[nickparker]

I took an intro linguistics class that focused a lot (like, weirdly more than I expected) on linguistic relativity, or the idea that the language you use affects your perception of reality.

It's one of the things I'm really hoping neuroscience can answer better before I die, because honestly the class gave me the impression that the entire field is incredibly contrived stuff like this.

My suspicion is that there's significant truth to it, but we still have such an awful understanding of cognition that almost all testable hypotheses we can imagine re: linguistic relativity are hopelessly naive. The only one that seemed really well founded to me was that Russian speakers distinguish shades of blue better because they have separate "light blue" and "dark blue" colors.

https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11759-russian-speaker...

[Brakenshire]

I think about it from the perspective of computing, when you learn jargon, are you just learning an idiom, or are you learning the model through which you will think? It's definitely the latter to some extent.

In my family, we have the eternal 'coming in five minutes', which is never five minutes, but which may be anywhere from 12 minutes to never. Essentially it's a way of putting a future task on a queue which will be checked at an indeterminate time in the future. This doesn't exactly reflect a precise parsing of the phrase, which might be tempting for a linguist, but I do think that the way you express yourself in language and the way that language is understood by others affects the way you think and behave. The eternal five minutes definitely has a habit of making us late.

[aquilaFiera]

Huh, that is interesting. Another example of that from Italian is that word for cranberry and blueberry are the same word. I had never thought of them being particularly similar but many Italians I asked said they're so similar that they don't even distinguish them in their head.