Ask HN: Why aren't there more missing words?

Re:Ask HN: Why aren't there more missing words? by kseistrup on Sunday February 22, 2015 @03:01AM (#9088667)

It's not that there are words missing, it's that you are lacking in imagination: you only allow yourself to think in concepts that you have words for.

E.g., in Indonesian there are two forms of “we”: “kita”, that includes the person being spoken to, and “kami”, that excludes the person being spoken to. In my native language, Danish, there is only one form (“vi”) but I have never felt that I need more words to express “we”. Yet, when I see the Indonesian feature it seems immediately useful and I start wondering why that possibility of expression has never evolved in the Danish (or English) language.

You would probably want to read up on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis — e.g., http://linguistlist.org/ask-ling/sapir.cfm

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Re:Ask HN: Why aren't there more missing words? by dassreis on Sunday February 22, 2015 @05:00AM (#9088905)

Thanks for the link. I had similar thoughts but was struggling to find a way to express them. "The only thoughts we're capable of are bound by the restraints of language", or something similar. It's a nice hypothesis. I think the same words can sometimes mean different things to different people, even where the context is fixed. I've often wondered whether we all see colors in the same way.

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