Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by TeMPOraL 977 days ago
It is obvious. Most words in different languages aren't 100% equivalent - they have large or small differences in sets of connotations. Same is true for phrases and sentences. When you translate a thought expressed in one language to another, you may get the primary, leading-order meanings across 100% right, but you'll still lose some lower-order connotations.

For a more direct analogy, I'd compare this to how LLMs process tokens, but I feel most of the community is not ready for it yet, as we're still stuck debating the validity of this comparison in the other direction...
1 comments
avgcorrection 977 days ago
> It is obvious. Most words in different languages aren't 100% equivalent - they have large or small differences in sets of connotations.

This is true. Which is why idioms and phrases can be hard to translate. But we're talking about Sapir-Worth hypothesis which is a much stronger claim.

I have never experienced that I need to think in a specific language in order to do something better (well, I only have two choices).

link
TeMPOraL 976 days ago
> I have never experienced that I need to think in a specific language in order to do something better (well, I only have two choices).

I found that for me, certain thoughts "flow better" in one language, and others in another. And this makes sense, because thinking is, in large part, exploring the web of associations and connotations, going down the gradient of what "feels right"[0] - and since those annotations and connotations have different structures in different languages, so will the thoughts drift in different directions, take different paths, even if they end up in the same place.

--

[0] - The obvious parallels between one's inner voice and the workings of an LLM are left as an exercise to the reader.

link
avgcorrection 971 days ago
> I found that for me, certain thoughts "flow better" in one language, and others in another.

For you. So not an absolute truth as in “it is obvious”.

> The obvious parallels between one's inner voice and the workings of an LLM are left as an exercise to the reader.

Another obvious? Hmm.

Perhaps obvious to the techno-animists.

link