[david-given]

Because language, to a large decree, determines your mode of thought. By learning a different language, you also learn how to think and reason differently. It doesn't matter whether you actually use it to talk to people or not.

For example: some African languages don't have temporal tenses --- they don't distinguish between past, present and future. Some Scandinavian languages don't have gender, anywhere. Some languages (though I've forgotten which) don't have possessive pronouns. All of these will expose you to new modes of thought.

It's precisely the same concept as learning as many programming languages as you can; learning Forth will make you write better C. Learning Lojban will make you speak better English.

[dalke]

Does that include Klingon and Elvish?

Less flippantly, I believe in 1980 it was for most people a better use of one's time to read "The Selfish Gene" and "Gödel, Escher, Bach" than to learn Linear B, in order to think and reason differently. (I specify a date since the main ideas described in those books now pervade culture, so they would have less of an impact now.)

Regarding Scandinavian languages and gender, "Norwegian has three genders: masculine, feminine and neuter—except the Bergen dialect, which has only two genders: common and neuter." (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norwegian_language). Danish and Swedish have two grammatical genders, common and neuter.

Traces of a masculine gender remain in Swedish when used to refer to a male. For example, "den rika" could mean "the rich", while "den rike" means "the rich man". However, it's perfectly fine to use "den rika" for the rich man.

All of the Scandinavian languages have more of a gender system than English does, so I think it's a bit odd to use that property as an example. Could you explain why learning (say) the Swedish gender system helps one think and reason differently in any useful form, other than the obvious one of being able to comprehend Swedish and related languages?

[erikb]

In English you have time. You say if something [happens] at some time, [is happening] now, has [happened] or [will happen]. In Chinese, for instance, you don't have grammar for that (=no tense). But you have grammar to determine if that what's happening has started to happen, is in the middle of happening (not sure how to express that in English), is finished and in many regards even what result was achieved (=aspect). You can't say "it happened" but you can say "happen-stateChanged". You also can't say "I found" but you can say "I search-done".

Now even if you try to communicate in a language with tense but without aspect you are able to communicate better because you know there are two things to think about, when something happened related to you (tense) and how that activity is related to the flow of time (aspect). You will find that even languages without one kind of grammar will have a way to express something similar (e.g. in English perfect/imperfect is expressed with tense). You might even be able to do something an untrained native of your target language might not be able to do: When there are different nearly similar ways to say something you might be able to choose the better alternative and distinguish between both of them because of your deeper understanding of grammar.

[dalke]

I believe my response wasn't clear enough. I don't believe that the statement "By learning a different language, you also learn how to think and reason differently." is useful.

I do not think it's useful for most people to learn Linear B. Instead, I think there are more effective ways to 'learn how to think and reason differently' in the same amount of time, if that's one's goal.

In addition, the comment about genderless Scandinavian languages is incorrect. There are at least two genders (in the grammar sense), and those languages have more of a gender influence than English does. One shouldn't learn Swedish to understand how a genderless language works.

That isn't to say that learning a language is pointless or that it can't lead to a different view on how to think. Rather, that the blanket statement doesn't contain useful advice, and one of the specific examples appears to be incorrect.

Regarding tenses, qué será, será. :)

[david-given]

Actually, I was thinking of Finnish.

With regard to the books, while I haven't read The Selfish Gene, I have read GEB, and while it's a superb introduction to the philosophy and formal logic, that's not really what I mean about modes of thought.

Example: Scottish Gaelic has two words for red. dearg is the kind of red you get in paint or dye. ruadh is the kind of red you get in hair or deer. They're not considered anything like similar in Gaelic, even though they're usually translated into English as the same word. So, if you think about colours in Gaelic you're going to reason about them in a very different way than if you are in English.

To expand on my reasoning with Finnish is: in English, we have two (well, five, but only two are of interest here) pronouns, which are gendered: he and she. This means that it's much easier to talk about two people in a single sentence if they're of different sexes. "He opened the door using her key." If the person who owns the key is also male, we can't use this construction unambiguously, so we need to rephrase.

Finnish only has a single pronoun, hän. So Finnish can't use the construction above. In order to say that, they'll always have to explicitly choose some other means to disambiguate the people. "The locksmith opened the door using the customer's key." "The large person opened the door using the small person's key."

Whereas in English, the first thing we do is to try and disambiguate by sex, simply because it makes the grammar easier. So people who think in English are going to reason about pairs of people (of any sex) differently than they will in Finnish.

The same reasoning applies to any place where a symbol or construct in one sentence doesn't map 1:1 onto the same symbol or construct in another, which is all of them. Learning and internalising a construct in a non-native language gives you a new way to think about things and expands your mental toolkit.

[dalke]

Ahh, I see the source of the confusion. Finnish is a Nordic language, but not a Scandinavian language.

If someone wants to appreciate differences in color perception, is it better to learn Scottish Gaelic or read Berlin and Kay's "Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution" or similar works since 1969? See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Distinction_of_blue_and_green_i... for the differences in blue and green across many different languages.

This is why I argue that if the goal is to "think and reason differently" then learning a new language should not be high on the list. Instead, learning a new language has a side effect of thinking and reasoning differently, but so do many other topics. I believe there are easier ways achieve that goal than learning a new language.

Your 'key' example is resolved in Swedish with a special term for his/her own X. Compare "Han öppnade dörren med sin nyckel" (He opened the door with his own key) with "Han öppnade dörren med hans nyckel" (He opened the door with some other male's key.)

GEB is also all about recursion. I remember in my own learning how tough it was to understand recursion and induction. I consider that a mode of thought.

There's also the essay in GEB about the difficulties of language translation, such as the street name in Crime and Punishment. He goes into several pages about the different aspects of that translation. I consider that an aspect of the same mode of thought you are talking about. Further, in "Metamagical Themas" he covers aspects of gender neutrality in Chinese. Reading his essays seems much easier than learning Finnish.

I'm not arguing against your conclusion, which is that "Learning _and internalising_ a construct in a non-native language gives you a new way to think about things and expands your mental toolkit" but against the implication that learning a new way to think is one of the reasons to learn a new language. I think that's poor advice given other methods to learn new ways of thinking.

Further, languages are not equal. The Swedish mode of thought is very similar to English, so you might end up after a couple of years of study with only a few small insights that could have been more easily learned by reading a linguistics textbook.

[david-given]

Re Finnish: fair enough. It's spoken in Scandinavia, hence my use of the word. I know it's a bit weird, language-wise.

Regarding translation, I keep meaning to pick up Hofstadter's Le Ton beau de Marot, which is all about this sort of thing.

[sampo]

> Finnish only has a single pronoun, hän.

Actually Finnish has two: hän for she/he, and se for it. But for example Turkish has only one: o for she/he/it.

[pbhjpbhj]

>Whereas in English, the first thing we do is to try and disambiguate by sex, simply because it makes the grammar easier. So people who think in English are going to reason about pairs of people (of any sex) differently than they will in Finnish. //

I don't think your conclusion follows. We elicit a sentence that externally shortcuts the designation of who does what by using pronouns where it seems still clear. But that doesn't mean we reason any differently internally about the subjects and objects. With a sentence like:

"The mother gave the sommelier a wave."

Being spoken as:

"She gave him a wave."

It seems quite reasonable to imagine that we perceive in our mind's eye the subject and object in the same way but extract the pertinent information as appropriate. A simpler sentence could be the result of a more complex process.

But then we come across this sort of issue within English too because we come across ambiguous situations "they gave me the other's key". Or perhaps ...

A: "She gave me her key"

B: "Who?"

A: "The girl gave me her key."

B: "Why did the girl have a key?"

A: "No I mean the girl gave me the mother's key."

The reasoning about the people was clearly about a girl and a mother in the first sentence but the expression of that reason wasn't elicited until the final one - I don't think the mental model has changed anywhere is such an exchange. Thus I don't see why there needs be a different internal model being used in your [david-given's] example.

In your red example if someone tells me "he has red hair" red refers to a different thing to "his door is red" - red _hair_ is what we call ginger hair usually. It's not that Gael's think of red differently IMO it's just a limitation of English expression. The expression doesn't reflect the internal model well.

[sho_hn]

Nitpick: Linear B is not a language.

[dalke]

Nit picked. Next time I'll say 'Mycenaean Greek'.

[kazagistar]

I certainly don't think in language. Easy evidence: I know the idea of what I want to say, but I totally forget the word. Language is just something I have to compile to once the idea is fully formed.

I understand that lots of people actually do think in language, but you shouldn't assume that everyone follows the same mental process.

[ColinWright]

Just because you can't think of a particular word at a given moment, do not assume that you are thereby not thinking in the language. Experiments show that it is far, far more subtle than you might imagine, and that your language affects how you think in ways you might not expect.

I've participated in experiments[0] that clearly showed that my perceptions of what was happening in my head with regards language were simply not true. Introspection is extremely subjective, and very poor at getting at reality.

[0] Participation required an NDA, so I can't tell you more.