Language Can Give You Super Mind Powers
weblog.noahburney.com
weblog.noahburney.com
German as a second language was mandatory for all elementary pupils in fourth, fifth, and sixth grade in my childhood school district, very unusual for the United States. I had more German in junior high and senior high (in two different states) and then Russian in senior high. I entered university as a Russian major and immediately began taking Chinese, switching my major to Chinese as I grew in delight for that language. I have had formal instruction as an adult in Modern Standard Chinese (a.k.a. Mandarin), Cantonese, Biblical Hebrew, Literary Chinese, Attic Greek, Biblical Greek, Japanese (first in the medium of Chinese, then in English), Taiwanese, and Hakka, and various courses in linguistics (also in the mediums of both English and Chinese). I have engaged in self-study of Biblical Aramaic, Mongolian, Spanish, French, Latin, Hungarian, Malay-Indonesian, Esperanto, Interlingua, etc., etc., etc.
I have to respectfully disagree with the strong version of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. Within each language grouping, people differ far more in their personal thinking along the dimension of visual thinker or not, or auditory thinker or not, than people differ from one another in thought patterns based on language background. But it is useful to learn another language and to live in another culture for exposure to new basic assumptions, and the same applies to learning computer language paradigms. People who program for a living, or who program just for fun, may like the books
http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Language-Pragmatics-Third-...
or
http://www.amazon.com/Essentials-Programming-Languages-Danie...
among other books on programming languages mentioned here on HN as examples of overviews of different approaches to high-level computer programming languages facilitating different kinds of programming problem-solving.
The case of human languages is quite a bit different. All human languages are constrained by the biology of the human brain, and human ear and human vocal tract (or hands and arms, in the case of sign languages for the deaf), and all human languages, without exception and even if they are constructed languages, have ambiguities and illogical features inconsistent with other features of the language. Many of the faults of Esperanto are very well documented,
http://www.xibalba.demon.co.uk/jbr/ranto/
and the Lojban promoters I have met online since 1994 have repeatedly demonstrated lack of logical capacity (at least in our common language of English) in a manner that puts me off from learning Lojban.
Learning a new cultural perspective by living in a new culture and learning the predominant language there is a very good idea, and highly educational. But the incidental features of one language as contrasted with another have no necessary relationship to how speakers of each language think, or how they can think.
Regarding constructed languages, I like Interlingua the best, but nobody knows it. It certainly appears to me to be both easy to learn and productive, but I'm very poor at it. I tried Esperanto a while back, but didn't like it.
Lojban, I think, is great fodder for science fiction. Unfortunately, the language was designed without any real interest in how the human brain processes language. It's full of wizzy tricks and neat stuff, and I like the idea of it, but it seems to resist being learned. When I was last looking into it ~2 years ago, there had essentially been one actual conversation in it, and there was reason to suspect the participants were talking past each other. I do think one could create an actual language from Lojban, but it would have to have a really restricted subset of the grammar.
Anyway, thanks for your insights. I often wish I had put the energy into human languages I put into programming languages.
>An Australian Aboriginal tribe, The Guugu Yimithirr, famously have no words for left, right, in front of or behind. They use north, east, west, and south instead. And as a result: they develop an internal compass—always knowing which way is north, even if you blindfold them and spin them around.
I for sure don't know the direction after being spun blindfolded :)
(edit: grammar)
More like they're acutely sensitive to external cues like their shadow (position of the sun) and other subtle details of the landscape. Their language just seems to reinforce that more subliminal attentiveness to these cues.
I found this to be one of the more interesting points made in the RadioLab story: while the majority of the limited number of modern languages in use today do not have this spatial-directional feature, it seems to have been a feature of a large number of the languages that have ever existed. (Edit: per Dr. Lera Boroditsky [great website: http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~lera/], it's a third of the world's (current?) languages, though not speakers.)
Which makes sense. Imagine our unsettled, migratory ancestors trying to keep their bearings without the aid of compasses or standardized maps. One of the first features you'd probably ask for in your language is a feature that helps you keep track of your approximate location.
Radiolab link: http://www.radiolab.org/2011/jan/25/birds-eye-view/
That's confusing how they achieve it (the cues) with why they developed the ability (need to know for proper communication, maybe for the reason you mention).
You can hear her account around 30 minute mark of this RadioLab episode: http://www.radiolab.org/2011/jan/25/birds-eye-view/
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870346730457538...
suggests that speakers of all these languages share the good spatial orientation abilities. Anyway it's true then that my argument doesn't hold. One should first verify if there is a subset of nomadic peoples that lack this language feature, and that they have poorer orientation abilities.
So the OP might very well be right: maybe we can hack our minds to get new abilities simply by changing our language. Maybe not much beyond this spatial orientation example, but who knows...
A great answer for the perennial questions "why should I learn math or science." It changes the way you think -- only instead of learning about culture you learn about patterns and nature.
I got a physics degree before leaving the field. People who didn't take science ask if I still use it. How do I answer so they'll understand that I use it in every thought?
I agree completely. And I would certainly agree that learning to think in Math/Biology/Evolution is just as important as learning to think in French.
Slightly related, one of the reasons I love English so much is that there are so many words and the creation of new words is not discouraged. There are an enormous amount of ways to describe how a thing is or how we feel and I think a certain level of expressiveness is very important for doing good work.
By the same token, knowing the language of say evolution or math - knowing all the terms and how to describe what's going on - can be just as important for say visual or program design as knowing the more 'industrial' words.
The question is: how and by how much?
(could you please post links to best 2-3 studies)
There is already an artificial language out there: Esperanto http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esperanto . From what I remember from language students, it's pretty much a failure.
Also, do you have any concrete ideas/point of action to do that? Do they work?
And yes, there has been a long and somewhat-pointless philosophical struggle by people who take language as more important, and those who take technology as more important. I remember discussing this with a Swedish man who insisted that we thought of everything in language, and I was insisting instead that I think in thought, which does not necessarily map to language. What finally seemed to make him uncertain about his own hard-line position was to just say, "look, I sometimes have the experience that I don't know how to put my thoughts in words. And I at least appear to be monolingual. It sounds like you're saying that this should be literally impossible. My thoughts are always in English, how could I ever have problems encoding them into English?"
Stephen Pinker's works have indirectly shown me one useful thing about these philosophical discussions: it helps to have an idea of Gödel/Turing-completeness[1] in your philosophy of language. The problem with the radical biological innatists[2] and the radical linguistic relativists[3] is that it seems hard to describe how languages evolve under either account. If our languages and proto-languages are in some sense Gödel-complete and can describe anything which is describable, then linguistic evolution just consists of building new language constructs which can more efficiently describe the new technologies -- and these in turn help us in thinking about our new technologies and making even newer technologies. You can also get a good distance in understanding how children acquire language; it's fundamentally similar to the bootstrapping process which gets a computer from being offline to running a modern operating system; a small set of built-in intuitions can construct a model for the entire rest of any logical system.
[1] Gödel's completeness theorem, as distinct from his more famous incompleteness theorem, says that a couple basic laws of logic are all you ever need, and any other logical system can be emulated by just constructing new objects whenever the axioms of the basic system call for them.
[2] something like, "all the concepts which you find meaningful are somehow indirectly encoded in the genome, your words name just those concepts meaningful to you."
[3] something like, "if your language doesn't have a word for X, then you just cannot think about X, full stop."
This is wrong. I speak two languages, so I can tell. Learning the second one didn't change the way I think.
what were the languages? they may be very similar.
Edit: clarity.
About the modes, did you by chance have Russian exposure during childhood (guessing based on your id)... that might account for some degree of integration even if you only became fluent later.