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Comment by throw4629294 | Hacker News Reader

I've worked with both extensively with both groups of French and German researchers at an English speaking lab and there were some noticeable oddities. The Germans never spoke German, even afaict in one-to-one conversations (say, at the desk next to me when debugging). The French were much more committed to their language and would speak French all the time, including in public slack channels and often at lunch if there was a large enough minority at the table.

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> The Germans never spoke German, even afaict in one-to-one conversations

This is fairly standard etiquette everywhere I've been in Central and Northern Europe.

The general idea is that it would be rude to have a one on one _next_ to you in a language that you might not understand.

Also in general I think people that only speak one language always assume other people are bad mouthing when usually people are just talking about random trivialities or some work/life problems. So it's always safer to keep everything in English.

This cliché is not such a faux pas if you make an effort of comprehension, since half of English is just mispronounced French.

And the remainder is mostly mispronounced German or Danish.

Et alors ? Quel est le rapport avec la choucroute ?

Sauerkraut toi même, je trouve ce factoid assez intéressant.

Je ne suis pas convaincu, j'ai plutôt tendance à voir les Français se taire en présence des non-francophones pour éviter le jugement des autres Français aux alentours (qui se feront un plaisir de se gausser de votre accent ou de la moindre bévue).

Je n'ai jamais entendu un Français "se gausser", je pense que c'est surtout un complexe d'infériorité que beaucoup de Français ont, et qui pensent qu'ils s'humilient en ne parlant pas comme la reine d'Angleterre.

Alors là pas de soucis: serendipity, abate, etc... https://wordwarriors.wayne.edu/list

Language is not a neutral medium. Languages induce a different way of thinking, different ways of solving problems, different ways to approach interpersonal behavior. Some languages will have vocabulary that doesn't exist in others, producing original concepts. Same goes with grammar, where many languages have very subtle and specific ways of representing time, classification, or logic, for instance.

You can read "Contre la Pensée Unique", of Claude Hagège (linguist at Collège de France) about it. He introduces the concept of "Galapagos effect", where linguistic differences with links and informational bridges lead to more innovation due to diversity of thoughts.

As a sidenote, speaking in your native language is always easier than speaking in english or any other language. If your mother tongue happens to be a language very well suited for science and mathematics, like French is, why speak english? Especially with other french speakers.

Related video which I just remembered: https://youtu.be/CmZdGo6b5yA?si=k67_azS5gwUvQJuq

So it seems languages might not change how you think, but might be able to emphasize certain aspects of things like you allude to (I believe).

Japanese gendered language: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_differences_in_Japanese

"African time" and its relation to language: https://wireilla.com/physics/ijrap/abstract/10321ijrap01.htm...

Personality modulated by language: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/136700691243889...

Of course, if you, as a dictator, ban the word "sad" and the adjacent synonyms, people won't stop feeling sad. However, it's likely that they won't be able to reflect on what they feel, which in turn will change the way they think. And it's likely that the psychologists of this country will have a much harder time healing their patients or writing papers about depression.

I was curious about this because it describes what I have always heard as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which has always been controversial and was out favor during the 1960s through 1980s. I looked up the Wikipedia article on linguistic relativity, which is apparently the proper name for it, and found that recent studies had actually confirmed the weak form of this hypothesis, that language can shape cognition. There is however evidence against the strong form of this hypothesis, which is that language can limit or preclude cognition.

So I'm left to conclude that the parent post saying that thinking in a particular language could lead to insights that wouldn't happen with a native speaker of another language, is not wrong. However it would be wrong to think that the speaker of that other language could not understand that insight, once explained. (Which is not at all what the parent said; I'm just fleshing this out for my own understanding.)

The “evidence” for this is pretty simple for anyone who has lived and learned different languages. It's the reason learning ancient Greek was for a long time a necessary step for European's elites, since the Roman Empire - the language was deemed to be a better medium of thought. For instance, there are multiple declinations of the word "love", with, for each, a subtle flavour, that is difficult to replicate precisely in English, and even harder in other languages : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_words_for_love

A language that insists a lot on the logical aspect of the sentence, such as French, will lead the speaker to think more logically. A language that makes it easy to create new words, such as German, will help the speaker to create new concepts.

A speaker of a language where time is represented linearly (say, Indo-Europeans), will think differently about it, compared to someone who speaks a language where the concept of time is much more relativistic. There is a plethora of literature regarding “African time” and why westerners have a hard time to understand African's view of punctuality because of this.

The same goes with personality, it's common that people have different personality depending on the language they speak! I'm personally much more polite in English, as the use of conditionals is much easier than in my native language (French). Some languages are also meant to be spoken differently depending on the sex of the speaker - Japanese comes to mind.

Does that mean that some things can't be translated? Not necessarily, but there's always something lost in translation, along with friction. No language is also “Turing complete”, and there's not a pure 100% overlap between every language. For instance, Estonian has no native word for art because of its peasant origins, and had to borrow the German "kunst"!

There's also a “bandwidth” aspect - some languages are slower to convey information, while others are faster. French is one of the fastest, and if you know French top-engineers, you know that they tend to speak FAST on top of this! ;-)

As such, if your mother tongue is a good language to do science (French) in, and you're discussing with a fellow native speaker, it's preferable to speak in it rather than in English. It's also much more comfortable, and the cultural proximity allows for a better work atmosphere and relationships. Which probably leads to better-performing teams as well.

Ceci.

n’est pas une pipe.

Le mec se plaint des gens qui parlent leur langues. Ok.

"Je suis allé dans leur pays et vous savez quoi ! Ils parlaient leur langue entre eux - au lieu de parler ma langue à moi, comme des gens civilisés !"

Sacrebleu

I've just attended a conference in France this week, can confirm, seems pretty accurate.

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