in Italian (etc)?

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Azure_(color)

My own pet hypothesis is that it is not just language but our entire culture that creates an O/S for our brain in our early years.

"Restraining world view" seems harsh IMHO. Sounds a little elitist to me. But affecting world-view is possibly correct.

I suspect the plasticity of the brain can overcome some of the things that the original O/S load affects but it seems to require either a big emotional event or real effort by people to undo the initial programming, like being dropped into a new country where you don't know the language but must learn it to survive. We figure it out.

It does beg the question however what are we missing, as a result of our initial programming, that we might want to download an update for. :)

> It does beg the question however what are we missing

Ability to say that certain objects is far from both speaker and listener for example.

Or ability to mention a French coworker in your speech without explicitly mentioning their gender and the whole singular the all together

> Ability to say that certain objects is far from both speaker and listener for example.

Non-native here. I don't quite follow. How about: "The object is far away from both of us.".

The concept is there, but maybe not as a single word. Sure, it might be convenient to be able to say "The object it broscht!", but it would just be syntactic sugar. Not a new concept.

Same for french coworker. Not a new concept.

"French person", "Frenchie", "Cheese eating surrender monkey"

Latter two might be SLIGHTLY inappropriate in a working environment.

> Same for french coworker. Not a new concept.

In English — yes. In Ukrainian or Russian I just can’t omit this information without descending into soul-crashing legalize of “french person“.

The point being —- yes, its possible to say exactly that, but it would either be in a wrong register or too much of words where you could have just one.

In parts of the USA you can say "yonder object" and be understood that it is far away from both of us. It is archaic to most native speakers now.

“Thither and yon” is probably still widely understood

Look at that tree over there.

I worked with a French person once. They were very good at their job.

If you say that languages are how people slice up the world, and this makes different languages harder or easier to learn, you're committing to some form of Sapir-Worf, however mild. "I have the English way of slicing up the world and it's hard to adjust to the Japanese way of slicing up the world".

An alternate explanation is, as I argued, that the differences between human languages are superficial and the underlying (and more interesting) concept of language is the same for everyone. If that's true, the differences between languages are minutia.

> English speakers are perfectly capable of seeing the difference between light blue and dark blue, we just happen to use the same basic word for both.

I remember reading about experiment that proved the opposite in regards to blue color —- speakers of languages with two basic colors for blue were differentiating one from another measurably faster.

No link to it unfortunately.

In English too. Mesa in English is a plateau, while in Spanish it's just a table (furniture), while sierra is not just a mountain range, but a carpenter's saw too.

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