The Piraha can’t count and many of them don’t appear to be able to learn to count, not even as motivated adults, past a critical period (when (I’ve heard but haven’t found a way to nail down for sure from clean eye witness reports) they have sometimes attended classes because they wish to be able to count the “money” they make from sex work, for example).
Are the Piraha in some meaningful sense “not fully human” due to environmental damage or are “counting numbers” not a natural abstraction or… or what?
On the other end of the spectrum, Ithkuil is a probably-impossible-for-humans-to-master conlang whose creator sorta tried to give it EVERY feature that has shown up in at least one human language that the creator of the language could find.
Does that mean that once an AI is fluent in Ithkuil (which surely will be possible soon, if it is not already) maybe the AI will turn around and see all humans sorta the way that we see the Piraha?
Also, it might be usable to cause us to intuitively understand (and fluently and cleanly institutionally wield, in social groups, during a political crisis) untranslatable 5!
Like, in a deep sense, I think that the “natural abstractions” line of research leads to math, both discovered, and undiscovered, especially math about economics and cooperation and agency, and it also will run into the limits of human plasticity in the face of “medicalized pedagogy”.
And, as a heads up, there’s a LOT of undiscovered math (probably infinitely much of it, based on Goedel’s results) and a LOT of unperfected technology (that could probably change a human base model so much that the result crosses some lines of repugnance even despite being better at agency and social coordination).
...
Speaking of “the wisdom of repugnance”.
In my experience, studying things where normies experience relatively unmediated disgust, I can often come up with pretty simply game theory to explain both (1) why the disgust would evolutionarily arise and also (2) why it would be “unskilled play within the game of being human in neo-modern times” to talk about it.
That is to say, I think “bringing up the wisdom of repugnance” is often a Straussian(?) strategy to point at coherent logic which, if explained, would cause even worse dogpiles than the current kerfuffle over JD Vance mentioning “cat ladies”.
This leads me to two broad conclusions.
(1) The concepts of incentive compatible mechanism design and cooperative game theory in linguistics both suggest places to predictably find concepts that are missing from polite conversation that are deeply related to competition between adult humans who don’t naturally experience storge (or other positive attachments) towards each other as social persons, and thus have no incentive to tell each other certain truths, and thus have no need for certain words or concepts, and thus those words don’t exist in their language. (Notice: the word “storge” doesn’t exist in English except as a loan word used by philosophers and theologians, but the taunt “mama’s boy” does!)
(2) Maybe we should be working on “artificial storge” instead of a way to find “words that will cause AI to NOT act like a human who only has normal uses for normal human words”?
...
I’ve long collected “untranslatable words” and a fun “social one” is “nemawashi” which literally means “root work”, and it started out as a gardening term meaning “to carefully loosen all the soil around the roots of a plant prior to transplanting it”.
Then large companies in Japan (where the Plutocratic culture is wildly different than in the US) use nemawashi to mean something like “to go around and talk to the lowest status stakeholders about proposed process changes first, in relative confidence, so they can veto stupid ideas without threatening their own livelihood or publicly threatening the status of the managers above them, so hopefully they can tweak details of a plan before the managers synthesize various alternative plans into a reasonable way for the whole organization to improve its collective behavior towards greater Pareto efficiency”… or something?
The words I expect to not be able to find in ANY human culture are less wholesome than this.
English doesn’t have “nemawashi” itself for… reasons… presumably? <3
...
Contrariwise… the word “bottom bitch” exists, which might go against my larger claim? Except in that case it involves a kind of stabilized multi-shot social “compatibility” between a pimp and a ho, that at least one of them might want to explain to third parties, so maybe it isn’t a counter-example?
Oh! Here’s a thing you might try! Collect some “edge-case maybe-too-horrible-to-exist” words, and then check where they are in an embedding space, and then look for more words in that part of the space?
Maybe you’ll be able to find-or-construct a “verbal Loab”?
(Ignoring the sense in which “Loab was discovered” and that discovery method is now part of her specific meaning in English… Loab, in content, seems to me to be a pure Jungian Vampire Mother without any attempt at redemption or social usefulness, but I didn’t notice this for myself. A friend who got really into Lacan noticed it and I just think he might be right.)
And if you definitely cannot construct any “verbal Loab”, then maybe that helps settle some “matters of theoretical fact” in the field of semantics? Maybe?
Ooh! Another thing you might try, based on this sort of thing, is to look for “steering vectors” where “The thing I’m trying to explain, in a nutshell, is...” completes (at low temperature) in very very long phrases? The longer the phrase required to “use up” a given vector, the more “socially circumlocutionary” the semantics might be? This method might be called “dowsing for verbal Loabs”.
This is fascinating and I would love to hear about anything else you know of a similar flavor.
As for the meat of the comment...
I think this comment didn’t really get at the main claim from the post. The key distinction I think it’s maybe missing is between:
Concepts which no humans have assigned words/phrases to, vs
Types of concepts which no humans have assigned a type of word/phrase to
So for instance, nemawashi is a concept which doesn’t have a word in English, but it’s of a type which is present in English—i.e. it’s a pretty ordinary verb, works pretty much like other verbs, if imported into English it could be treated grammatically like a verb without any issues, etc.
I do like your hypothesis that there are concepts which humans motivatedly-avoid giving words to, but that hypothesis is largely orthogonal to the question of whether there are whole types of concepts which don’t have corresponding word/phrase types, e.g. a concept which would require not just new words but whole new grammatical rules in order to use in language.
Ithkuil, on the other hand, sounds like it maybe could have some evidence of whole different types of concepts.
Alright! I’m going to try to stick to “biology flavored responses” and “big picture stuff” here, maybe? And see if something conversational happens? <3
(I attempted several responses in the last few days and each sketch turned into a sprawling messes that became a “parallel comment”. Links and summaries at the bottom.)
The thing that I think unifies these two attempts at comments is a strong hunch that “human language itself is on the borderland of being anti-epistemic”.
Like… like I think humans evolved. I think we are animals. I think we individually grope towards learning the language around us and always fail. We never “get to 100%”. I think we’re facing a “streams of invective” situation by default.
Don: “Up until the age of 25, I believed that ‘invective’ was a synonym for ‘urine’.”
BBC: “Why ever would you have thought that?”
Don: “During my childhood, I read many of the Edgar Rice Burroughs ‘Tarzan’ stories, and in those books, whenever a lion wandered into a clearing, the monkeys would leap into the trees and ‘cast streams of invective upon the lion’s head.’”
BBC: long pause “But, surely sir, you now know the meaning of the word.”
Don: “Yes, but I do wonder under what other misapprehensions I continue to labour.”
I think elephants have personal names to help them manage moral issues and bad-actor-detection that arise in their fission-fusion social systems, roughly as humans do, because personal names are convergently useful for managing reputation and tracking loyalty stuff in very high K family systems.
I think humans evolved under Malthusian conditions and that there’s lots of cannibalism in our history and that we use social instincts to manage groups that manage food shortages (who semi-reliably go to war when hungry). If you’re not tracking such latent conflict somehow then you’re missing something big.
I think human languages evolve ON TOP of human speech capacities, and I follow McWhorter in thinking that some languages are objectively easy (because of being learned by many as a second language (for trade or slavery or due to migration away from the horrors of history or whatever)) and others are objectively hard (because of isolation and due to languages naturally becoming more difficult over time, after a disruption-caused-simplification).
Like it isn’t just that we never 100% learn our own language. It is also that adults make up new stuff a lot, and it catches on, and it becomes default, and the accretion of innovation only stabilizes when humans hit their teens and refuse to learn “the new and/or weird shit” of “the older generation”.
Maybe there can be language super-geniuses who can learn “all the languages” very easily and fast, but language are defined, in a deep sense, by a sort of “20th percentile of linguistic competence performance” among people who everyone wants to be understood by.
And the 20th percentile “ain’t got the time” to learn 100% of their OWN language.
But also: the 90th percentile is not that much better! There’s a ground floor where human beings who can’t speak “aren’t actually people” and they’re weeded out, just like the fetuses with 5 or 3 heart chambers are weeded out, and the humans who’d grow to be 2 feet tall or 12 feet tall die pretty fast, and so on.
Tracking McWhorter again, there are quite a few languages spoken in mountain villages or tiny islands with maybe 500 speakers (and the village IQ is going to be pretty stable, and outliers don’t matter much), where children simply can’t speak properly until they are maybe 12.
(This isn’t something McWhorter talks about at all, but usually puberty kicks in, and teens refuse to learn any more arbitrary bullshit… but also accents tend to freeze around age 12 (especially in boys, maybe?) which might have something to do with shibboleths and “immutable sides” in tribal wars?)
Those languages where 11 year olds are just barely fluent are at the limit of isolated learnable complexity.
For an example of a seriously tricky language, my understanding (not something I can cite, just gossip from having friends in Northern Wisconsin and a Chippewa chromosome or two) is that in Anishinaabemowin they are kinda maybe giving up on retaining all the conjugations and irregularities that only show up very much in philosophic or theological or political discussions by adults, even as they do their best to retain as much as they can in tribal schools that also use English (for economic rather than cultural reasons)?
So there are still Ojibwe grandparents who can “talk fancy”, but the language might be simplifying because it somewhat overshot the limits of modern learnability!
Then there’s languages like nearly all the famous ones including English, where almost everyone masters it by age 7 or 8 or maybe 9 for Russian (which is “one of the famous ones” that might have kept more of the “weird decorative shit” that presumably existed in Indo-European)?
…and we kinda know which features in these “easy well known languages” are hard based on which features become “nearly universal” last. For example, rhotics arrive late for many kids in America (with quite a few kindergartners missing an “R” that the teacher talks to their parents about, and maybe they go to speech therapy) but which are also just missing in many dialects, like the classic accents of Boston, New York City, and London… because “curling your tongue back for that R sound” is just kinda objectively difficult.
In my comment laying out a hypothetical language like “Lyapunese” all the reasons that it would never be a real language don’t relate to philosophy, or ethics, or ontics, or epistemology, but to language pragmatics. Chaos theory is important, and not in language, and its the fault of humans having short lives (and being generally shit at math because of nearly zero selective pressure on being good at it), I think?
In my comment talking about the layers and layers of difficulty in trying (and failing!) to invent modal auxialiary verbs for all the moods one finds in Nenets, I personally felt like I was running up against the wall of my own ability to learn enough about “those objects over there (ie weird mood stuff in other languages and even weird mood stuff in my own)” to grok the things they took for granted enough to go meta on each thing and become able to wield them as familiar tools that I could put onto some kind of proper formal (mathematical) footing. I suspect that if it were easy for an adult to learn that stuff, I think the language itself would have gotten more complex, and for this reason the task was hard in the way that finding mispricings in a market is hard.
The Piraha can’t count and many of them don’t appear to be able to learn to count, not even as motivated adults, past a critical period (when (I’ve heard but haven’t found a way to nail down for sure from clean eye witness reports) they have sometimes attended classes because they wish to be able to count the “money” they make from sex work, for example).
Are the Piraha in some meaningful sense “not fully human” due to environmental damage or are “counting numbers” not a natural abstraction or… or what?
On the other end of the spectrum, Ithkuil is a probably-impossible-for-humans-to-master conlang whose creator sorta tried to give it EVERY feature that has shown up in at least one human language that the creator of the language could find.
Does that mean that once an AI is fluent in Ithkuil (which surely will be possible soon, if it is not already) maybe the AI will turn around and see all humans sorta the way that we see the Piraha?
...
My current working model of the essential “details AND limits” of human mental existence puts a lot of practical weight and interest on valproic acid because of the paper “Valproate reopens critical-period learning of absolute pitch”.
Also, it might be usable to cause us to intuitively understand (and fluently and cleanly institutionally wield, in social groups, during a political crisis) untranslatable 5!
Like, in a deep sense, I think that the “natural abstractions” line of research leads to math, both discovered, and undiscovered, especially math about economics and cooperation and agency, and it also will run into the limits of human plasticity in the face of “medicalized pedagogy”.
And, as a heads up, there’s a LOT of undiscovered math (probably infinitely much of it, based on Goedel’s results) and a LOT of unperfected technology (that could probably change a human base model so much that the result crosses some lines of repugnance even despite being better at agency and social coordination).
...
Speaking of “the wisdom of repugnance”.
In my experience, studying things where normies experience relatively unmediated disgust, I can often come up with pretty simply game theory to explain both (1) why the disgust would evolutionarily arise and also (2) why it would be “unskilled play within the game of being human in neo-modern times” to talk about it.
That is to say, I think “bringing up the wisdom of repugnance” is often a Straussian(?) strategy to point at coherent logic which, if explained, would cause even worse dogpiles than the current kerfuffle over JD Vance mentioning “cat ladies”.
This leads me to two broad conclusions.
(1) The concepts of incentive compatible mechanism design and cooperative game theory in linguistics both suggest places to predictably find concepts that are missing from polite conversation that are deeply related to competition between adult humans who don’t naturally experience storge (or other positive attachments) towards each other as social persons, and thus have no incentive to tell each other certain truths, and thus have no need for certain words or concepts, and thus those words don’t exist in their language. (Notice: the word “storge” doesn’t exist in English except as a loan word used by philosophers and theologians, but the taunt “mama’s boy” does!)
(2) Maybe we should be working on “artificial storge” instead of a way to find “words that will cause AI to NOT act like a human who only has normal uses for normal human words”?
...
I’ve long collected “untranslatable words” and a fun “social one” is “nemawashi” which literally means “root work”, and it started out as a gardening term meaning “to carefully loosen all the soil around the roots of a plant prior to transplanting it”.
Then large companies in Japan (where the Plutocratic culture is wildly different than in the US) use nemawashi to mean something like “to go around and talk to the lowest status stakeholders about proposed process changes first, in relative confidence, so they can veto stupid ideas without threatening their own livelihood or publicly threatening the status of the managers above them, so hopefully they can tweak details of a plan before the managers synthesize various alternative plans into a reasonable way for the whole organization to improve its collective behavior towards greater Pareto efficiency”… or something?
The words I expect to not be able to find in ANY human culture are less wholesome than this.
English doesn’t have “nemawashi” itself for… reasons… presumably? <3
...
Contrariwise… the word “bottom bitch” exists, which might go against my larger claim? Except in that case it involves a kind of stabilized multi-shot social “compatibility” between a pimp and a ho, that at least one of them might want to explain to third parties, so maybe it isn’t a counter-example?
The only reason I know the word exists is that Chappelle had to explain what the word means, to indirectly explain why he stopped wanting to work on The Chappelle Show for Comedy Central.
Oh! Here’s a thing you might try! Collect some “edge-case maybe-too-horrible-to-exist” words, and then check where they are in an embedding space, and then look for more words in that part of the space?
Maybe you’ll be able to find-or-construct a “verbal Loab”?
(Ignoring the sense in which “Loab was discovered” and that discovery method is now part of her specific meaning in English… Loab, in content, seems to me to be a pure Jungian Vampire Mother without any attempt at redemption or social usefulness, but I didn’t notice this for myself. A friend who got really into Lacan noticed it and I just think he might be right.)
And if you definitely cannot construct any “verbal Loab”, then maybe that helps settle some “matters of theoretical fact” in the field of semantics? Maybe?
Ooh! Another thing you might try, based on this sort of thing, is to look for “steering vectors” where “The thing I’m trying to explain, in a nutshell, is...” completes (at low temperature) in very very long phrases? The longer the phrase required to “use up” a given vector, the more “socially circumlocutionary” the semantics might be? This method might be called “dowsing for verbal Loabs”.
First things first:
This is fascinating and I would love to hear about anything else you know of a similar flavor.
As for the meat of the comment...
I think this comment didn’t really get at the main claim from the post. The key distinction I think it’s maybe missing is between:
Concepts which no humans have assigned words/phrases to, vs
Types of concepts which no humans have assigned a type of word/phrase to
So for instance, nemawashi is a concept which doesn’t have a word in English, but it’s of a type which is present in English—i.e. it’s a pretty ordinary verb, works pretty much like other verbs, if imported into English it could be treated grammatically like a verb without any issues, etc.
I do like your hypothesis that there are concepts which humans motivatedly-avoid giving words to, but that hypothesis is largely orthogonal to the question of whether there are whole types of concepts which don’t have corresponding word/phrase types, e.g. a concept which would require not just new words but whole new grammatical rules in order to use in language.
Ithkuil, on the other hand, sounds like it maybe could have some evidence of whole different types of concepts.
Caloric Vestibular Stimulation seems to be of a similar flavor, in case you haven’t heard of it.
Seconded!!
Alright! I’m going to try to stick to “biology flavored responses” and “big picture stuff” here, maybe? And see if something conversational happens? <3
(I attempted several responses in the last few days and each sketch turned into a sprawling messes that became a “parallel comment”. Links and summaries at the bottom.)
The thing that I think unifies these two attempts at comments is a strong hunch that “human language itself is on the borderland of being anti-epistemic”.
Like… like I think humans evolved. I think we are animals. I think we individually grope towards learning the language around us and always fail. We never “get to 100%”. I think we’re facing a “streams of invective” situation by default.
I think prairie dogs have some kind of chord-based chirp system that works like human natural language noun phrases do because noun-phrases are convergently useful. And they are flexible-and-learned enough for them to have regional dialects.
I think elephants have personal names to help them manage moral issues and bad-actor-detection that arise in their fission-fusion social systems, roughly as humans do, because personal names are convergently useful for managing reputation and tracking loyalty stuff in very high K family systems.
I think humans evolved under Malthusian conditions and that there’s lots of cannibalism in our history and that we use social instincts to manage groups that manage food shortages (who semi-reliably go to war when hungry). If you’re not tracking such latent conflict somehow then you’re missing something big.
I think human languages evolve ON TOP of human speech capacities, and I follow McWhorter in thinking that some languages are objectively easy (because of being learned by many as a second language (for trade or slavery or due to migration away from the horrors of history or whatever)) and others are objectively hard (because of isolation and due to languages naturally becoming more difficult over time, after a disruption-caused-simplification).
Like it isn’t just that we never 100% learn our own language. It is also that adults make up new stuff a lot, and it catches on, and it becomes default, and the accretion of innovation only stabilizes when humans hit their teens and refuse to learn “the new and/or weird shit” of “the older generation”.
Maybe there can be language super-geniuses who can learn “all the languages” very easily and fast, but language are defined, in a deep sense, by a sort of “20th percentile of linguistic competence performance” among people who everyone wants to be understood by.
And the 20th percentile “ain’t got the time” to learn 100% of their OWN language.
But also: the 90th percentile is not that much better! There’s a ground floor where human beings who can’t speak “aren’t actually people” and they’re weeded out, just like the fetuses with 5 or 3 heart chambers are weeded out, and the humans who’d grow to be 2 feet tall or 12 feet tall die pretty fast, and so on.
On the “language instincts” question, I think: probably yes? If Neanderthals spoke, it was probably with a very high pitch, but they had Sapiens-like FOXP2 I think? But even in modern times there are probably non-zero alleles to help recognize tones in regions where tonal languages are common.
Tracking McWhorter again, there are quite a few languages spoken in mountain villages or tiny islands with maybe 500 speakers (and the village IQ is going to be pretty stable, and outliers don’t matter much), where children simply can’t speak properly until they are maybe 12.
(This isn’t something McWhorter talks about at all, but usually puberty kicks in, and teens refuse to learn any more arbitrary bullshit… but also accents tend to freeze around age 12 (especially in boys, maybe?) which might have something to do with shibboleths and “immutable sides” in tribal wars?)
Those languages where 11 year olds are just barely fluent are at the limit of isolated learnable complexity.
For an example of a seriously tricky language, my understanding (not something I can cite, just gossip from having friends in Northern Wisconsin and a Chippewa chromosome or two) is that in Anishinaabemowin they are kinda maybe giving up on retaining all the conjugations and irregularities that only show up very much in philosophic or theological or political discussions by adults, even as they do their best to retain as much as they can in tribal schools that also use English (for economic rather than cultural reasons)?
So there are still Ojibwe grandparents who can “talk fancy”, but the language might be simplifying because it somewhat overshot the limits of modern learnability!
Then there’s languages like nearly all the famous ones including English, where almost everyone masters it by age 7 or 8 or maybe 9 for Russian (which is “one of the famous ones” that might have kept more of the “weird decorative shit” that presumably existed in Indo-European)?
…and we kinda know which features in these “easy well known languages” are hard based on which features become “nearly universal” last. For example, rhotics arrive late for many kids in America (with quite a few kindergartners missing an “R” that the teacher talks to their parents about, and maybe they go to speech therapy) but which are also just missing in many dialects, like the classic accents of Boston, New York City, and London… because “curling your tongue back for that R sound” is just kinda objectively difficult.
In my comment laying out a hypothetical language like “Lyapunese” all the reasons that it would never be a real language don’t relate to philosophy, or ethics, or ontics, or epistemology, but to language pragmatics. Chaos theory is important, and not in language, and its the fault of humans having short lives (and being generally shit at math because of nearly zero selective pressure on being good at it), I think?
In my comment talking about the layers and layers of difficulty in trying (and failing!) to invent modal auxialiary verbs for all the moods one finds in Nenets, I personally felt like I was running up against the wall of my own ability to learn enough about “those objects over there (ie weird mood stuff in other languages and even weird mood stuff in my own)” to grok the things they took for granted enough to go meta on each thing and become able to wield them as familiar tools that I could put onto some kind of proper formal (mathematical) footing. I suspect that if it were easy for an adult to learn that stuff, I think the language itself would have gotten more complex, and for this reason the task was hard in the way that finding mispricings in a market is hard.
Humans simply aren’t that smart, when it comes to serial thinking. Almost all of our intelligence is cached.