Does the language you speak change how you think?
Why Hacker News recommends it
Linked as a concise, accessible rebuttal whenever linguistic relativity comes up in a thread.
What it is
Tom Scott, with linguists Gretchen McCulloch and Molly Ruhl, examines whether the language you speak changes how you think. The short answer is mostly no, with caveats about the weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
Recommended by 1 HN commenters across 1 different months, 2023 to 2024.
What Hacker News said
Recommends cardanome · 2024-06 · on “Orwell: The Rewrite”
Note that Orwell promotes an hard form of the Sapir Whorf hypothesis called linguistic determinism meaning that a language would make it impossible think certain thoughts. This is obviously wrong. Have you ever experienced anything for which you didn't have the words to explain? This already proves that you can feel and think things that are not easily expressed in the languages you know. Also some people don't even think in words but are more visual thinkers. But even for the softer version, linguistic relativism, these is not much hard evidence. You subjective experience is not easily measurable. Yes, the act of learning new languages can gives you new perspectives and enrich you as a pers
Cites elvis10ten · 2023-11 · on “There's something going on with AI startups in France”
Related video which I just remembered: [this video] So it seems languages might not change how you think, but might be able to emphasize certain aspects of things like you allude to (I believe).
Cites wilg · 2024-01 · on “Our language, our world”
Tom Scott recently did a video about how linguistic relativity (Sapir-Whorf) is almost certainly not true: [this video] It's an alluring idea, but it's been debunked.