The thesis of this article was also explored in the beautiful, emotional and brain-twisting short story /Story of your life/ by Ted Chiang, with a delicious bit of the principle of least action known from modern classical mechanics mixed in, in which a linguist's perception of time is fundamentally changing in the course of her studies of an alian language. Very much recommended. (This story was the basis for the 2016 movie /Arrival/.)
I speak multiple languages including Russian. I think I discriminate between more colors, just because for a particular color shade chances are one of the languages has different adjectives.
Because I distinguish between light blue and blue, I'd keep calling something "light blue" even when people in my extended family who don't speak Russian will start saying "this is green now". Sometimes we have silly arguments about that which is fun.
Another one I like is the color between yellow and green. Russian has the word "salatoviy" (салатовый) translated as "salad green". I always see it that way even when not thinking or speaking Russian and I'd tell people something is "salad green" and they'd respond with "huh? oh you mean yellow..."
I'm a native English speaker, I was learning Russian while dating a native Russian speaker. One of the lighthearted arguments we got into was whether a particular towel was green or blue. Color is a really easy-to-illustrate example of linguistic axioms differing across languages.
It's very believable that language plays a role. However, such arguments happen between people with the same mother tongue. So those color axioms could be defined on a community, or even a family level. Within a population speaking one language (and having a uniform education likely plays a big role) a particular axiom probably has better chances to become more or less dominant, but still differences are apparently more complex than language -> color.
You're totally right, this was a formative anecdotal experience for me but honestly there's absolutely no control for the experiment. I'm sure I've had the blue vs. green disagreement with non Russian speakers and discarded it. If it weren't already topical (I'm sure we were exploring синий versus голубой) I may not have considered the blue/green towel memorable.
In English this is often called chartreuse or pear. (Ignore the web/CSS color “chartreuse” which is hilariously terrible, like pretty much all of the named web colors.)
> In English this is often called chartreuse or pear.
Although I know what both of these objects are, and think it seems like an accurate descriptor, I have honestly never once heard those used as colors (so I'd hesitate to say "often"). Wikipedia agrees on this usage though, so maybe it's just me who hasn't heard it...
I recall hearing "Ao" was used for both blue and green until recently. "Midori" was used later on as meaning only green. I think it has something to do with plant colors.
I actually heard a lot of silly arguments between people who all have the same native language about orange vs red vs pink, or where is the border between blue and green. So not so sure it's about language, or culture.
> Russian has the word "salatoviy" (салатовый) translated as "salad green"
And English has "mint green" and "lime green", "sea foam green" "neon green" all representing different variants of green. For blue we have aqua, royal blue, periwinkle, powder blue, baby blue etc.
I would guess most languages with a few million speakers have words for a lot of colors. But I think the argument here is that "baby blue" or "sky blue" is not one of English's "base" colors, but is rather within the classification "blue". The difference is subtle, but it's captured in the test mentioned in the article: if I switch from navy to baby blue, and English speaker might clock both as blue. But for a Russian speaker, these would clock as different colors entirely. I believe a similar thing would happen for blue and green between an English speaker and a Japanese speaker.
The perceptual difference is microscopic, and I certainly wouldn't take it as far as the statement in the headline, but it does seem like the difference is there.
Whorfian effects are generally extremely small. If you speak Russian you might be able to discriminate certain shades of blue around 50 ms faster than if you speak English. Maybe language has some low-level effects, but there is no evidence for anything dramatic.
The real problem with a lot of these studies is that it's difficult to distinguish between a linguistic effect versus a cultural effect--does the language distinguish terms because the linguistic community wishes to do so frequently, or does the distinct terms within the language cause the linguistic community to distinguish the terminology? It is my opinion that, most of the time, if not all, it is the culture driving the language.
I think one interesting example of where the linguistic hints is overridden by the cultural milieu is in the term ski mask. Picture someone wearing a ski mask; what is he about to do: ski down the mountain, or rob a bank? I suspect most people associate the ski mask more readily with a bank robber (particularly the three-hole variant) than a warm weather gear that you might use if the windchill is going to be below 0°F. (I personally use the term balaclava instead of ski mask, though I know there's a large segment of the population who doesn't know what a balaclava is). In that case, the linguistic clue of "ski" is less important than the fact that the main context people see it in is when people are concealing their identities to rob banks in movies.
This quote from the article suggests that mechanism involved is specifically linguistic:
"""
To determine if words were being automatically (and perhaps unconsciously) activated, the researchers added the following twist: they asked their Russian participants to perform a verbal task at the same time as making their perceptual discrimination. This condition eliminated the reaction time advantage of contrasting goluboy and siniy. However, a nonverbal task (a spatial task) could be done at the same time while retaining the goluboy/siniy advantage. The dual task variants indicated that the task of discriminating color patches was aided by silent activation of verbal categories.
Thank you for posting this. It's always my biggest complaint about Linguistic Relativity... And that so many people believe it simply because it seems like it must be true. Boroditsky (who I associate with the strong push to push it on the public) and her ilk have done a lot of harm, as this does directly impact thinking in terms of things like AAVE, which we've already seen causes transcription errors in court leading to many issues.
That might not even be a Whorfian effect. Perhaps the act of learning the word for a color involves spending time looking at the color, as well as practice at identifying it, so you prime your visual system in a way that could happen even without language. I propose that if you gave someone wordless practice with a color (for example by asking them to sort objects) they would see all of the same time improvements.
To determine if words were being automatically (and perhaps unconsciously) activated, the researchers added the following twist: they asked their Russian participants to perform a verbal task at the same time as making their perceptual discrimination. This condition eliminated the reaction time advantage of contrasting goluboy and siniy. However, a nonverbal task (a spatial task) could be done at the same time while retaining the goluboy/siniy advantage. The dual task variants indicated that the task of discriminating color patches was aided by silent activation of verbal categories.
I don't think it does it well. Compare the Russians to someone who does the task regularly in English, say a graphic designer. My guess is the differences will go away when you compare someone who practices it regularly to them.
This is just a toy experiment that shows causal relationships between thought and language can exist. You can't look at the arbitrary number of 50ms and say, "Well, it seems small, the effects aren't important."
The point is that influence is there, working away all the time in thousands of ways we don't understand. Maybe it all adds up to nothing. But the "small differences" in experiments like these don't prove that. You could have hugely important global effects while still seeing small experimental differences for something like reaction time to shades of blue.
The entire experimental literature on linguistic relativity is characterized by tiny effects and failures to replicate.
Maybe the tiny, inconsistent effects do add up to something. Maybe there are hugely important global effects. But no one has ever identified them in a reproducible way.
To be fair, there have been >some< replications. My favourite is Gilbert et al, PNAS, 2006 where they more or less replicate the same effect with a different colour set in English speakers >AND< show that it is stronger in the left hemisphere (consistent with it being linked to language). http://www.icsi.berkeley.edu/pubs/ai/whorfhypothesis06.pdf
So is it your opinion that Sapir Whorf is fundamentally just not true? What is happening when we learn a new concept or new word and start seeing things differently or noticing something more often? In your opinion what is the correct way to think about that if it's not language influencing thought/perception?
I do think language has a dramatic effect on thought, with the caveat that most human languages are pretty much similar in what they are capable of expressing, because all human languages serve basically the same purposes.
So when you learn a new concept via language, it can have a dramatic effect on your life. But whether you learn it in English or Russian isn't going to make a huge difference, because they aren't that different in terms of what they can express easily.
For example, if you take examples of so-called "untranslateable" words, usually you can translate them pretty easily. German has the word "Fernweh" which means longing for a distant place in the same way that nostalgia means longing for home. No direct English equivalent, yet I was able to express it in English in a few words with no trouble. We have yet to find a word which is completely untranslateable, or a word in one language which could only be translated into another language by means of hundreds and hundreds of words.
So language can have a big effect without the differences between human languages being so important.
Similar logic to the Invariance Theorem for Kolmogorov complexity[0], which essentially states that the programming language you use to calculate the complexity (description length) of an object doesn't matter much, because Turing-complete languages can all simulate each other. Human languages are capable of simulating each other very well.
> German has the word "Fernweh" which means longing for a distant place in the same way that nostalgia means longing for home.
While I agree almost any concept can be translated in a phrase or sentence, I do still wonder if the difference between a single word and a phrase can be substantial. In the sense that you are more likely to use and think of a single word that really nails the description of a feeling or situation.
To take the canonical example of schadenfreude, I definitely "saw" that situation more often after learning the word, even though the concept, expressed less succinctly, wasn't novel to me. Poetic or catchy phrases can have the same effect. Or an undue persuasive effect: "If the gloves don't fit, you must acquit."
There are also some words that are thoroughly embedded in your culture and yet you still don't really see what they're referencing, which can be quite confusing.
For me it's "homesickness." People might ask me if I'm feeling homesick, but the concept just doesn't click for me. I can use the word in a sentence but it somehow feels made up.
> So when you learn a new concept via language, it can have a dramatic effect on your life. But whether you learn it in English or Russian isn't going to make a huge difference, because they aren't that different in terms of what they can express easily.
But what if it's between very different languages like English and Hopi, or some tribal tongue from the depths of the Amazon?
Russian and English have quite a lot of cultural mixing. The strong claims I or hear are that some tribe has no concept of time or counting, or that the Ancient Greeks didn't have a word for blue, and thus Homer talked about the sea being the color of blood wine, or whatever it was.
A really interesting one that I only vaguely recall is a tribe that always specified the direction they were coming from when meeting someone. An anthropologist studying them had to learn to be able to always know what direction, and she claimed that eventually she acquired something like a bird's eye view in her mind of the area in order to accomplish that. Which was second nature to the natives. Not that it was mystical, but just some mental ability to conceptualize direction from a different perspective.
> But what if it's between very different languages like English and Hopi, or some tribal tongue from the depths of the Amazon?
No need to go that far. How many people know the difference between machine code and assembly? Between an interpreter and a compiler? Between iteration and recursion? All of those are English words, and yet you'd see a stark difference between the ability of a programmer and a layperson to make use of these concepts.
The problem with theories of linguistic relativism is that they tend to ignore that humans will create new words for themselves when they really need to. When a group of people performs badly at a task they don't have the words to describe, it's more likely that the task hasn't been important enough for them to come up with the words, than that they're actually limited by their current vocabulary.
This would be the case where you'd find the strongest effects.
Talk of tribes not having words for time has not been substantiated. Time is a very useful concept no matter how you are living.
It is true that there are tribes without number words, and indeed they don't know how to count and have trouble differentiating quantities above like 5. This is the most dramatic Whorfian effect I know of. Paper: http://lchc.ucsd.edu/mca/Mail/xmcamail.2014-12.dir/pdf2Yb7JA...
(But if you put Westerners through verbal interference, so they can't count sub-vocally, their behavior patterns look similar!)
And there are languages where direction is always expressed in terms of an absolute north-south-east-west grid rather than relative left-right: the Whorfian effects from these languages are more controversial.
> a tribe that always specified the direction [...] eventually she acquired something like a bird's eye view in her mind
Even when the language you speak doesn't have this requirement, you can still pick up this skill. When you live for a few years in a cold square-grid city like those of northern China, you learn to always know which way is north so you don't lose direction walking around connector overpasses and subway tunnels in the winter.
>>Similar logic to the Invariance Theorem for Kolmogorov complexity[0], which essentially states that the programming language you use to calculate the complexity (description length) of an object doesn't matter much, because Turing-complete languages can all simulate each other.
"Beware of the Turing tar-pit in which everything is possible but nothing of interest is easy."
Alan Perlis [1]
>> We have yet to find a word which is completely untranslateable, or a word in one language which could only be translated into another language by means of hundreds and hundreds of words.
Do we? How do you explain the existance of words like "get", "fuck", "buffalo", "dharma", "karma", "tao", "таковам"?
Each of these have numerous meanings, which could individually be translatable in another language with very short phrases, but if you want to translate the general cluster you will need pages and pages in a dictionary I think ...
The only time you need more than one of the possible meanings at a time is when you want to make a pun. When translating, you'd have to explain both meanings, ruining the fun, but it's not a real barrier to expressing the content.
Poetry is so often cultural, and deals why certain things like rhyme and meter which influences that. It can be translated easily - the hard part is trying to keep all the cultural connotations of a word and the structure of the poem.
> German has the word "Fernweh" which means longing for a distant place in the same way that nostalgia means longing for home. No direct English equivalent, yet I was able to express it in English in a few words with no trouble.
With no trouble, or with a single word? In a way you didn't translate the word, you translated the definition, but even apart from mixing up nostalgia and homesickness, it's still far from making the meaing clear IMO. I would describe Fernweh more for longing for not being where you are, wanting to be where it's very different (you wouldn't have Fernweh for an exact clone of your current surroundings no matter how far away it is).. I can't define it well, but I know it's not longing for some specific distant place, and the way you phrased it, it could be understood that way. Some interwebs use "wanderlust" as the English translation for Fernweh, but in German, at least to me, Wanderlust and Fernweh don't mean quite the same thing, though even that would be better than leaving it at "longing for a distant place".
Sure, you can explain every word with hundreds of words if need be, but even then that's not the same.
Ich hab Heimweh / Fernweh? / Sehnsucht / Ich weiß nicht, was es ist
Replacing words with elaborate versions of them doesn't have quite the same effect. FWIW I'm saying this as a German who uses English as the primary language for most things that don't outright require German, because it's shorter... I would go crazy programming with German variable names, I would be so busy translating words I wouldn't ever get in the zone. German isn't functionally equivalent there, for me, it's just additional inefficiency and indirection.
And how can you ever know for sure you grok it all, and not just what fits into the toolset you have? I'm not even sure two random people can necessarily meaningfully communicate about the actual depths of their experiences, even if it's in their native language.
> How could the idea come up that humans can communicate with each other through letters! One can think of a person that is far away, or touch a person that is close by, everything else is above the power of humans.
-- Franz Kafka
Nevermind letters and the other technology he was on about there, are even spoken words really that different? How can language achieve what even science can't?
> The modern astrophysical world view, which began with Galileo, and its challenge to the adequacy of the senses to reveal reality, have left us a universe of whose qualities we know no more than the way they affect our measuring instruments, and — in the words of Eddington — "the former have as much resemblance to the latter as a telephone number has to a subscriber." Instead of objective qualities, in other words, we find instruments, and instead of nature or the universe — in the words of Heisenberg — man encounters only himself.
-- Hannah Arendt, "Vita Activa"
> If I express a feeling with a word, let us say, if I say "I love you," the word is meant to be an indication of the reality which exists within myself, the power of my loving. The word "love" is meant to be a symbol of the fact love, but as soon as it is spoken it tends to assume a life of its own, it becomes a reality. I am under the illusion that the saying of the word is the equivalent of the experience, and soon I say the word and feel nothing, except the thought of love which the word expresses.
-- Erich Fromm
Even if you add body language to it, pheromones, so-called shared experiences (you can't share experiences, nothing can occupy the same space at the same time), and so on, I don't think it fundamentally changes. With good friends, people who spend a lot of time in physical vicinity, it quickly approaches something that feels very intimate, where you can communicate a LOT with just a nod or a grunt and actually know how it will be understood. But "a lot" isn't "everything". Simulating "very well" isn't actually "being interchangeable".
I think there is no harm in accepting that. There is a lot of demonstrable harm of confusing symbols and things, on the other hand. That's why, even though as usual I don't really understand what Kafka is talking about (at least I would never be sure I do), I think he is on to something here:
> When you stand before me and look at me, what do you know of the pain in me, and what I do I know of yours. And if I threw myself to the ground before you and cried and told you, what would you know more of me than of hell, if somebody told you that it is hot and terrible. For that reason alone we humans should should face each other so reverend, so thoughtful, so loving as if facing the gates of hell.
It's true you can't translate words between languages exactly. Nor can you translate any individual's meaning of a word exactly into another individual's meaning of the word within a language! When I think of "nostalgia" I get a very particular sequence of mental images and emotions, tied in with my particular life experiences, doubtless different from yours.
But it is not hard to translate between languages within the same epsilon of error that holds for translation between speakers within a language.
Culture is embedded in language, which influences the way you think, your brain, your emotion and your behaviour. People speaking A language embraces B culture, and people in B culture does C thing. Instead of saying B -> C, trying to explain it with A -> C is not the right thing to do.
It's more the other way around I feel. Language is the mark of culture, not the other way. Ppl who have a certain cultural attitude use language to reflect that.
As a programmer I still attribute a bit of weight to Sapir-Whorf. I understand there's nothing magic about it, but it's still a useful concept to know about. Point of view matters in your understanding of the world, words are often ways to massage said PoV.
My point is it's not a super power, if the effect is real at all (and it's probably not because the paper that showed it has a number of red flags), it's tiny.
But English has words for shades of blue as well: azure, navy, teal.
I guess the difference is what is considered a shade and what is considered a separate color?
In my native Polish we have siny (same root as the Russian word, but it's a rarely used word), niebieski (general word for blue), granatowy (navy blue - sometimes considered a separate color).
If you asked me to describe a light blue car I would more likely say "niebieski" than "siny". But if it was a dark blue car I would likely call it "granatowy", not "niebieski".
There is no purple in the spectrum. Purple is the color you get when you take white light and put it through a filter which blocks the middle part of the spectrum, or when you combine a red and a blue light source.
Really the named rainbow colors should just end at “blue”, or if you like can include one more color name for very dark and intense “indigo” or “violet” or “purplish blue” (pick your favorite one extra name) but Newton wanted to have 7 color names for aesthetic/numerological reasons.
well, arguably, navy versus cornflower would handily cover pedantic differentiation, as needed.
put another way, one can easily counter that the flag and the sky handily share similar saturation of the same hue, differentiated only by the value of darkness.
take it one step further, and the sky at dusk will drop its brightness, and even if only for a moment, match the flag’s deeper blue, until the sun completely sets and the night sky becomes black, when not contaminated by light pollution.
It does (also turquoise and others), however I found that unless someone worked with color, or visual media, painting, graphic design etc. they won't use those names in colloquial speech.
"Did you see that cyan car that drove by?" is not something the majority of people in US might say while in Russia they will use the adjective goluboy and would say it is a completely different color from dark blue.
Printers needed a technical term for this color which they wanted to distinguish from common blue pigments used in painting so they pulled the Greek word for blue.
It shouldn’t be used to refer to a broader color category, and definitely should not be used to refer to blue–green colors. For that stick to blue–green, greenish blue, or teal.
Similarly magenta is a colorful moderately purplish red color, again of medium lightness (named for a famously bloody battle). Again printers adopted this as a technical term because it is a bit different than the “red” pigments commonly used in painting.
The names “cyan” and “magenta” really should not be used to refer to additive mixtures like sRGB #00FFFF or #FF00FF. These colors are unrecognizably far away from printing ink colors.
I have been mildly obsessed with Linguistics over the past few months (to the point where I decided to double major in it!).
For a while now I thought it was an area I would probably enjoy learning more about. What really got me going was actually reading the Russian Blues paper mentioned in the article, after it was featured on Fermat's Library a few months back(https://fermatslibrary.com/s/russian-blues-reveal-effects-of...). It is a super interesting intro paper to linguistics and the methods they used to evaluate differences between languages are quite clever.
Sounds related to the Baader-Meinhoff effect, where simply having a word in your vocabulary makes you much more aware of it in the future, to the point that it feels odd how often you're hearing it.
Only tangentially related but there's a very popular game with intentionally genderless characters. The creator does not wish it to be translated to certain languages in which it's difficult to keep things genderless. Some language choose a gender for all kinds of nouns so apparently it's hard to keep things genderless in those languages.
In Chinese, the first-person masculine and feminine pronouns are homophones. My teacher told me the he/she written forms were only introduced upon contact with Western languages. It's not uncommon for native Chinese speakers to mis-gender their family members when speaking English, since to (most of?) them, there's only a grammatical distinction when writing.
In college, I took a course on Chinese literature, translated into English. A couple of the stories relied on a plot twist regarding the gender of one of the main characters. Unfortunately, the plot was given away early in both because it was obvious the translator was going through great pains to avoid gendered pronouns in English.
Re: unconventional gender depiction in media, and how language and media affects thinking
By coincidence, I spent a long time reading various sci-fi books consecutively which each had nonstandard approaches to gender. One book series (Ancillary Justice) used she/her pronouns for all characters because the protagonist's culture did not have the social concept of gender, and in-story the protagonist mentions the choice of using female pronouns when translating the story into English. In many Greg Egan books, most of the characters are uploaded human minds or AIs which exist independently of any specific body or avatar, so traditional gender norms don't necessarily apply. In some Greg Egan books, the protagonist and some characters were agendered and used unconventional pronouns such as ve/ver/vis. In another Greg Egan book, none of the characters had gender, and male and female pronouns were used seemingly randomly and often changed for individual characters in text and dialog (I assume there may have been some grammatical, social, or situational pattern or intention to it).
These books each had interesting worlds that captivated me (for non-gender-related reasons). I often visualized scenes in my head and day-dreamed about the possibilities with the stories' technologies and characters. I quickly noticed that my mind usually wanted to use the characters' genders as the first step in picturing how a scene would look and play out. These books rarely answered the question of characters' genders (at least not in a way that matched up to my cultural expectations), so I had to break that habit in order to really get into the stories. I had to really think about the dynamics between the characters in order to imagine the books' scenes instead of doing my usual pattern-matching of scenes against preconceptions of how male and female characters interacted.
I think this shift in thinking stuck with me. The "male" and "female" buckets in my mind became much less defined. I think I truly internalized that those mental buckets are just shortcuts that we over-rely on. It became increasingly obvious to me that neither gender had an exclusive claim to any quality that I previously considered gendered, including qualities that I was attracted to. Long story short, I'm now in a same-sex relationship and identify as bisexual. It didn't occur to me as a possibility before these books. I know some people will read this and decide this all must mean that I was always wired up to be bisexual and in denial until now, but I don't think it's that. I believe the mind is much more plastic and malleable than most people think, but our culture rarely gives the opportunities to put this plasticity to use.
I would really like to see some more research done on Whorfian effects of gendered language. It certainly seems plausible that a language that forces speakers to remember and pay attention to every person's gender will affect how its speakers think, and there are plenty of languages that don't do that, for comparison, so perhaps there are some interesting experiments that could be done.
Speaking several languages gives you some advantages. You need to automate the distinction of complex sensory patters to the point in which it become effortless(after lots of practice).
You create complex neural networks that process this sensory data.
It is incredible how we see an image with text on it and text just pop out effortless in Mandarin or English, Russian or Spanish.
But IMHO, it is not speaking spoken languages that will give you an edge, because they all are similar, but knowing the different languages of very different fields.
For example a Musician speak the language of Music, tones, frequencies,Harmonics. It works in the same way, after lots of practice it becomes second nature to understand complex patterns in the world.
There is a language of science, understanding orders of magnitude, entropy, energy, numbers in general, experiments, errors.After lots of practice, it becomes second nature to you understanding those patterns.
Someone who works with people or animals like dogs could anticipate what they are thinking (or what they will think in the future), just by looking at the body language or speech nuances. After lots of practice, it becomes second nature.
Programmers learn a computer language, and after years of practice, it becomes part of who they are. There are Holy wars in programming because people that master a language feel threatened when this language is attacked, is an attack on themselves.
When you learn about kerning you notice it everywhere. Was it not there before? Of course it was you just never noticed because you didn't know it's a "thing" that has a word for it.
Can we agree that you only notice what you can put into concepts? and concepts are words that we made up so it follows that a lack of words to describe something will generally make it go unnoticed.
When I was a kid, the first times I saw a rainbow was in a cartoon like Fantasia, or with crayons or other drawings, where it was drawn with stripes. Then, when I finally saw a real rainbow (as a young child), it looked like a smooth gradient! But nowadays, I see stripes.
Lera Boroditsky (who is mentioned in the SA article) gave a short TED talk about language affecting thinking. In addition to the "Russian blue" anecdote, she also talks about language usage causing heightened perceptions of cardinal directions.
Boroditsky should not be trusted. Her research is highly flawed and has many issues. And one of her most 'impactful' studies relies on data that has been 'publication forthcoming' since 2002! I'll edit/add another comment with more detail and links to some linguistic rebuttal when I'm on a computer
Sure. First off, note that if you read her 2002 work about gender, it often relies on a(n in) famous "bridge study". In 2002, she mentioned it as "publication forthcoming"; 17 years later, it still hasn't been published.
But a general good overview of her statements regarding to blame, and why they fail, can be found on LanguageLog [1]. I'd also recommend searching LanguageLog, as there's other articles discussing how she often overstates the conclusions, and how the media takes it ever farther. If you're on Reddit (can't access it currently on work WiFi), search in /r/linguistics and /r/badlinguistics to find even more criticisms of it (and other Linguistic Relativity research).
This is why I have come to the (anecdotal) conclusion that one can only integrate into a group / society / culture when one learns / masters the language.
There are many nuances that imply the importance of particular details in the hidden meaning of the wording. These get easily lost when one does not fully comprehend the language used.
Shameless plug, but the book 'Through the Language Glass', by Guy Deutscher covers this and more about language and thought in a very entertaining way. Check out the book, or find my notes about it here: alvaroduran.me/through-the-language-glass
The researches seriously acted like it was a surprise that discrimination between light blue and dark blue is faster than between two shades of light blue or two shades of dark blue.
despite my love for languages I find that the only advantage it gives me is a) social b) ability to digest more information. What is missing is the ability to make deep sense of it. Recently read some of Heidegger's early work (he seems to have created his own language just to say what he wanted to say) and I think his concept of Enframing[1] has something to do with it:
> Heidegger also referred to the metaphysical manner of thinking in our age as a "one-track thinking," a term which he explicitly associated with technology. (27) In a similar spirit, he called it a "one-sided thinking" that tends towards a "one-sided uniform view" in which "[everything] is leveled to one level," and "[our] minds hold views on all and everything, and view all things in the same way." (28) There is, to be sure, a kind of language that, as the expression of this form of thinking, is itself one-track and one-sided. Heidegger finds one "symptom" of the growing power of the technological form of thinking in our increased use of designations consisting of abbreviations of words or combinations of their initials. (29) It is thus a technological form of language in the sense that it heralds that order in which everything is reduced to the univocity of concepts and precise specifications.
Heidegger labels such interpretations "technological" while remarking that they are a given only "insofar as technology is itself understood as a means and everything is conceived only according to this respect." (30) If our way of thinking is one that values only that which is immediately useful, then language is only conceived and appreciated from this perspective of its usefulness for us. More importantly, this suggests it is the essence of technology as Enframing that somehow determines what he calls the "transformation of language into mere information." (31)
... and ...
> It is within Enframing, then, that "speaking turns into information." Heidegger also spoke of the "language machine" [Sprachmaschine] as "one manner in which modern technology controls the mode and the world of language as such." (33) We can infer that the language machine is one crucial way in which this language of Enframing speaks. (34) With the construction of what Heidegger called electronic brains, calculating, thinking and translating machines, the language machine is made possible insofar as their activities take place in the element of language. The term "language machine" should not be taken as if Heidegger were merely taking about calculators and computers. He referred to machine technology itself as "the most visible outgrowth of the essence of modern technology," (35) and he insisted that the fact ours was the age of the machine was due to the fact it is the technological age, and not vice versa. (36) More importantly, Enframing itself is not anything technological in the sense of mechanical parts and their assembly. Thus, the language of Enframing cannot itself be reduced to anything technological in this narrow sense. Moreover, Heidegger explicitly characterized the language machine as the "technical complex of calculating and translating machines." (37) He also distinguished it from what he called the "speaking machine" or recording apparatus. The distinction is important because he does not see the latter as "intruding into the speaking of language itself." The language machine, on the other hand, does intrude by regulating and adjusting through its mechanical energies and functions how we can use language. (38)
Everyone says that language shapes your thinking, but there isn't a single fundamental discovery in physics that even had words for it beforehand. Thought is far enough ahead of language for it to be hard for language to have any influence on it, unless you're talking about these studies which aren't really thought.
Developing an understanding of quantum mechanics landed Heisenberg the Nobel prize, whereas nowadays thousands of students manage to work through their textbooks just fine. Having information expressed in human language, a form highly optimized for our understanding, is a huge step down from pulling yourself by your bootstraps outside of any familiar conceptual framework.
I would argue that quantum mechanics is actually not expressed in textbooks. Instead, they have exercises and sufficient hints. Try learning QM without doing any of the exercises and you will see what I mean. On the contrary, I bet you could learn QM just fine with just a few definitions and a series of well-designed problems.
"Starting with definitions" is the opposite of the language-less, intuitive way of understanding something. It means precisely that one has been provided with an effective formal language for the domain. The fact that you rederive some minor parts surely helps, but students don't routinely rediscover QM from scratch.
It has been largely established that language structures shape how the brain organizes cognitive reasoning, which in turn shapes the brain and vise versa.
It is less well established that language shapes the data processing of the 5 senses. This is largely due to the trouble of defining what is a distinctive word when comparing languages and relating the resulting vocabulary distinctions to perceptual distinctions in an objective way.
It explains that inuit languages do not actually have more words for snow than other languages. The other link explains that linguistic determinism is a superseded theory that can not be used to accurately model language. The "X words for snow" is even a sort of running joke as the cliché example of crackpot theory among linguists (see snowclone).
It's a cliché among journalists rather than a theory among linguists.
According to that Wikipedia article, it's the Sami languages that have lots of words for snow, though it all critically depends on what you mean by "word", "snow", "language", "have", ... The question "How many words for snow does language X have?" is impossible to answer for many different reasons.
You're right: the answer for Dutch or German would be 'infinite' because these languages allow you to compose (new) words on the fly, using other nouns as prefix.
The first example I came up with after 0.05s of thought was "autosneeuw" (car snow) which could mean the snow you find on top of a car.
