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Comment by yarg | Hacker News Reader

> The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis postulates that a person's language influences their perceptions and cognitive patterns. Stanislav Kozlovsky proposed[8] in the Russian popular-scientific magazine Computerra that a fluent speaker of Ithkuil, accordingly, would think "about five or six times as fast" as a speaker of a typical natural language.

This seems to assume that one is thinking in their spoken language - but is that generally the case?

Outside of reading, writing and communicating, I damned near never think in natural language.

I don't know about other people, for anything technical I'm generally thinking in structures, not words.

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The idea that language and thought are the same thing was discarded decades ago, and no linguist uses the pop term "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" anymore (though linguistic relativity is still sometimes discussed).

If the cited claim was even remotely true, there would be significant differences in the "speed of thought" between speakers of natural languages also (which differ in semantic density). Such cognitive superiority would have obvious real-world consequences, but no such phenomenon appears to exist.

Precisely. Languages have more or less information density ("bits per symbol"), but when you look at information rate per unit time, it all works out to pretty similar.

Kind of like how QAM256 can convey more bits per symbol than QAM16, but it needs a lower baud for a given noise level, channel bandwidth, and error rate. You can squeeze out efficiency of a channel, but you can't overcome the noisy channel coding theorem max rate.

https://seantrott.github.io/information/

I don't think that language and thought are the same thing, and I certainly don't think language affects speed of thought, but I think in English all the time. It depends on the person, really. Some people have a strong internal monologue, others have a weak one, and others don't have one at all. Its a weird phenomenon, and AFAIK nobody knows why people have varying levels of internal monologuing.

If this is topic is new to you, it is worth checking out some conversations about inner voice over at reddit: https://old.reddit.com/r/nosurf/comments/10tnb8g/do_you_have...

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