This is what your brain does when it processes language.

I find that in languages I don't speak well, my ability to understand degrades much more quickly as the audio quality goes down. But in my native language, even with piss poor audio quality, my brain fills in the garbled words with its prior expectation of what those words should be, based on context.

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mockingloris a day ago | parent [-]

A slight segue to this; I was made aware of the phenomena that - The language in which you think in, sets the constraints to which you level of expanse the brain can think and parse information in.

I think in English fortunately and it's an ever evolving language so, expanding as the world does. That is compared to the majority of people where I'm from; English was a second language they had to learn and the people that thought them weren't well equipped with the resources to do a good job.

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└── Dey well; Be well

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cyphar 20 hours ago | parent [-]

This is called linguist relativity (nee. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) and the strong form you describe has fallen out of favour in modern linguistics.

A surprising number of monolingual people think their own language is the most adaptable and modern language, but this is obviously untrue. All languages evolve to fit the needs of speakers.

Also, the idea that people "think in language X" is heavily disputed. One obvious counterargument is that most people have experienced the feeling of being unable to express what they are thinking into words -- if you truly did think in the language you speak, how could this situation happen? My personal experience is that I do not actively hear any language in my head while unless I actively try to think about it (at least, since I was a teenager).

(This is all ignoring the comments about ESL speakers that I struggle to read as anything but racism. As someone who speaks multiple languages, it astounds me how many people seem to think that struggling to express something in your non-native language means that you're struggling to think and are therefore stupid.)

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sigbottle 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I think it's more like, you have a thought X, that has so many dimensions to it, but the way you serialize it to something that's actually discussable and comparable to other thoughts is language. And sometimes that language naturally loves slicing one part of that thought one way or the other.

(then there's also a feedback loop type of argument, that always happens when discussing any sort of perception-reality distinction, but let's ignore that for now)

At least for me, my brain is so bad and it's hard for me to truly hold a single thought in my head for a long time. Maybe it eventually settles into my subconscious but I don't really have a way to verify that.

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numpad0 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> if you truly did think in the language you speak, how could this situation happen?

As far as how it happens to me is concerned, either something closer to speech than raw thoughts reports back the data in shared memory is invalid for selected language, or I find there's no text representation exist for what I am trying to say.

The "raw" thoughts work with the currently active language, for me, so at least for me, I just know strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is not even a hypothesis, but just a reasonable verbalization closely matching my own observations.

I don't get why people can't take it, even in the age of LLMs. It is what it is and that old guy is just never correct even for once.

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codedokode 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

My experience is that sometimes, for example, when I watch a lecture in a foreign language, there could be some terms for which I don't know the correct translation so I cannot think about or mention them in my native language, while I understand what they mean.

	▲	cyphar 2 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I was more focused on the experience of monolinguals (where this kind of explanation is impossible), but yes I also experience this fairly often as someone who speaks more than one language.