English can distinguish between hear/listen/overhear/eavesdrop to distinguish different ways how people perceive sound.
As an English speaker it’s however not easily possible to do the same with smell perception.
A language like Esperanto however has the ability to express the concept because you can combine syllables to make words in Esperanto.
A friend who who’s deeply into Esperanto said that reasoning in Esperanto allowed him to understand things about meditation that can be expressed in Esperanto but not directly in English without making up new jargon this allowed him to understand things that would be harder otherwise.
Making up new words for a concept is always possible, but grammar that makes it possible to make up a term to express a concept that the listener hasn’t heard before exists in some languages but not in others.
If you take math, not having to make up a new word to say 42 but be able to express the concept with existing building blocks is very valuable. If you would have a language that needs a new word for 42 you had a problem operating in modern society that you couldn’t just fix by adding a lot of jargon for specific words.
Not easily being able to express the intentionality difference of hear/listen does make some conversations about meditation harder in English than in Esperanto.
If you would design a language for maximum intellectual utility you can look into systematizing fields of knowledge so that you can express concepts to without the need for making up jargon that has to be learned separately.
Could you please ask about the specific examples of the Esperanto words? (I speak Esperanto.)
I think a similar example would be the adjective “Russian” in English, which translates to Russian as two different words: “русский” (related to Russian ethnicity or language) or “российский” (related to Russia as a country, i.e. including the minorities who live there).
(That would be “rus-a” vs “rus-land-a / rus-i-a” in Esperanto.)
I noticed this in a video where a guy explained that “I am Rus-land-ian, not Rus-ethnic-ian”, which could be expressed in English as “I am a citizen of Russian Federation, but I am not ethnically Russian”. On one hand, it can be translated without any loss of information; on the other hand, four words in Russian expanded to over a dozen words in English. More importantly, in 99% of situations the English speaker would not bother making the distinction, while a Russian speaker would be making it all the time.
Still seems to me that these things are rare, and more importantly, they don’t seem to have the impact one might naively predict based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. For example, one could naively predict that such language nuance would lead to less nationalism (because the country is less linguistically conflated with the dominant ethnicity), and yet, ethnic Russians don’t seem less nationalistic.
Similarly, English-speaking feminists spent a lot of effort changing the default “he”, through “he or she”, to the singular “they” (and some of them go even further). But there are languages, such as Hungarian, which never even had “he” and “she”, and have always used a gender-neutral pronoun. And yet, I don’t think that Hungarians are less sexist than their neighbors.
I don’t speak Esperanto myself, but took that meditation example from someone who speaks it. I don’t know how that actually boils down to Esperanto words.
Still seems to me that these things are rare, and more importantly, they don’t seem to have the impact one might naively predict based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
Naive predictions often seem wrong in many domains.
For example, one could naively predict that such language nuance would lead to less nationalism (because the country is less linguistically conflated with the dominant ethnicity), and yet, ethnic Russians don’t seem less nationalistic.
The English are unlikely to say that the Irish are really English after all in the way that you have Russians say that the Ukranians are really Russian. The Russian idea that everyone who’s descending from a culture that had mass with Old Church Slavonic is Russian, is quite different than how other people in Europe think about the relevant concepts of identity.
The idea that Ukrainians are really Russians seems to make a lot more sense to Russian speakers than it does to most Europeans.
A Russian friend told me that when he speaks with other Russians, this involves a lot of references to Russian literature in a way that you wouldn’t do in English or German conversation. Reasoning by literature analogy is quite different from a lot of the way reasoning happens in English or German.
Something like TNIL or Real Character might be used for maximum intellectual utility. But I cannot see how simply minimizing the amount of words that need to exist for compact yet precise communication would help correct the corrupted machinery our minds run on.
I don’t think the mental model of “corrupted machinery” is a very useful one. Humans reason by using heuristics. Many heuristics have advantages and disadvantages instead of being perfect. Sometimes that’s because they are making tradeoffs, other times it’s because they have random quirks.
Real Character was a failed experiment. I don’t know how capable Ithkuil IV happens to be.
English can distinguish between hear/listen/overhear/eavesdrop to distinguish different ways how people perceive sound.
As an English speaker it’s however not easily possible to do the same with smell perception.
A language like Esperanto however has the ability to express the concept because you can combine syllables to make words in Esperanto.
A friend who who’s deeply into Esperanto said that reasoning in Esperanto allowed him to understand things about meditation that can be expressed in Esperanto but not directly in English without making up new jargon this allowed him to understand things that would be harder otherwise.
Making up new words for a concept is always possible, but grammar that makes it possible to make up a term to express a concept that the listener hasn’t heard before exists in some languages but not in others.
If you take math, not having to make up a new word to say 42 but be able to express the concept with existing building blocks is very valuable. If you would have a language that needs a new word for 42 you had a problem operating in modern society that you couldn’t just fix by adding a lot of jargon for specific words.
Not easily being able to express the intentionality difference of hear/listen does make some conversations about meditation harder in English than in Esperanto.
If you would design a language for maximum intellectual utility you can look into systematizing fields of knowledge so that you can express concepts to without the need for making up jargon that has to be learned separately.
Could you please ask about the specific examples of the Esperanto words? (I speak Esperanto.)
I think a similar example would be the adjective “Russian” in English, which translates to Russian as two different words: “русский” (related to Russian ethnicity or language) or “российский” (related to Russia as a country, i.e. including the minorities who live there).
(That would be “rus-a” vs “rus-land-a / rus-i-a” in Esperanto.)
I noticed this in a video where a guy explained that “I am Rus-land-ian, not Rus-ethnic-ian”, which could be expressed in English as “I am a citizen of Russian Federation, but I am not ethnically Russian”. On one hand, it can be translated without any loss of information; on the other hand, four words in Russian expanded to over a dozen words in English. More importantly, in 99% of situations the English speaker would not bother making the distinction, while a Russian speaker would be making it all the time.
Still seems to me that these things are rare, and more importantly, they don’t seem to have the impact one might naively predict based on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. For example, one could naively predict that such language nuance would lead to less nationalism (because the country is less linguistically conflated with the dominant ethnicity), and yet, ethnic Russians don’t seem less nationalistic.
Similarly, English-speaking feminists spent a lot of effort changing the default “he”, through “he or she”, to the singular “they” (and some of them go even further). But there are languages, such as Hungarian, which never even had “he” and “she”, and have always used a gender-neutral pronoun. And yet, I don’t think that Hungarians are less sexist than their neighbors.
I don’t speak Esperanto myself, but took that meditation example from someone who speaks it. I don’t know how that actually boils down to Esperanto words.
Naive predictions often seem wrong in many domains.
The English are unlikely to say that the Irish are really English after all in the way that you have Russians say that the Ukranians are really Russian. The Russian idea that everyone who’s descending from a culture that had mass with Old Church Slavonic is Russian, is quite different than how other people in Europe think about the relevant concepts of identity.
The idea that Ukrainians are really Russians seems to make a lot more sense to Russian speakers than it does to most Europeans.
A Russian friend told me that when he speaks with other Russians, this involves a lot of references to Russian literature in a way that you wouldn’t do in English or German conversation. Reasoning by literature analogy is quite different from a lot of the way reasoning happens in English or German.
Something like TNIL or Real Character might be used for maximum intellectual utility. But I cannot see how simply minimizing the amount of words that need to exist for compact yet precise communication would help correct the corrupted machinery our minds run on.
I don’t think the mental model of “corrupted machinery” is a very useful one. Humans reason by using heuristics. Many heuristics have advantages and disadvantages instead of being perfect. Sometimes that’s because they are making tradeoffs, other times it’s because they have random quirks.
Real Character was a failed experiment. I don’t know how capable Ithkuil IV happens to be.