Comment by keybored 4 days ago
> Well, speaking in different languages facilitates different modes of thinking
Sapir-Whorf? Can’t that just be put to bed by now?
> People against that tend to lean totalitarian. People for a monoculture, that is.
On the topic of languages at least.
Some technologists seem to want to get rid of all ostensibly useless things. More than one language being one of them.
I don't think it's even limited to written or spoken languages.
I've been learning a lot of CAD and mechanical principles lately, and I can tell that my brain has some sort of kinematic/movement language that is expanding, and helping me understand how things work, and how to build more things.
Exactly. Culture obviously influences thinking, language less so. Sapir-Whorf has been refuted, except for some minor minor areas (names of colours - some people call these two colours two different names, some call them the same - big deal!; left-right vs north-east-south-west; etc.)
I'm a Japanese speaker with maybe above Japanese average but way below professional English and effectively nothing else except I've taken _a_ Chinese class, and it's currently obvious to me that UG theory is largely BS and most of the rest tautological, except I have no ability to succinctly point it out in a logical, academia accepted language.
There's been too many anecdotal cases I've had that aren't going to fit with the basic premise of UG theory that there's a hard-wired common human language engine with output stage that is language. Like they seem to have logical constructions that feels sound but aren't going to be linguistically valid in languages I know in Chinese, and there are of course phenomena of people's attitudes switching along with their languages, etc.
One counter example to UG theory I've come across recently is an easily understood phrase "verbalizing one's feelings": if UG theory holds some water, feeling == thoughts == language, or at least they should be close to each others, and we should be able to just `^C dump-sumerian<CR>` at any moment at zero cost, and we can't. Not that it takes unreasonable bandwidth or storage to do so but we can't. Doesn't that perhaps suggest that languages are both external yet natural to yourself as much as a keyboard is to a man?
Maybe it actually needs exposure to the third language so your subconscious can eliminate the possibility that you're just not good at the second one, I don't know, though I do believe multi(>=3) lingualism is sufficient condition.
You’re bilingual like me?
UG means Universal Grammar? I guess you have me pegged as a Chomskyist because it makes sense to me. But I can’t understand you taking a Chinese class made you an embittered opponent of some advanced, nerdy linguistic theory. For my part I wouldn’t be able to understand it at a technical level.
>Sapir-Whorf? Can’t that just be put to bed by now?
Said by someone who only speaks one language? Nice Idiom: shame if something were to happen to it.
It is SO EASY to prove this (literally just talk to any multilingual and watch their entire personality shift when they change languages {some languages have larger gaps}, they themselves don't often notice the effect)!
>On the topic of languages at least.
At least, you say... hmmm... why does that raise ALL THE RED FLAGS...
> Some technologists seem to want to get rid of all ostensibly useless things. More than one language being one of them.
which is why programmers keep inventing new languages (rust), which is the defacto standard everyone uses now. /s
Your arguments are as singularly cultured as what you argue for.... Which - as it so happens to be - (the quality of your arguments) is exactly my argument against such a future state.
And on one more note: Dave Ackley has some nifty ideas about the opposite of efficiency being robustness instead of waste. having a monoculture promises efficiency, but with that comes a brittleness that will cut us.
I thought the weak form was pretty solid?
It's pretty obvious to anyone who learns math or programming, that once you find the right vocabulary or equation for something, that your brain chunks it, and it's easier to reason about that domain moving forward.
Of course it's not like if you don't have the word "blue" you are color blind, it's just that it's really hard to have a conversation about 10 different shades of blue if you don't even have a word for it.
The strong version of Sapir Whorf is obviously false because everyone has perceptions and feelings that they can't put words to.