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Comment by ElMocambo_x4 | Hacker News Reader

These studies seem to confirm intuitions that many people have expressed in many ways, especially regarding German philosophers who cannot easily be translated in other languages because of the "analytical" properties of that language.

As someone who speaks several languages it is also very apparent that somehow the infrastructure in the brain must be slightly different for different languages. For instance, to pick German again, when "caching" certain parts of sentences for later processing, which does not exist in other languages.

The brain being a muscle, it is only natural that this would translate in more developed cognitive abilities for those language speakers.

I've heard several takes on Asian students being better than others in maths: one of those argued that both the languages themselves, plus the way they are taught to young kids, could, on the long term, make brains better suited to maths. Would be curious to see such studies on that.

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asian students who matriculate into western unis or all asian students? significant filter skew happening in the former case.

Perhaps related observation, though npt directly addressing the OP topic: STEM programs, as well as medicine - and from personal experience I would argue especially medicine (vs. STEM proper) - rely on curricula that tend to favor humans who are better than most at mimicking computers. Rote memorization (relatively necessary for ideogram-centric writing systems) is rewarded, excursive analysis is not.

> The brain being a muscle, it is only natural that this would translate in more developed cognitive abilities for those language speakers.

Not necessarily: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0956797620903113

Previously discussed here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35681824

This need for "caching", because of verbs being often very far in the sentence structure, is also very common in Latin. That is supposedly why in Italy for a very long time Latin was the main subject in scientific high school (things seem to have changed starting around the mid 2010s, with the introduction of a latin-less scientific school).

On the other side, I was convinced by the research and statements of Andrea Moro (see e.g. https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/noam-chomsky-and-andrea-m...) that anti-universalist claims about language should be taken with more than a grain of salt.

> especially regarding German philosophers who cannot easily be translated in other languages because of the "analytical" properties of that language.

I wonder if the reverse is just as true in other contexts. How do you say "Let's think this through step by step" in German?

„Lass uns das Schritt für Schritt durchdenken.“

Let us this step by step through think.

Interestingely there is this split of the action again so you need to stash away the "let's" in your brain until you know what to "let's" which comes only at the end of the sentence.

In the english version the verb "think through" comes directly after the "let's", so there's no need to cache anything; it seems that is clearer and more direct.

There is some comedy in speeches of the head of state of the GDR - former East Germany - who often read his speeches from paper, and used some veeeery long sentences, spoken slowly and with many pauses. I remember listening and breathlessly waiting for the verb, to finally find out what he actually wanted to say :) Not that it was interesting, it was boring propaganda, I just found this effect so interesting. He used a "sentence melody where every single section ended high, and only at the very end, after a looong sentence, he finally lowered his voice.

Example: https://youtu.be/a5zRik-6eVI

Even without understanding the language, you can recognize the structure. Every sentence is split into short sections, and the end of the sentence is clearly recognizable by the voice finally lowering. You do need some knowledge of German to see that the very important verb is only revealed in this very last part, only then do you know what that entire looong sentence was actually about.

Yeah, this feature of German is annoying. A very similar one is "splittable [trennbare] verbs" where one verb is split into its root and a prefix where in some sentence types, the root goes in front and the prefix goes to the absolute end of the sentence. But you need both to understand the meaning (there are often many variants of the prefixes for one verb root).

Mach das Fenster *auf*. vs. Mach das Fenster *zu*. (Open/close the window). The verbs here are "aufmachen" and "zumachen".

You will need to wait for the (sometimes long) sentence to finish to understand what is being asked for.

As a French living in Germany, the German sentence structure has the interesting side effect that it is way harder to start answering before the speaker finishes his sentence.

In French, you basically listen to 3/4 of the sentence, can guess the end, not wait for it and answer. This makes very "compact" discussing from the "sound" point of view. In German, you mostly need to wait before you answer. So, you have maybe more pauses in between, but then the sentences can have these "composed" words which pack at the word level a lot of meaning in little "sound".

This is the joy of speaking different languages, like the different computer languages, each one brings us diversity. For that, I am happy we do not have a single language on Earth.

> For instance, to pick German again, when "caching" certain parts of sentences for later processing, which does not exist in other languages.

Do you have an example for this?

Gestern bin ich mit dem Freund meiner Mutter, der in dem großen roten Haus im Tal des Berges wohnt, Fußball spielen gegangen.

Literal translation: Yesterday, was I with the friend of my mother, who in the big red house on The Valley of the mountain lives, playing football.

So you get a lot of context before you actually get what happened.

Seems very similar to English subclauses

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