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Re:Our Language Affects What We See by goatlover on Tuesday February 05, 2019 @02:40AM (#19083609)
> 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.

Re:Our Language Affects What We See by yorwba on Tuesday February 05, 2019 @04:08AM (#19083880)
> 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.

Re:Our Language Affects What We See by canjobear on Tuesday February 05, 2019 @09:51AM (#19085712)
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.

Re:Our Language Affects What We See by vorg on Tuesday February 05, 2019 @01:20PM (#19088015)
> 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.