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Comment by marc_abonce | Hacker News Reader

Intuitively, I agree with the thesis. But the example for Spanish confuses me. One of the illustrations says:

"Absence of negatively biased mental verbs in English slows down the development of Theory of Mind. Children acquiring Spanish (which has verbs indicating false belief) have better performance in false-belief tasks."

But as a Spanish speaker I don't know what verbs is this referring to. On top of my head I can only think of the word "disbelieve" which doesn't have an exact, single word translation, but that's the opposite of what the quote seems to imply. Other verbs like deceive, doubt, misunderstand or imagine do have matching translations in both languages. What am I missing here?

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They gave the example of the verb yiwei in Mandarin. If you say “ta yiwei X” it means “s/he thinks X” with a strong connotation that X is in fact false. The Spanish equivalent is supposed to be the verb creerse [1], like if you say “Juan se cree que lo van a ascender” it means “Juan thinks that they are going to promote him” but with a strong connotation that he won’t in fact be promoted. English doesn’t really have a verb for “think” with the connotation that the belief is false. The claim (for what it’s worth, I am skeptical) is that English speakers are slower to learn the concept that someone can have a false belief, because English lacks such a verb.

[1] according to https://ojs.ub.uni-konstanz.de/sub/index.php/sub/article/vie... for example. I don’t know enough Spanish to say if the verb really works this way. Verbs like this are called “contrafactive”

Asking which-eth is hard in English but easy in Tamil. I’m going to tell everyone that this is why list.indexOf is slow.

> English doesn’t really have a verb for “think” with the connotation that the belief is false.

How does yiwei/creerse differ from "Juan doubts that they are going to promote him"?

Quite a bit, actually. It shows that Juan is aware of it, whereas in the Spanish equivalent he may actually believe it, even though it still is false. In a way you are very much illustrating the GP's point. And if I got it wrong then I am doing the same :)

Hah, now we have anecdotal evidence.

Juan does not doubt, the speaker does.

Note that creerse is creer+se.

TIL thanks, but the evidence is weak I'm afraid. English isn't my mother tongue, and it's 6am here. I misread that this "strong connotation" was about the subject (Juan) and not about the object (Promotion).

In "yiwei"/"creer" case, Juan believes that they are going to promote him (but his belief is not very well calibrated and is likely false). yiwei/creerse asserts something about the truth value of the belief, in addition to what the belief is.

In the "doubts" case, Juan believes that they are not going to promote him. There is no assertion regarding the truth value of that belief.

just to be sure. are you a native english speaker? only speak english?

The English term is misthinks or misbeliveves.

When they say "English", they mean the language people call English today, not the language that was called "English" in the 17th century.

In that case, "fantasize", "dream", or "wish" are verbs that come to mind for believing a lie.

"You wish" is a common retort for making an untrustworthy claim of belief, especially of an unrealistically rewarding future.

> English doesn’t really have a verb for “think” with the connotation that the belief is false

Really? Huh, maybe. I suppose, guess, imagine, assume, opine, claim, that none of these verbs carry a strong enough connotation of falsehood. There's take for granted, but it's unwieldy. I fancy that the verb fancy would be very suitable for the job, but it makes one sound like an 1850s Southern Belle.

Oh yeah, "creerse" and "creérsela" definitely have different connotations from "creer" even if they're technically conjugations of the same verb.

I found an article that offers "fall for it" as a translation for "creérsela" (te la creíste/se la creyó) and I agree.

https://www.tellmeinspanish.com/grammar/creer-vs-creerse/

In the form of "creerse" it can also mean "believe in yourself" which used to have the same connotation of being mistakenly overconfident, although in the last couple of years I've started to see more "debes de creértela" Linkedin memes which have the opposite (true belief) connotation, more like "fake it till you make it".

If anyone's confused, don't worry. This verb always means "believe", the only difference is in the subtle connotations but they never affect the actual meaning.

The English approach here, as with other linguistic matters, is to solve the problem by using more words.

"Juan thinks they are going to promote him, but I'm not so sure."

Spoken English can easily express that meaning without the additional words by putting the stress on either “thinks” or maybe “they”.

Granted this doesn’t address the claim of the original post.

I'm not a native speaker but even for me it's obvious you can just say "naively thinks".

> If you say “ta yiwei X” it means “s/he thinks X” with a strong connotation that X is in fact false.

I was interested to learn just now that Chinese dictionaries don't bother to mention this. I assume the reason is that the analogous construction in Classical Chinese has no such implication.

By contrast, Chinese-English dictionaries vary from noting that 以为 "usually" refers to mistaken belief to outright defining it that way.

English has words that are both connotative and denotative for “they think X” where X is false. The denotative verbs are simply “misbelieve” or “misthink” if you know it is false.

The connotative form which immediately comes to mind is the various forms of “notion”. Its primary use case is to indicate that the thing it refers to is likely false and has no connection to reality.

I've never encountered these words until now.

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