Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf] • Hacker News Board

Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]

#71

Post by guax » Sat, Jun 22, 2024, 7:18 AM UTC

nopinsight wrote: post #61

etrvic wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are many concepts in our thought stream without a 'word' or even a simple 'phrase' to label them. If those concepts would exist you wouldn’t be able to explain them using words, no matter how complex the phrase may be. Taking a phrase and expecting it to have a single word replace is unrealistic. You can’t just asign a word to every possible sentence/phrase. Having a direct translation means you don’t necessa…

How did Michelangelo create his masterpieces? Can one describe the process using any verbal language in sufficient detail such that another master or a robot could create David? That's an example of thought processes beyond language. I suspect the same happens in many other fields. Even in an abstract field like mathematics, intuition often forms in the mind before verbal description or articulation.

I don't get your point on Michelangelo. We can very easily describe the process if we could see it. We just can't cause he's dead and he was not big on YouTube, even then we can explain a lot from evidence.

Its much more complex to explain why we classify them as masterpieces than how he made it.

Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]

#72

Post by TeMPOraL » Sat, Jun 22, 2024, 7:20 AM UTC

nopinsight wrote: post #7

There are many concepts in our thought stream without a 'word' or even a simple 'phrase' to label them. A word or a common phrase is coined when a concept is sufficiently common and important enough such that someone comes up with a label to communicate the idea succinctly and the label catches on. We, humanity, have words or common phrases to label the vast majority of significant concepts. However, not every concep…

Interesting examples. For me, a predominantly linguistic thinker, it's actually those concepts having words that make it possible for me to really think about them on their own.

So "buying books and never reading them", yes, it's a phenomenon that happens and one could presumably talk about it, but it's hard to even think of in the first place - it's a complex set of ideas joined together in a specific way. Tsundoku, however, is a concept. A single word. A token. A point in the latent space. Something I feel existing independently in my mind, as a node that I can feel emotions about, that grows attachments. That's much easier to access, and thus much more common to talk about.

Nam-jai, I already have an English word for this in my mind, "pay -it-forward". Yeah, it's one semantic unit in my mind. Funny enough, I'm ESL and I don't know a word in my native language for this (Polish); the concept exists in my head literally as "pay it forward", and brings up associations with some broken down car story, and Jesus for some reason.

Guanxi - in English, isn't that a "social network"? That's another good example of a concept I find much easier to think about once it's pinned down with a name.

Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]

#73

Post by benrutter » Sat, Jun 22, 2024, 7:21 AM UTC

leto_ii wrote: post #69

benrutter wrote: post #56

It absolutely melts my mind every time I come across the two facts that: - People experience their thoughts very differently - We all secretly believe that deep down, everyone experiences thought like we do. I've never really had a strong internal monologue when thinking, so my assumption would always be that of course, thinking isn't very linguistic (even if we can use it as a tool while thinking). It seems like the…

> I've never really had a strong internal monologue when thinking I'm curious, what is it like when you read something? Is it just not meditated by a monologue at all?

I definitely have an inner monologue im some situations, reading is a good example. I can speed read in which case I don't really have a perception of the sounds, but if I'm closely reasing something then I do have a sense of the sounds if words as I'm reading.

The idea of thinking independtly like that though seems unbearably slow to me (although lots of very clever people report doing it, so obviously it isn't for them!)

Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]

#74

Post by TeMPOraL » Sat, Jun 22, 2024, 7:23 AM UTC

gyomu wrote: post #39

nopinsight wrote: post #7

There are many concepts in our thought stream without a 'word' or even a simple 'phrase' to label them. A word or a common phrase is coined when a concept is sufficiently common and important enough such that someone comes up with a label to communicate the idea succinctly and the label catches on. We, humanity, have words or common phrases to label the vast majority of significant concepts. However, not every concep…

> * 積ん読 (Tsundoku) (Japanese): Buying books and never reading them, just letting them pile up. i don't speak Thai or Mandarin, so I can't speak to the other 2, but this one is a pun (combining tsundeoku, pile up, and dokusho, book reading) that survived in the language due to its catchiness. A bit like "hangry" (hungry + angry) in English. I have a hard time interpreting the existence of those words as an indication…

> They're just meme-like constructs that caught on due to arbitrary phonetic properties of the language.

My take: they became instant memes and experience wide adoption because they capture a concept without another name - and that makes it not just easy to talk about, but also to think about in the first place (counter to article's thesis?).

Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]

#75

Post by calf » Sat, Jun 22, 2024, 7:25 AM UTC

derriz wrote: post #55

calf wrote: post #17

The crux of their argument is that the language faculty and other faculties (math/logic/abstract, theory of mind/social reasoning, spatial/temporal imagination, and other cognitive abilities) all evolved in parallel, so the most plausible explanation is that language is mostly independent of all those other faculties which are activated in distinct neural network areas of the human brain, based on brain scan studies…

Actual human natural language isn’t recursive in any meaningful sense. Formal grammar - an (often futile) attempt to describe the structure of natural languages - is generally expressed using a formal mathematical system which features recursion.

Actual human natural language is meaningfully recursive, because any grade school student understands the recursive properties of certain toy sentence examples in that they could "go on forever" as a set of arbitrarily larger complex sentences.

The commonality of mathematical grammars (as mathematical objects in their own right) and natural language is that both have computational properties such as recursive structure - or ambiguity, which was discussed in the paper.

Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]

#76

Post by mewpmewp2 » Sat, Jun 22, 2024, 7:26 AM UTC

benrutter wrote: post #73

leto_ii wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I've never really had a strong internal monologue when thinking I'm curious, what is it like when you read something? Is it just not meditated by a monologue at all?

I definitely have an inner monologue im some situations, reading is a good example. I can speed read in which case I don't really have a perception of the sounds, but if I'm closely reasing something then I do have a sense of the sounds if words as I'm reading. The idea of thinking independtly like that though seems unbearably slow to me (although lots of very clever people report doing it, so obviously it isn't for…

That is thinking slow for you?? How do you reach conclusions or how do you know the reasons why you reached the conclusion?

Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]

#77

Post by TeMPOraL » Sat, Jun 22, 2024, 7:28 AM UTC

dejj wrote: post #68

nopinsight wrote: post #7

There are many concepts in our thought stream without a 'word' or even a simple 'phrase' to label them. A word or a common phrase is coined when a concept is sufficiently common and important enough such that someone comes up with a label to communicate the idea succinctly and the label catches on. We, humanity, have words or common phrases to label the vast majority of significant concepts. However, not every concep…

Brevity is key for words that aid thinking. Consider Chinese 成语 (Chengyu) [1] or Japanese 四字熟語 (Yo Ji Juku Go) [2]: - 指桑骂槐 (Zhi Sang Ma Huai) - Pulling the shoots to make the rice grow = helicoptering - 拔苗助长 (Ba Miao Zhu Zhang) - Point at the mulberry tree to curse the locust tree = deflective criticism These condense a whole story with moral lesson in them, and they facilitate recall of that concept. The trick is om…

So you're effectively saying that Chinese is compressed Tamarian? Like, instead of writing "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" you'd put their initials together, so you're saying the Chinese-equivalent of "DJT" and the listener instantly knows the story, and therefore the message, it refers to?

Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]

#78

Post by _as_text » Sat, Jun 22, 2024, 7:31 AM UTC

nopinsight wrote: post #36

Swizec wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * 关系 (Guanxi) (Mandarin): Your network of connections that help you get stuff done in life and business. I do think in American English at least there is a phrase for this: Your Network. You even used it to explain the word :) Usually the first association to “your/the network” is social. You have to specify if you mean the technical version with computers.

Major differences between them. The concepts are rooted in very different cultures. In-depth explanation by Orlando Yang: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/chinese-guanxi-vs-western-soc... Easier-to-read one by GPT-4o: https://chatgpt.com/share/e/b2a76479-2950-4aad-ad8e-97e775be...

I really don't think it's all that different, sorry. The difference is that there is a more direct and established way of talking about these things in China, because it has such a long history of bureaucracy and everyone got used to these dnyamics over thousands of years, but even in places like Sweden you can have guanxi. It boils down to doing something for a member of your ingroup strictly because he's in your ingroup.

I mean even the word 关系 and "network" have the same etymology. 系 = threads of silk arranged in a pattern.

Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]

#79

Post by mewpmewp2 » Sat, Jun 22, 2024, 7:31 AM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #72

nopinsight wrote: post #7

There are many concepts in our thought stream without a 'word' or even a simple 'phrase' to label them. A word or a common phrase is coined when a concept is sufficiently common and important enough such that someone comes up with a label to communicate the idea succinctly and the label catches on. We, humanity, have words or common phrases to label the vast majority of significant concepts. However, not every concep…

Interesting examples. For me, a predominantly linguistic thinker, it's actually those concepts having words that make it possible for me to really think about them on their own. So "buying books and never reading them", yes, it's a phenomenon that happens and one could presumably talk about it, but it's hard to even think of in the first place - it's a complex set of ideas joined together in a specific way. Tsundoku…

And I can definitely think about buying books without reading them. Firstly, coincidentally I thought about this in the morning, but I didn't need a word, but it was still linguistic. I just thought the whole sentence.

Re: Language is primarily a tool for communication rather than thought [pdf]

#80

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jun 22, 2024, 7:32 AM UTC

vishnugupta wrote: post #45

Most of the time we are communicating (internal monologue) with ourselves which I’m sure shapes our thoughts. I’d guess a large percentage of that is through a language. In fact languages codify a community’s culture, values, a way of life all of which go way beyond communication.

[deleted]