It's inspirational to see speakers of a minority language adopt modern technical terminology to their language. Every language is a unique perspective; the death of a language through irrelevancy leaves entire groups without the ability to view themselves through their own lens.
> Every language is a unique perspective; the death of a language through irrelevancy leaves entire groups without the ability to view themselves through their own lens.
My ancestors probably spoke various Gaelics and Old Norse, their descendants did science in Latin even though it was not their native language, and now I'm speaking English.
What perspective is lost? Astrophysics is the same in English, Gaelic, and in Blackfoot.
I would understand this thinking when it came to poetry, prose, songs, etc; but astrophysics in Blackfoot is just astrophysics without a common vocabulary with astrophysicists.
While not really discussed in the article, it's interesting to look for instance at Robin Wall Kimmerer's "language of animacy". She makes the point that the pronouns used to refer to people vs objects influence the directions your scientific thoughts may go, because of fundamental assumptions carried in the form of address. Her language is Potawatomi if I remember.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis remains controversial, but it's a well-known linguistic hypothesis that language available influences thought.
(Totally different and yet related: Heard Kimmerer on a podcast recently and she proposed something I don't even have words for. We created neural networks inspired by the way we understand mammalian brains to work, right? But plant communities have a distributed chemical method of communicating and 'learning', across organisms rather than within one. What would the machine learning equivalent of that be?)
> The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis remains controversial, but it's a well-known linguistic hypothesis that language available influences thought.
As far as I'm aware, it wasn't even a hypothesis, it was a shower thought.
It's probably right in some limited ways, but until somebody shows me the exotic grammar in their language which makes it dramatically simpler to express the discoveries of the field of astrophysics, I'm not convinced there's much there.
There are a handful of languages whose speakers express radically different views of numeracy from indo-european and asian language speakers, but as long as you're expressing the same concept with broadly similar power, it's not clear that the language itself informs the concept. There's nothing profound about a numeral, especially a numeral for "1", and there's mostly nothing special about words like "ennui".
> We created neural networks inspired by the way we understand mammalian brains to work, right?
Not exactly, no. The neural network metaphor is broadly related to all things with neurons, and based on a specific simplification of the concept of neurons which is general and abstract enough that it maps about as well to plant signaling as it does to insect or mammal signaling.
To me, it seems like vocabulary definitely has an effect. My native tongue is Finnish, but I find it easier to discuss (and think) some things in English because English has more specific vocabulary in certain areas. It's not that is impossible to express these things in Finnish, but it sort of feels uncomfortable.
It's also difficult to separate a language from its culture, so that might be another reason it feels so compelling to think that languages influence your thoughts.
My internal thoughts switch between Finnish, English and sometimes Japanese depending on context.
I have to say I'm disappointed in your reply. Neurons only occur in animals, and the concept of neural signaling is not directly analogous to plant signaling in communities. Plants have a much wider vocabulary than electrical activation.
I appreciate that you're trying to stick to astrophysics and the numbers one through three, but you have failed to engage with the "language of animacy" concept, which makes this sort of a pointless reply. In addition, "it's not clear that the language itself informs the concept" -- yes, that's the point of there being a hypothesis, and that's the point of this discussion. I don't propose that the truths of astrophysics are going to be different in Blackfoot. I do propose that languages carry fundamental values and concerns of societies. These values and concerns of course influence scientific inquiry. Now, it may be that language, choices regarding directions of research, and approaches to scientific inquiry are all just results of underlying drivers, but that's the interesting part of the discussion.
> Neurons only occur in animals, and the concept of neural signaling is not directly analogous to plant signaling in communities. Plants have a much wider vocabulary than electrical activation.
Are some integers impossible to express in binary?
The comments below mention Sapir-Whorf but personally as a bilingual person I think Sapir-Whorf is a load of bull. It's not so much that the languages themselves are fundamentally different but the literary canons/oral traditions that are created in a language that create the unique perspective. You could translate works but translation is inherently biased and lossy. Even after translating, media created in the current language is still heavily preferred. Think about how much more of Norse and Gaelic media that would've survived if your ancestors hadn't put it through highly lossy conversion when they changed languages.
>What perspective is lost?
Take for example Germania by Tacitus. IIRC it was written more as a critique (by way of comparison) of Roman society than an objective account of German society. If Germans today spoke a Romance language, no doubt they would read Germania in school and view their own ancestors and by extension themselves through some fun-house mirror. I'm not sure if contemporary accounts of that era from the Germans themselves exist, but imo even no record is better than one written from the perspective of a contemptuous outsider.
>Astrophysics is the same in English, Gaelic, and in Blackfoot.
For fundamentally objective things like astrophysics it is true that it would be the same in all languages. However, a language only used for poetry is not one that survives long. The more media (both technical and non-technical) that exists in a language the more likely you are to use it regardless of the domain. So imo creating useful media in astrophysics is what allows for the rest of their media to survive.
