My native language is Russian, yet I find it more comfortable to use English almost exclusively when talking about programming, math or rationality. Case in point: my email conversation with Vladimir Nesov spontaneously switched to English after the first couple emails, even though we’re both Russian.
In my impression people born into different languages often do narrate the world differently, at least at the emotional level, and some of those ways can be better than others for certain topics—e.g. less likely to lead you astray with the persuasive/musical component of words. Another example would be the complex, massively recursive sentences common to German philosophy, obviously made possible by regularities and trends of language.
Sorry, I’m downvoting you. You should have argued your point instead of name-calling.
It seems much more likely that the difference in quality between Anglo and Continental philosophy, to the extent that the difference exists, is based on chaotic factors. One (relatively) good philosopher randomly happens to be born in England and then he teaches his students (relatively) good philosophy, and they teach their students, and a whole tradition is born by chance. In continental Europe, that single die roll comes up the other way, and a seductive but (relatively) sinful philosophy is born. This story strikes me as more likely than that English is such a wondrous language out of all the various languages of the world that it alone confers resistance to philosophical sin. I hadn’t thought I needed to make an argument for this, I didn’t expect the posters here to take the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis seriously. That was my mistake, I see.
As for why you find it more comfortable to use English when talking about technical subjects, I would guess that it is because English has a particularly rich technical vocabulary, due to English-speakers recently leading the way in technical progress. I don’t speak Russian so I don’t know how it works there, but I know that many languages use loan words from English heavily for technical subjects. One might be able to argue that this is a deficiency of these other languages, but it doesn’t seem like the sort of deficiency that would lead one into philosophical error, and it is not a deficiency that existed when the Platonists were writing in any case.
I sympathize with your idea of amplification of random differences, but will try to persuade you that “strong Sapir-Whorf”, even if false per se, might still contain a grain of merit.
Any language co-evolves with its culture—a sort of definite integral over their historical path up to now. The English language is not wholly determined by its grammar and vocabulary: if you randomly generate many grammatical and meaningful phrases in English, a lot of them will still sound “wrong” because they don’t correspond to multi-word frequency patterns of everyday English use. As a culture evolves, those multi-word frequencies change to reflect reality. That’s why I find it hard to talk about programming in Russian: I’m missing not just the technical terms, but also the grown connective tissue of commonplace word combinations specialized for programming that would make phrases sound natural and easy.
When you study many languages, like me, you find that every language has its own sweet spots. The experience of reading Pushkin in Russian seems to have no analogies in the whole English language and has resisted all attempts at translation. French postmodernist thought sounds great in French but (as a rule) turns to lousy and phony wordplay in other languages. And you never really get the point of Italian until you try singing in it, suddenly feeling the sounds come more naturally than in your language of birth, whatever it is.
Personally, I find the suggestion that English philosophy is more reasonable than continental… to contain more than a grain of truth. The reason for that may well be a complex interplay between geographical location, anthropology, history, art and feeding it all back into the language; pretty hard to disentangle, but the result is, like some “racist and bigoted” conclusions, quite obvious to see once you start looking.
When you study many languages, like me, you find that every language has its own sweet spots. The experience of reading Pushkin in Russian seems to have no analogies in the whole English language and has resisted all attempts at translation. French postmodernist thought sounds great in French but (as a rule) turns to lousy and phony wordplay in other languages. And you never really get the point of Italian until you try singing in it, suddenly feeling the sounds come more naturally than in your language of birth, whatever it is.
It sounds to me as though this effect can be explained by things being lost in translation, which can happen to any language and is not indicative of a deep fundamental difference between languages. The true test of this theory would be to translate some English poetry into Russian and see if it comes out sounding deeper, or to translate some English postmodernism into French and see if it comes out sounding more authentic. It is actually believable that if you translate an English song into Italian that it will be more aesthetically pleasing—different languages have different patterns of sound, and some patterns of sound fit song better than others. But one rarely sings one’s philosophy.
The true test of this theory would be to translate some English poetry into Russian and see if it comes out sounding deeper, or to translate some English postmodernism into French and see if it comes out sounding more authentic.
It’s great that you proposed an experiment. Still, the language might facilitate original expression in a certain form more than it facilitates translation. To control for that effect somewhat you could ask a good Russian poet or French philosopher to do the translation, and I can guess how that will turn out!
Can’t say about philosophy, but Russians with good knowledge of English or other languages often prefer good Russian translations of literary works to the originals, despite preferring the originals of technical texts etc. Maybe an artefact of the Soviet era when non-state-sanctioned writers often worked as translators, raising the average quality of translations at the cost of never publishing their own thing. For example, I didn’t much enjoy the original text of LOTR compared to the Russian translation by Muravjev/Kistyakovsky. The contrast is especially felt in the poetry: Russian has a much deeper store of rhymes, no one is forced to stick to “lie—die” or “land—hand” as Tolkien had to, and all inconsistencies of meter are also gone—I was actually amazed how many of them there are in the English version, making some verses almost unreadable.
It’s worth noting that some of Tolkien’s poems started as written in Quenya, a language that Tolkien designed specifically for poetry—he once said that he created the world of Middle-Earth just so that he could have somewhere that his language was spoken—and it’s not surprising if Tolkien’s English translations of Elvish and his other languages aren’t as good.
Nominull, your remarks about language here and above seem off (although my experience is narrower than cousin_it’s, since I’m only bilingual, German is coming slowly, with little motivation). Each language has its sound, influencing the way you can use it for different tasks. Of course, you can accurately communicate a deeply understood concept in any language, by describing it redundantly, but that doesn’t apply to the sum total of everyday use, in particular to viewing the language as a tool for refining your concepts.
I think it’s better in all cases simply to say that strong Sapir-Whorf is wrong, but that weaker versions have some utility as a means to understand how humans think and speak.
What exactly makes it difficult to use Russian?
I know Russian, so I will understand the explanation.
I find my native Norwegian better to express concepts in than English.
If I program something especially difficult, or do some difficult math, physics, or logic, I also find Norwegian better.
However, if I do some easier task, where I have studied it in English, I find it easy to write in English, due to a “cut and paste” effect. I just remember stuff, combine it, and write it down.
Whenever I try translating some math or programming stuff from Russian into English or vice versa, the Russian version ends up about 20% longer. Maybe it’s because many useful connective words in Russian are polysyllabic, e.g. “kotoryi” (which) ,”chtoby” (to), “poetomu” (so), making sentences with complex logical structure sound clumsy. Translating into Russian always feels like a poetic jigsaw puzzle to make the phrase sound okay, while translating into English feels more anything-goes at the expense of emotional nuance. YMMV.
It seems that, at least in this usage, English better approximates the ideal expressed in Entropy, and Short Codes:
People have a tendency to talk, and presumably think, at the basic level of categorization—to draw the boundary around “chairs”, rather than around the more specific category “recliner”, or the more general category “furniture”. People are more likely to say “You can sit in that chair” than “You can sit in that recliner” or “You can sit in that furniture”.
And it is no coincidence that the word for “chair” contains fewer syllables than either “recliner” or “furniture”. Basic-level categories, in general, tend to have short names; and nouns with short names tend to refer to basic-level categories. Not a perfect rule, of course, but a definite tendency. Frequent use goes along with short words; short words go along with frequent use.
My native language is Russian, yet I find it more comfortable to use English almost exclusively when talking about programming, math or rationality. Case in point: my email conversation with Vladimir Nesov spontaneously switched to English after the first couple emails, even though we’re both Russian.
In my impression people born into different languages often do narrate the world differently, at least at the emotional level, and some of those ways can be better than others for certain topics—e.g. less likely to lead you astray with the persuasive/musical component of words. Another example would be the complex, massively recursive sentences common to German philosophy, obviously made possible by regularities and trends of language.
Sorry, I’m downvoting you. You should have argued your point instead of name-calling.
It seems much more likely that the difference in quality between Anglo and Continental philosophy, to the extent that the difference exists, is based on chaotic factors. One (relatively) good philosopher randomly happens to be born in England and then he teaches his students (relatively) good philosophy, and they teach their students, and a whole tradition is born by chance. In continental Europe, that single die roll comes up the other way, and a seductive but (relatively) sinful philosophy is born. This story strikes me as more likely than that English is such a wondrous language out of all the various languages of the world that it alone confers resistance to philosophical sin. I hadn’t thought I needed to make an argument for this, I didn’t expect the posters here to take the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis seriously. That was my mistake, I see.
As for why you find it more comfortable to use English when talking about technical subjects, I would guess that it is because English has a particularly rich technical vocabulary, due to English-speakers recently leading the way in technical progress. I don’t speak Russian so I don’t know how it works there, but I know that many languages use loan words from English heavily for technical subjects. One might be able to argue that this is a deficiency of these other languages, but it doesn’t seem like the sort of deficiency that would lead one into philosophical error, and it is not a deficiency that existed when the Platonists were writing in any case.
I sympathize with your idea of amplification of random differences, but will try to persuade you that “strong Sapir-Whorf”, even if false per se, might still contain a grain of merit.
Any language co-evolves with its culture—a sort of definite integral over their historical path up to now. The English language is not wholly determined by its grammar and vocabulary: if you randomly generate many grammatical and meaningful phrases in English, a lot of them will still sound “wrong” because they don’t correspond to multi-word frequency patterns of everyday English use. As a culture evolves, those multi-word frequencies change to reflect reality. That’s why I find it hard to talk about programming in Russian: I’m missing not just the technical terms, but also the grown connective tissue of commonplace word combinations specialized for programming that would make phrases sound natural and easy.
When you study many languages, like me, you find that every language has its own sweet spots. The experience of reading Pushkin in Russian seems to have no analogies in the whole English language and has resisted all attempts at translation. French postmodernist thought sounds great in French but (as a rule) turns to lousy and phony wordplay in other languages. And you never really get the point of Italian until you try singing in it, suddenly feeling the sounds come more naturally than in your language of birth, whatever it is.
Personally, I find the suggestion that English philosophy is more reasonable than continental… to contain more than a grain of truth. The reason for that may well be a complex interplay between geographical location, anthropology, history, art and feeding it all back into the language; pretty hard to disentangle, but the result is, like some “racist and bigoted” conclusions, quite obvious to see once you start looking.
It sounds to me as though this effect can be explained by things being lost in translation, which can happen to any language and is not indicative of a deep fundamental difference between languages. The true test of this theory would be to translate some English poetry into Russian and see if it comes out sounding deeper, or to translate some English postmodernism into French and see if it comes out sounding more authentic. It is actually believable that if you translate an English song into Italian that it will be more aesthetically pleasing—different languages have different patterns of sound, and some patterns of sound fit song better than others. But one rarely sings one’s philosophy.
It’s great that you proposed an experiment. Still, the language might facilitate original expression in a certain form more than it facilitates translation. To control for that effect somewhat you could ask a good Russian poet or French philosopher to do the translation, and I can guess how that will turn out!
Can’t say about philosophy, but Russians with good knowledge of English or other languages often prefer good Russian translations of literary works to the originals, despite preferring the originals of technical texts etc. Maybe an artefact of the Soviet era when non-state-sanctioned writers often worked as translators, raising the average quality of translations at the cost of never publishing their own thing. For example, I didn’t much enjoy the original text of LOTR compared to the Russian translation by Muravjev/Kistyakovsky. The contrast is especially felt in the poetry: Russian has a much deeper store of rhymes, no one is forced to stick to “lie—die” or “land—hand” as Tolkien had to, and all inconsistencies of meter are also gone—I was actually amazed how many of them there are in the English version, making some verses almost unreadable.
It’s worth noting that some of Tolkien’s poems started as written in Quenya, a language that Tolkien designed specifically for poetry—he once said that he created the world of Middle-Earth just so that he could have somewhere that his language was spoken—and it’s not surprising if Tolkien’s English translations of Elvish and his other languages aren’t as good.
Nominull, your remarks about language here and above seem off (although my experience is narrower than cousin_it’s, since I’m only bilingual, German is coming slowly, with little motivation). Each language has its sound, influencing the way you can use it for different tasks. Of course, you can accurately communicate a deeply understood concept in any language, by describing it redundantly, but that doesn’t apply to the sum total of everyday use, in particular to viewing the language as a tool for refining your concepts.
I think it’s better in all cases simply to say that strong Sapir-Whorf is wrong, but that weaker versions have some utility as a means to understand how humans think and speak.
What exactly makes it difficult to use Russian? I know Russian, so I will understand the explanation.
I find my native Norwegian better to express concepts in than English. If I program something especially difficult, or do some difficult math, physics, or logic, I also find Norwegian better.
However, if I do some easier task, where I have studied it in English, I find it easy to write in English, due to a “cut and paste” effect. I just remember stuff, combine it, and write it down.
Whenever I try translating some math or programming stuff from Russian into English or vice versa, the Russian version ends up about 20% longer. Maybe it’s because many useful connective words in Russian are polysyllabic, e.g. “kotoryi” (which) ,”chtoby” (to), “poetomu” (so), making sentences with complex logical structure sound clumsy. Translating into Russian always feels like a poetic jigsaw puzzle to make the phrase sound okay, while translating into English feels more anything-goes at the expense of emotional nuance. YMMV.
It seems that, at least in this usage, English better approximates the ideal expressed in Entropy, and Short Codes: