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Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

If you know several different languages, the advantage is not that your view is enhanced, but rather you are more aware of the false contributions of language to thought; you are more aware that some pattern of thinking is just really some linguistic convention and not real semantics.

For instance, you are more likely to spot someone's equivocation: confusing multiple meanings of some term in the same argument. Right away you realize: "Doh, in this other language I know, those two concepts are not even the same word; what he's saying doesn't translate."

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\{tangent on semantics} At first, reading your comment, I pictured a graph of English words and a graph of Japanese words. If these relationships between words define them, then differences in the graphs explains differences in meaning.

But, though it would be neater for language to be defined within itself, words are references to concepts. Hence, it may be that it's not so much that the node doesn't exist in the other graph, but that the referent doesn't exist. It's one graph (words) relating to another graph (concepts).

We could describe a referent in English, but if it is a complex object with complex relations to other objects, this couldn't be brief; and even if we coined a neologism for it, that new word and concept wouldn't be familiar and integrated into our knowledge graph (and, we wouldn't have experienced it anyway, only read of it).

Possibly, English-speaking expats in Japan could develop slang for those concepts... which would only make sense to them. So they'd probably just use the Japanese words.

I was never that good of a Japanese speaker so someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but to me it felt like there was a lot more ambiguity about things in Japanese than in English. And I definitely found when I used it for long periods of time, even my way of perceiving the world around me changed, in a way that seemed closer to how the Japanese I knew perceived it. I never knew if this was a cause or an effect. And I _definitely_ experienced, as you say, knowing that there was no way to translate something to English without losing its Japanese "feeling".

I can relate to this by my experience with Romance languages like Spanish and Italian as they employ the subjunctive mode extensively in their semantics and I'd find myself over time this subjunctive mode/mood creeping into my psyche as I master these langs but lucky me this subjectively negative doubt feeling dissipates as long as I switch back to English* or my native language.

PS: The English language employs subjunctives as well albeit to way lesser degree. Constructs like "He said he would come around this time" is subjunctive in nature.

There are very few differences between German and English, but there are tons of difference between European languages and Asian ones.

I studied in Korea, I was specially interested in Hangul, and found Japanese extremely similar to Korean in the cultural side of things.

For example, there is a iconic concept in the US of "bad guy", "rebel against the world". It simply does not exist in Korea, or in Japan by the way. You can't talk about "bad guys"to them, because it does not exist in their world.

The same happens with different levels of respect and politeness in Japan, it does not match anything the Western world has.

Words are like icons or shortcuts for something the culture has.

The intimate relationships, the families, the social contracts,violence, the way of working... it is simply another world of thinking.

It's funny: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Guy_(TV_series) is a Korean show :)

Interesting... That is what i like of Y.

> For example, there is a iconic concept in the US of "bad guy", "rebel against the world". It simply does not exist in Korea, or in Japan by the way. You can't talk about "bad guys"to them, because it does not exist in their world.

The Japanese are well aware of this because they've seen American movies. The word you want is ヤンキー.

Haven't you seen Akira?

"There are very few differences between German and English,"

While English is, more or less, a simplified version of German I still would not agree to your statement. English has no declension (a simplification of a grammar). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declension

In German it does not make a difference if you say "Dog bites Man" or "Man bites Dog". The word order is very flexible and it is always clear who bites whom. This is a major difference in a language.

The lack of grammatical genders in English is also a significant difference from German, IMHO.

It's interesting that of the largest economies in the world, the non-grammatical-gender languages seem to reign supreme (English, Chinese, Japanese).

Interesting but not surprising, lower barrier of entry, network effect.

"the non-grammatical-gender languages seem to reign supreme " Hm. Seems like bullship.

Portuguese? (Brazil) Russian? I suspect Indian (Hindi) might have genders too. German is not a tiny Economy by the way.

Top 3 are all genderless and, combined, vastly outsize the remaining 7 on the top 10.

I've heard Japanese doesn't really have "curse" words. I can't say how true that is.

This is true. Words like "shit" (くそ) exist, which is fairly tame compared to other languages. One of the worst phrases you can say is basically the command "die" (死ね).

When "cursing" at someone in Japanese, it's more about inflection, tone, and using the social status constructs of the language to talk down to someone. Such as the insanely informal Kansai dialect below:

お前、何をやてねん？！あほやで！ "What are you doing?! Stupid!"

Translated it's pretty tame, but depending on the context this could be quite shocking to the receiver.

I would rather say doesn't translate as is, from my experience in French, English and Amazigh languages (order or proheficiency). It very rare to miss a word except specific things like the famous manyfolds words used by iniuits to describe ice.

edit: added language I know

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