There are many concepts in our thought stream without a 'word' or even a simple 'phrase' to label them.
A word or a common phrase is coined when a concept is sufficiently common and important enough such that someone comes up with a label to communicate the idea succinctly and the label catches on.
We, humanity, have words or common phrases to label the vast majority of significant concepts. However, not every concept is accorded such importance in every language. Some common words in other languages without direct translation in English:
* 積ん読 (Tsundoku) (Japanese): Buying books and never reading them, just letting them pile up.
* น้ำใจ (Nam-jai) (Thai): Literally "water from the heart". Being very nice and helpful without expecting anything back.
* 关系 (Guanxi) (Mandarin): Your network of connections that help you get stuff done in life and business.
This is perhaps another line of evidence to support the thesis of the article.
Make no mistake though: Language is extremely useful for some types of thoughts, especially more abstract ones. Not everyone, however, uses it as their primary tool for thinking.
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The above also helps explain some limitations of LLMs, such as their inadequate spatial intelligence. Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) start to address these issues by using much more granular data than language alone.
> * 積ん読 (Tsundoku) (Japanese): Buying books and never reading them, just letting them pile up.
i don't speak Thai or Mandarin, so I can't speak to the other 2, but this one is a pun (combining tsundeoku, pile up, and dokusho, book reading) that survived in the language due to its catchiness.
A bit like "hangry" (hungry + angry) in English.
I have a hard time interpreting the existence of those words as an indication that Japanese culture really values not reading the books you buy, or English speaking culture is irritated due to hunger more so than other cultures.
They're just meme-like constructs that caught on due to arbitrary phonetic properties of the language.
there are no good examples. The basic premise in Linguistics these days seems tl be that all languages are potentially equally expressive. Trade-offs in one domain (grammar, lexicon, phonology etc.) afford advantages in another. Which means, there is no need to refer to Japanese at all.
You could equally refer to some slur in a lower register to then claim that this doesn't exist in your language and how it can't be translated either. So when Joe Biden said "SoB" on tape once, that was code switching; likewise, when Trump says anything it's all made up and coded and means something entirely different. However, these are bad examples if your target is a monolingual Japanese, obv.
> They're just meme-like constructs that caught on due to arbitrary phonetic properties of the language.
My take: they became instant memes and experience wide adoption because they capture a concept without another name - and that makes it not just easy to talk about, but also to think about in the first place (counter to article's thesis?).
However, Tsundoku hasn't caught on, at least not in English, except as a vain example of language fun facts. If there was a need, it would be borrowed eventually, perhaps as a semantic loan (calque). We call it hording already. Japanese simply adds a work related to reading. I don't read Japanese but I can recognize the "speech" radical at least.
Consider Chinese 成语 (Chengyu) [1] or Japanese 四字熟語 (Yo Ji Juku Go) [2]:
- 指桑骂槐 (Zhi Sang Ma Huai) - Pulling the shoots to make the rice grow = helicoptering
- 拔苗助长 (Ba Miao Zhu Zhang) - Point at the mulberry tree to curse the locust tree = deflective criticism
These condense a whole story with moral lesson in them, and they facilitate recall of that concept. The trick is omission of everything but 4 characters from the whole story. Sometimes they're just an enumeration:
- 柴米油盐 （Chai Mi You Yan) Firewood, Rice, Oil, Salt = essential things for everyday life
- 都道府県 (To Dou Fu Ken) all 4 types of Jap. prefecture = everywhere
I think brevity is key for words that aim at aiding thinking. All languages allow composition; consider "Eierschalensollbruchstellenverursacher". But only if the word is short, can you quickly cast your thought into its form (as if speaking) and proceed to compose it with the next thought. You do this until your individual mental capacity runs out.
It's also very important that others know the concept.
I find myself often refer to "that scene in Wolf of Wallstreet where Belfort _really safely_ drives his Lamborghini home"[3] to express "power is nothing without control". I wish there was a briefer word for it yet.
So you're effectively saying that Chinese is compressed Tamarian? Like, instead of writing "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" you'd put their initials together, so you're saying the Chinese-equivalent of "DJT" and the listener instantly knows the story, and therefore the message, it refers to?
Chengyu are very common in Chinese, more common than analogous English phrases, but the entirety of Chinese isn't composed of chengyu. I haven't seen much Star Trek so I read the wiki description and watched a couple of clips + explainer YouTube videos to understand what you're talking about. From what I understand, Tamarian seems to be a language that is entirely chengyu/成语.
There's a subclass of 成语 the sense of which you can't even guess at unless you know the story:
- 塞翁失马 (Sai Weng Shi Ma) - Old man loses horse; a 5-fold story of riches-to-rags-to-riches-to-rags-to-riches = life is unpredictable
- 自相矛盾 (Zi Xiang Mao Dun) - Resemble spear and shield = unstoppable force meets indestructible object
The latter is so common that 矛盾 (Mao Dun) is the dictionary entry for "contradiction" in Chinese and Japanese.
Because 矛盾 is so common, the story 自相矛盾 (=etymology) gets taught only later to native speakers. Similarly, consider the surprising etymology of word "rob", deriving from "robe" [1].
Consider also:
- "Seven at One Blow" [2] = bamboozle
This proverb everyone knows, yet nobody uses it. It only cumbersomely embeds in a sentence; "bamboozle" is briefer.
But 成语 do easily embed in Chinese or any phrase does in Tamarian.
"Seven at One Blow" is certainly not a proverb that everyone knows in English; it's the name of the fairytale in English, but not something that people use to mean "bamboozle".
It's simply the case that Chinese relies far more on literary/historical allusions (chengyu) than English does. We might talk about someone's "Achilles heel" or a "Trojan horse", but these literary/historical allusions are simply nowhere near as common as chengyu in Chinese.
These are fascinating. Anyone know a book our other source for a list of such Chinese shorthand figures of speech and the tales/aphorisms behind them about human nature? Kinda like “sour grapes” in English, or Aesop’s fables.
The book I have at hand is called "成语故事 Geschichten von chinesischen Sprichwörtern". It's parallel German and Chinese.
ISBN 978-7-119-06018-7
Published by CBT China Book Trading GmbH www.cbt-chinabook.de
You are missing that to drive one-self home is a metaphor, possibly a visual metaphor in this case, for DIY self-service in the private domain, as it were.
The Mandarin word literally means "relationships" and the concept is well established in English. When you describe somebody as "connected", that's what you're saying.
It's an incredibly poor example of an "untranslatable" phrase.
The first and only time I've ever felt like I really know Chinese was when I came across the phrase '洋汽扑鼻' in "Fortress Besieged" by Qian Zhongshu. It literally means 'the breath of the sea assaults the nostrils". It's a joke on how fashionable and in demand everything Western was in China in the 1920s. For me it's just laugh-out-loud-for-10-minutes funny. I've tried to explain it to literal dozens of my friends and now I know not to even try.
Charity is closer to ใจบุญ (jai-bun) than น้ำใจ (nam-jai).
A mixture of "act of kindness" and "good will" would be a more fitting translation, but the interesting part here is that "sportmanship" is also considered an act of น้ำใจ (น้ำใจนักกีฬา nam-jai nak-kee-la or literally. sportman's nam-jai).
We also have a word เสียน้ำใจ (sia-nam-jai) for when our nam-jai ended up as a waste, or for when the other party is being ungrateful for the kindness that's being given, and also เลี้ยงน้ำใจ (leang-nam-jai) for when you're doing/accepting nam-jai for the sake of not making the other party sia-nam-jai.
In the King James Bible you have lovingkindness but I guess that might be a mistranslation of the Hebrew checed which literally means "covenant loyalty." But I feel like lovingkindness even if it was originally mistranslated has the same connotation as nam-jai.
I really don't think it's all that different, sorry. The difference is that there is a more direct and established way of talking about these things in China, because it has such a long history of bureaucracy and everyone got used to these dnyamics over thousands of years, but even in places like Sweden you can have guanxi. It boils down to doing something for a member of your ingroup strictly because he's in your ingroup.
I mean even the word 关系 and "network" have the same etymology. 系 = threads of silk arranged in a pattern.
In English your family and friends are absolutely part of your network. If I needed a job and someone told me they'd reach out to everyone in their network until they found me one, I'd be very confused if they'd failed without ever speaking to their friends and family about it. "Your network" is definitely related to/aimed at economic productivity and personal productivity, but it is not composed only of people you've met at work.
The mandarin guangxi encompasses a whole lot more than just your network. That would be considered a very bastardised translation, losing all the extra meanings such as good luck created by having that network, possibilities to fortune, a kind of karma, and more.
Karma aside, "having connections"/being "well-connected" is pretty much the equivalent in English. It's not bastardised at all; terms don't need to have the exact same cultural implications to be basically equivalent.
> all the extra meanings such as good luck created by having that network, possibilities to fortune, a kind of karma, and more.
In your 20s you might think of your network as people who you went to college with. In your 40s your network takes on a meaning much closer to what you have described. I don’t yet know what happens in your 60s.
> There are many concepts in our thought stream without a 'word' or even a simple 'phrase' to label them.
If those concepts would exist you wouldn’t be able to explain them using words, no matter how complex the phrase may be. Taking a phrase and expecting it to have a single word replace is unrealistic. You can’t just asign a word to every possible sentence/phrase. Having a direct translation means you don’t necessarily need that word in your language.
One might argue that the limit of our language is the limit of our ability to think.
How did Michelangelo create his masterpieces? Can one describe the process using any verbal language in sufficient detail such that another master or a robot could create David? That's an example of thought processes beyond language.
I suspect the same happens in many other fields. Even in an abstract field like mathematics, intuition often forms in the mind before verbal description or articulation.
> Can one describe the process using any verbal language in sufficient detail such that another master or a robot could create David? That's an example of thought processes beyond language.
Possibly. Even if this was just emulating the thought process that happened non-verbally, it would still work. I imagine that's a big part of why language seems so critical an invention: because it can be used as emulator of otherwise non-verbal thought processes.
That said, in case of Michelangelo, describing the "algorithm" is not sufficient, because just as important are the external factors. Art reacts to the medium and situation, so there's a lot of randomness into any specific work. It's kind of like with Stable Diffusion - we could get the prompt just right to generate something like a picture someone else generated, but there's only one seed that will result in identical output, and that little number is something we can't easily reverse.
>How did Michelangelo create his masterpieces? Can one describe the process using any verbal language in sufficient detail such that another master or a robot could create David? That's an example of thought processes beyond language.
I'm not sure what you mean. He probably started with something "Ok, I need to create a statue", then "Who should I pick, I guess it should be someone Biblical, let's pick David because they like him in Florence", then "Ok, he was a healthy and muscular young man, and I have enough material for a 5 meter high statue", then "let's start with sculpting a general outline and then focus on head and neck shapes" (...) and finally "looks good, but the nose should be a bit smaller". I can almost imagine the whole thought process (except I know nothing about sculpting, but I'm not terrible at some other art forms).
There's nothing that is inherently non-verbal in this process. And all of these decisions can be described algorithmically and numerically (even though humans doing art usually compare their results to a reference images instead of doing 3d math in their head).
Here is the key part of my argument: in sufficient detail such that another master or a robot could create David, (implying) in the exact same style as the masterpiece, without seeing or touching the artifact itself (because that would not be just verbal language anymore).
Isn't that what CNC machines do? Or even 3D modeling software, which then gets 3D printed? Is that not creating things, potentially as complicated as David, using language? I know CNC machines use G-Code.
I think the only limiting factor we have on that is we don't yet have a robot that can chisel marble to create a carbon copy of such sculptures, but we can otherwise do it with other materials.
In the context of the original article in which this whole discussion takes place, I assume we are talking about verbal, natural language. Specifying every little detail would make my comments sound like legalese.
To my understanding, this is not a type of natural language the paper discusses:
N10 G21 ; Set units to millimeters
N20 G17 ; Select XY plane
N30 G90 ; Absolute positioning
N40 G00 Z5.0 ; Raise Z axis to 5.0 mm
I don't expect a human could recreate David with that, no. But you also included robot in your post, and a robot can use that language to recreate David. If you hadn't specified robot, then sure.
I doubt Michelangelo could write such a spec, but he could make David. The ability to communicate is not the same thing as the ability to do, they are separate, as people who can write such a spec probably can't make it by themselves either.
I don't get your point on Michelangelo. We can very easily describe the process if we could see it. We just can't cause he's dead and he was not big on YouTube, even then we can explain a lot from evidence.
Its much more complex to explain why we classify them as masterpieces than how he made it.
In the context of the original article in which this whole discussion takes place, I assume we are talking about verbal, natural language. Specifying every little detail would make my comments sound like legalese.
To my understanding, this is not a type of natural language the paper discusses:
N10 G21 ; Set units to millimeters
N20 G17 ; Select XY plane
N30 G90 ; Absolute positioning
N40 G00 Z5.0 ; Raise Z axis to 5.0 mm
I believe that intuition is often not enough to have a concrete thought. It’s more of a feeling, you can’t reach conclusions based on intuition, you also need reason.
I find language to be worse for abstract thought. Abstract thought to me is shapes and transformations. I then have to put words to them, "Imagine there is a ball here and another ball here and..."
I can imagine things transformating in space much faster than thinking it in words.
Interesting examples. For me, a predominantly linguistic thinker, it's actually those concepts having words that make it possible for me to really think about them on their own.
So "buying books and never reading them", yes, it's a phenomenon that happens and one could presumably talk about it, but it's hard to even think of in the first place - it's a complex set of ideas joined together in a specific way. Tsundoku, however, is a concept. A single word. A token. A point in the latent space. Something I feel existing independently in my mind, as a node that I can feel emotions about, that grows attachments. That's much easier to access, and thus much more common to talk about.
Nam-jai, I already have an English word for this in my mind, "pay
-it-forward". Yeah, it's one semantic unit in my mind. Funny enough, I'm ESL and I don't know a word in my native language for this (Polish); the concept exists in my head literally as "pay it forward", and brings up associations with some broken down car story, and Jesus for some reason.
Guanxi - in English, isn't that a "social network"? That's another good example of a concept I find much easier to think about once it's pinned down with a name.
And I can definitely think about buying books without reading them. Firstly, coincidentally I thought about this in the morning, but I didn't need a word, but it was still linguistic. I just thought the whole sentence.
I can think of that too. But it's not the same. A crude analogy would be to working memory. "Buying books without reading them, as a phenomenon" takes half a dozen or more slots in memory. "Tsundoku" is one slot.
A word or a common phrase is coined when a concept is sufficiently common and important enough such that someone comes up with a label to communicate the idea succinctly and the label catches on.
We, humanity, have words or common phrases to label the vast majority of significant concepts. However, not every concept is accorded such importance in every language. Some common words in other languages without direct translation in English:
* 積ん読 (Tsundoku) (Japanese): Buying books and never reading them, just letting them pile up.
* น้ำใจ (Nam-jai) (Thai): Literally "water from the heart". Being very nice and helpful without expecting anything back.
* 关系 (Guanxi) (Mandarin): Your network of connections that help you get stuff done in life and business.
This is perhaps another line of evidence to support the thesis of the article.
Make no mistake though: Language is extremely useful for some types of thoughts, especially more abstract ones. Not everyone, however, uses it as their primary tool for thinking.
-----
The above also helps explain some limitations of LLMs, such as their inadequate spatial intelligence. Large Multimodal Models (LMMs) start to address these issues by using much more granular data than language alone.