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.
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.