The idea that "our world [is] parsed and circumscribed as it is by the limits of our vocabulary" is nuts. Just because there's not a one-to-one correspondence between a word in a language and a word in another, does not mean you can't express the same content through a combination of words and sentences.
The fact that the author was able to write this article and convey these concepts in English shows that the idea that vocabulary limits our experience is incoherent.
I agree with the article that it does limit your vocabulary. For example, writers (and comedians) play with words, phrases, sentences and paragraphs. Playing with paragraphs is a lot harder than playing with words. If you take the word and leave only an "equivalent" sentence or paragraph in the toolbox, the experience that can be created with that alone, changes.
There tends to be lot more mental fatigue involved in parsing sentences than there is in picking up a similar meaning from a familiar word. That process of passing meaning from one party to another is what defines an experience. If you miss a joke and someone explains it to you, you may "get it" and at that point understand as it well as the person who "got it" immediately but you would have had totally different experiences.
This topic is related to the question "whether there are prohibitively unthinkable thoughts given a vocabulary". The answer to that is generally shown in no uncertain terms be a strong YES.
The idea is that it shapes your thoughts. You're drawn to things that are easier to express. It's not that you can't express any arbitrary concept, but if you happen to have a concise word for something then you're more likely to use that than to try to ramble through something that takes a paragraph of explanation.
Indeed. The power of language in shaping our perception of the world is the subject of much of twentieth century philosophy [1].
For an analogy for this crowd though: All programming languages are Turing complete. Any algorithm can be expressed in any of them.
Would you thus conclude that your choice of programming language does not limit you? Especially when it comes to working in a large team on a complex project? (and there are no larger and more complex projects than human society)
An analogous concept would be Dennetts intuition pumps [2]. An answer that is more idiomatic and more easily expressed will present itself more rapidly. It will be communicated to your teammates more efficiently, and it might win out due to its linguistic superiority rather than its inherent superiority or correctness. Thus it quite literally shapes my world.
None of this requires me to suppose that thoughts outside of language can not be expressed or that I can not extend and develop language to better express my thoughts.
The claim isn't that it's impossible to have a thought unless you have language for it, but rather that having language for something makes it easier. It's a close relative of Kolmogorov Complexity and a variety of theorems from machine learning regarding hypothesis classes - different languages have more or less effective ways to express the same concept, and choosing a language with better notation for a given topic can make that topic easier to handle. In many cases (especially technical topics) this change makes the difference between the topic being completely intractable and being a two-week unit in eighth grade.
As a concrete example, consider mathematics. I can mostly handle the theory behind integration by eyeballing it and using spatial intuition, but I can't get any farther than that without introducing language that allows me to precisely circumscribe concepts and relate them precisely.
edit: also note that "the thoughts that I'm having don't use words" doesn't mean that those thoughts aren't using language. It's just not a language that you could serialize to something that could come out of your mouth - it's some private, unique internal representation that your brain has constructed for it to work with concepts on its own. Still a language, for the purposes of this discussion, since that internal representation will have all the same properties as above - some people have better internal representations for particular topics.
> I often have thoughts that can't be phrased in language
Is it that they can't be phrased or that you can't phrase them? I often have thoughts that I can't express through drawing, but that doesn't mean it is an impossibility. I think that we often ignore that the act of putting ideas or thoughts to words is a skill that can be made easier through training.
That does not mean that all human experience is communicable. In fact, internal mental states are only communicable to the extent that they are universal. Suppose I am eating cake and you ask me what it tastes like. I say strawberry.
Ok, but now supposed that you never tasted strawberrys. How do I describe in language the flavor of strawberry to someone who never tasted them? I can make an approximation based on flavors you know, but once you taste strawberrys you realize that, although what I said is true, it does not convey the sensation of eating strawberrys at all.
Even more: the less types of fruit you have tasted, the harder it is to convey an approximation of the flavor of strawberrys through language. So a lot hinges on culture and shared experiences.
Languages come from different cultures and sets of shared experiences, so it is natural that they develop more conceptual density in some things than others, and it is also natural that the grammar more naturally fits a certain way of thinking and seeing the world. You can discuss German philosophy in English, but it is a bit clunky. If you ever had the experience of learning a foreign language, you probably felt that you achieved proficiency when you were finally able to "bend" your thought process like the locals do.
Aldous huxley describes the idea that our own minds are "island universes" and that the way those we call "geniuses" think is an experience that can be described but never fully communicated, "that there is little or no common ground of memory to serve as a basis for
understanding or fellow feeling. Words are uttered, but fail to enlighten"
I can't turn senses into words. I can't stare at a scene and capture the equivalent of a photograph by talking. But any thoughts I have about the strawberries or the scene, I can put into words.
Language helps me express what is in my head without an actual human or machine language. I think in objects that are not words, so i always translate to human language when expressing my thoughts. Learning a new language helps me understand culture and the people mostly using it and as importantly the vocabulary of the already known languages. i am a poliglot. When I converse in one language i never translate to another it just flows.
Knowing different languages you could have inner monologue in the language of your choice, but one doesn't have to. I think when you speak enough languages it's easier to come to the point where your thoughts don't have a language or at least one could loose that sense. When speaking, you almost have to think in a specific language, anyone who conversed with different persons in different languages would know that it takes time to "switch" to a different though model, that's because you have a loop between Wernicke's area, Broca's area and (pre)motor cortex and it takes effort to change language fast. Hence verbal translators only become good with a lot of practice.
People have tried for a long time to find correlations between language traits and cultural or political effects. For the most part, it doesn't seem to be there.
What people actually do in practice in the situation you're describing is to just use the foreign word directly. That's how languages end up filled with loanwords.
Came here to say something similar. However, this is true only at a large enough scope. For an essay it shouldn't be a problem but for a slogan it can be and often is. There's a range between the two, and also a range within words about how untranslatable they are. Usually "untranslatability" comes down to how much meaning/nuance is carried in the word. A five word Swedish sentence using lagom[1] might translate easily into English, or you might have to use a paragraph to get the meaning across.
Even within English, there are untranslatable words. I've never found a satisfactory translation for "daggy" or "ta" for non-Australian English speakers and most translations of "bogan" miss the subtle shadings that make the word distinctive.
Anyone who spends sufficient time in Australia ends up absorbing the meaning of those words by osmosis but any attempt to communicate the meaning, except via immersion ends up frustratingly not fully capturing the nuance.
With regards to 'ta', isn't it just a casual way of saying 'thanks'? That's what it means in British English. In Britain, it's mostly used in the North of England. Here's an example of it being used from a British advert from the 90s:
As for 'daggy', it strikes me that it's the kind of loosely-defined word that ends up being a useful filler word. Much like 'cool', I suspect you can't really define it without knowing the context in which its used. Would you say daggy has one meaning or multiple overlapping meanings?
Not in the least, language goes on to influence culture, national ideas and mores (and vice versa). That then goes on to influence who, and what, you are.
It's common for multi lingual people to feel more direct in one language over another, or for it to influence them in other ways of both mood and thought.
To give, perhaps a somewhat clichéd example, consider the Himba tribe who rather famously do not distinguish linguistically between blue and green[1], only having half the colour groups we do. They do not have words to shape a simple view, and go on to have difficulty telling apart colours we would have no difficulty at all differentiating. But if you were to show them 20 different shades of green that we'd struggle to tell apart they'd clearly see differences.
I'd say that's a reasonable case that language, and use or otherwise of the concept it conveys, can make a rather dramatic difference.
The effects of color terms on Himba color perception are vastly exaggerated in the media. The actual papers found very small and subtle effects, not dramatic differences.
It was the BBC Horizon from a few years back I got my understanding from, I'd have expected better from them. They have dumbed down quite a bit in recent years though.
Anyone who needs to distinguish 20 shades of green would develop the ability to do so. That's more culture or experience than language. Having names for them just means they have some need to communicate that information. You could do the same in English by drawing words or codes from color lists like websafe, Pantone, etc.
An example where language forces our thinking and even actions instead of simply allowing us to express it easily is plurals. Plurals force us to include unneeded number information in a lot of our thinking and talking. We have to have at least 2 cars to say "I have some cars" when showing off, otherwise admit that we only have one. You can see it in writing that uses "I" or "we" too. It reveals how many people it represents. A 2-person company can look much bigger than a 1-person company because it can use "we", "our", etc. just the same as a 1000000 person company does.
>does not mean you can't express the same content through a combination of words and sentences.
This is not true, from my experiences studying foreign languages. There are many words and idioms/phrases that don't have an accurate translation into any other language. Even a paragraph-long translation fails to translate the nuance and meaning behind the word. The author's list has many Japanese definitions that I don't entirely agree with - or fail to translate the nuance behind the words/phrase.
At best you get a close approximation. This is one of a few reasons why things are "lost in translation". Without an equivalent - the nuance is lost.
I do not agree, e.g. the verb "flâner" in French can be translated in "to wander around" but this translation does not convey the pleasure of the person loitering in the streets (something induced by "flâner"). I already tried to translate it in some situations but there is nothing perfect, "taking a walk" is similar but it induces a physical activity whereas "flâner" only means enjoying your time outside, thinking loosely while walking and watching what's around you.
And as you can see after these two long sentences, the lack of a word to describe extensively this experience makes it quite absurd for non-French speakers. Words are such a great way to describe our environment thus I agree with the author that "our world is parsed by the limits of our vocabulary".
Doesn't the person using the word flâner suffer just as much as someone using a language that doesn't have that word?
If I'm sauntering, enjoying a constitutional, taking some air, or what have you then perhaps these are the things that the French person is trying to express but flâner is the closest that comes to mind [sorry, perhaps ironically, my French is not good enough to realise this analogy precisely].
Somewhat aside to the main point:
>the lack of a word to describe extensively this experience makes it quite absurd for non-French speakers //
In the past, and I'm struggling for an example, people have said things like there's no word for "such-and-such" in English and it's simply been that they don't know that word. This makes it still a limit of vocabulary but not a limit of the particular language: why isn't there a word in English for "bottom shaped", well of course there is, just most people don't know it.
The strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is conclusively disproved empirically, and also suffers from being logically impossible. The weak versions of it border on tautology.
The strong version of the hypothesis is basically the old "if your language doesn't have separate words for blue and green then you're incapable of seeing a difference between blue and green", which is conclusively disproven by all the cultures which don't have separate words but nonetheless are able to distinguish the colors when producing, say, complex patterned textiles.
And logically speaking, strong SW makes developing words for concepts impossible since strong SW says that from your perspective there's no perceivable concept you'd need to develop a word for.
Versions weak enough to stand up to empirical evidence tend to be "if your language makes it more complex to express a concept, it'll be more complex for you to express the concept". If you word it up fancy, you can get things like "people who speak language X do this task faster", but that's unsurprising if their language is giving them help at it.
>"if your language doesn't have separate words for blue and green then you're incapable of seeing a difference between blue and green", which is conclusively disproven
Well yeah, of course. Your eye has blue color receptors that send signals to the brain well below the level of language. Animals don't have language and can distinguish colors, after all. That's just like saying because English doesn't have good words to describe different textures, we can't distinguish the difference.
But the explanation of SW I've always heard is nowhere near that strong. E.g. that because English doesn't have good words for different textures, that information isn't making it to the conscious mind. E.g. we are much more likely to forget texture, not notice it, or not use it to describe things, etc. I don't' see how that's a tautology.
I know I grew up without a really conscious separation between the different tastes. E.g. sweet, sour, salty, bitter, and umami. Obviously I could taste the difference. But I couldn't describe the type of food I felt hungry for, or explain why something tasted good. As an adult I've found distinguishing these categories consciously is very useful.
I think you are underselling the empirical evidence in favor of weak Sapir-Whorf. In the 70ies Rosch did some famous experiments in Papa New Guinea with speakers of a language with impoverished color vocabulary that demonstrated that colors outside the vocabulary remained salient (and were e.g. used to categorize objects).
However since then there has been a fair amount of research that shows effects which go beyond what you would seem to allow above (e.g. hemispherical effects on color discrimination, http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~kay/tics2.pdf has some examples).
There could be limits, but it would be easier to believe they are soft limits that don't come into play in the vast majority of human behavior.
But what I really think the author is highlighting is a potential difference in perspective that accompanies participating in a culture that uses one set of concepts as 'primitives' and how that might lead to failures to understand another culture with different primitives. Not necessarily "we can't understand them", but "we don't understand them."
I think language is very important. Of course you can figure out some way to express just about any word in a foreign language in your native language.
However, a limited vocabulary limits one's thinking in the same way that writing everything in assembly will limit how and what you write despite the fact that everything can be written in assembly.
I'm always delighted to discover words (whether or not they're in my native language) that describe really useful concepts that I would have had to describe in much clunkier ways before. It allows me to reason about things involving those concepts much more clearly.
It's not really important that sometimes these useful words are discovered by studying other languages. I get the same benefit when I discover a useful word in my native language that I hadn't heard of before. I'm just more likely to find such words in other languages, because I've known English all my life and therefore am much more likely to already know what I would consider the most useful English words.
Eventually foreign words become useful enough that they get grandfathered into most English-speakers' vocabularies (zeitgeist, faux pas, deja vu, etc.). This happens with all languages of course, but English seems like more of an omnivorous mutt language than the others that I've tried to learn.
> However, a limited vocabulary limits one's thinking in the same way that writing everything in assembly will limit how and what you write despite the fact that everything can be written in assembly.
I'm not sure I would agree. You said it yourself: "despite the fact that everything can be written in assembly". It does limit your writing and speaking but good vocabulary is not a prerequisite for a good ability to think. People can think differently, some have more language oriented thinking, others visual, abstract or even logical etc, all depending on the areas you are working in.
> The idea that "our world [is] parsed and circumscribed as it is by the limits of our vocabulary" is nuts.
Superficially yes but it is just a rephrasing of Wittgenstein's "The limits of my language mean the limits of my world." which has a proper philosophical foundation:
> The fact that the author was able to write this article and convey these concepts in English shows that the idea that vocabulary limits our experience is incoherent.
How so? The author just describes a phenomenon, one he can write about because he experienced those limits and reflected upon them. He never said those limits cannot be pushed or overcome, the point is that experiencing them is what allows us to "learn about the world and ourselves".
I don't buy into the idea that the way we parse the world is necessarily limited by the limits of our vocabulary - however the way we communicate and record information may be.
Even then, programming languages are able to communicate and parse information which one might define as 'beyond the limits of' our collective cultural lexicon and structural rules of communication, which (as far as I know as a layman) are generally linear and include undertones and idioms.
also, as long time fan of meditation, I think I am able to look at the world, turn off that internal voice and view things in a way that's less limited by language.
I can't say for human languages, but in other 'linguistic' notations, I can't deny how the builtin vocabulary and concepts changes everything. Just having lambda for instance.
> Just because there's not a one-to-one correspondence between a word in a language and a word in another, does not mean you can't express the same content through a combination of words and sentences.
The article specifically acknowledges and discusses this in the third paragraph. That means that the fact the parent comment is currently the top voted comment means that very few commenters and voters have read even the beginning of the article.
No, I think you're somewhat missing what is meant by "untranslatable" - the idea behind it is that there are many singular words in other languages which immediately bring about a specific idea or evoke specific emotions or thoughts, etc. It's not that the word can't be explained in English, it's that there isn't an English equivalent of a word, and often they even lack phrases.
Defining the word isn't really the same, since that's English assimilating the word, not translating it. A very simple and classic example is bouquet; a literal translation would be closer to a small collection of plants (not even flowers necessarily, I think it's something like "little wood"); however, if you said "bouquet" in French, it was understood that you weren't talking about bushes or trees, it was specifically a pretty grouping of flowers. Subsequently, when the word gets to English speakers, they don't have a word for it really - a bunch of flowers is just "a bunch of flowers". There's a bush, there's a grove, there's a bundle, and so on, but when you want to talk about a pretty arrangement of flowers, you use bouquet.
But don't mistake assimilation for translating the word, it's just defining it. Look at the list the author compiled on their site:
Just go and pick some of the words and try to define them as concisely as you can with one English word, or even an idiom/slang/phrase. Some maybe, but most don't really have any simple equivalent or similarity in English. Even with the definition of some of them, quite a few would be hard to use correctly in an English sentence.
Like, consider a few of the russian words:
тоска) (Russian, n.): longing for one’s homeland, with nostalgia and wistfulness.
I think we could call that homesickness, cultural rejection, or a few other English words that are similar (though from the Russians I know that are versed in English, they disagree and say homesick misses how deep of a feeling тоска has.
But then consider авось: (Russian, particle): maybe/what if; faith/trust/hope in luck, serendipity, destiny or fate.
What English particle would convey the same idea here? Better yet, how would you convey such a concept in English with any other word combination?
This is why assimilation comes into play and why translations aren't always reliable. Languages can be vastly different, even if they're categorized the same. Slavic languages rarely (if ever) use "to be" in most of its tenses, and as such, they construct descriptions and ideas far differently than you would in the Germanic based languages - as the languages evolved with different rules, naturally certain words were necessary for either standard communication or for artistic license, words which were not necessary in other languages simply because they didn't evolve that way. Assimilation plays an important part in language even today: Say the English word "Coffee" at a restaurant just about anywhere in the world and odds are you will get a cup of coffee. Say "Computer" or "Phone", and likely they'll know what you mean. But again, that's assimilation - where there was no word, but there was a need, the word was taken. The truth is there are many words in many languages that as English speakers we don't know if we need; the words are foreign to how we think and write and speak.
> "I think we could call that homesickness, cultural rejection, or a few other English words that are similar (though from the Russians I know that are versed in English, they disagree and say homesick misses how deep of a feeling тоска has."
тоска sounds to me to be a mixture of homesickness and patriotism. I personally suspect your Russian acquaintances that are versed in English are overlooking that homesickness without patriotism can be a deep feeling.
For example, when I've been away from the UK for a long period of time, what I've found I miss the most is the sense of humour. That's not to say other countries are lacking a sense of humour (and there's plenty of other enjoyable facets of all the countries I've been to so far), but there's a particular style of humour that is particularly prominent in the British Isles (including Ireland) where we 'take the piss' out of ourselves as much as each other. To others, that might seem like a strange thing to be homesick about, especially in a deep way, but I assure you that when you're tired of pretense you can miss it a lot, just as much as any wistful dreams of the motherland.
P.S. Google Translate converts тоска into 'yearning', I wonder if that sits better with your Russian acquaintances.
I hadn't considered "yearning", but I ran it by a few of my colleagues and tried to find examples in literature/movies/songs they might be familiar with. Granted, this might be their lack of intimacy with English, but they didn't feel that it quite captured the feeling that тоска is supposed to give. It could also just be them being stubborn, as is occasional to happen.
But the point of тоска was more to illuminate the uniqueness of авось, making it stand as a clear example of something that I really feel doesn't have an English equivalent.
And no, I do understand what you're missing - I'm an American working abroad in Russia, and the humor my friends and I use in the US doesn't translate well either, largely because my colleagues, while being very good at English for the purpose of supporting our product, aren't quite fast enough with the language to get wordplay or the sarcastic bits.
> "I hadn't considered "yearning", but I ran it by a few of my colleagues and tried to find examples in literature/movies/songs they might be familiar with. Granted, this might be their lack of intimacy with English, but they didn't feel that it quite captured the feeling that тоска is supposed to give. It could also just be them being stubborn, as is occasional to happen."
Thanks for trying. I suspect you may be right about the stubbornness. Competing on depth of feeling is an easy way to create a sense of distinction between us. In a similar way, the Koreans have a word, Han, that they have set out as describing something uniquely Korean, but from what I can see it's a catch-all term for the feelings that come along with oppression. If you want to highlight a deep sense of oppression not felt elsewhere, of course you're going to try to create a sense of uniqueness for your own word describing these things.
Yeah, totally. I'm always open to being wrong on stuff, plus as I struggle to learn Russian it helps to try to understand words better - I can say that business-wise, I've had no need to тоска nor do I anticipate it. Since I'm not good enough at Russian to get into their literature without a dictionary in hand, I can't really find examples of it in literary or poetic works to get a better idea of how it's been used.
There is an interesting concept in machine learning called "word vectors" or word2vec. They measure how often words occur near each other, and then try to reduce it to a vector that carries most of that information. This results in similar words having similar vectors. And even a very interesting result that you can do math on them. E.g. "king"-"man"+"woman" gives a word vector very close to "queen". I imagine this is at least somewhat similar to how words are represented in the human brain.
I wonder if you looked at the space of all word vectors, and found areas where words were missing. Do to some quirk of language, there was no word to represent that point in concept space. You could also compared the vector space for multiple different languages, and automatically determine what words don't have equivalents.
Seems like these could be visualized in interesting ways using trees/graph theory. I worked on a project called wordTempo that had an interesting approach, if anyone is interested in discussing
Kiasu on his list is essentially 'FOMO' - fear of missing out. I think acronyms are an interesting way to integrate some of these untranslatable words into our own cultural lexicon.
There are also vocabulary items that do have direct translations into other languages, but none with the same precise connotation.
For example, 斯文 from Chinese most directly translates as 'refined' or 'cultured' in English.
In Chinese, the term has a strong positive connotation and can be used an almost any context to compliment any person; it carries the implication that the person is of good character and education.
In American English, 'refined' feels mostly neutral (shading into a pejorative with 'effete') and while 'cultured' has a positive connotation, it doesn't directly speak to the person's character.
What we see is that cultural norms and values become embedded in the vocabulary of languages. Even a directly, literal translation will not capture the same implied attitude. That's why translations of books and the like tend to avoid close word-for-word readings.
>In American English, 'refined' feels mostly neutral (shading into a pejorative with 'effete') and while 'cultured' has a positive connotation, it doesn't directly speak to the person's character. //
Your point still stands I think but it sounds like you're describing "classy" in en-gb.
It's often used in en-gb in a sarcastic insult way to denigrate [in the sense of disparage!!] someone's behaviour "yeah, real classy mate" but that only works because its use conveys the opposite meaning without the sarcasm.
Signed Languages of the Deaf people have many «untranslatable» expressions. Especially of forms, movement and dynamics like the way a flock of birds is flying around in the sky, or the specific way a toon is squashed in an accident and pops up again.
To what extent can speakers of other languages compensate using gesticulation?
I am sure gesticulation is much cruder, but it has an advantage too: the signs for toon-squishing don't have to share configuration space with a big vocubulary of ordinary words.
Well, there's a saying amongst italians (and italian descendants) that in order to shut an italian up, you have to tie his/her hands. Conversely, they say you are never "trully speaking italian" until you start gesticulating as much as a native-speaker :)
That's not a problem. My son «pronounced» the word «bus» wrongly, and I could show him what exactly was wrong by standing up his toy yellow postbus vertically on the floor. The configuration space is enormous.
As a musician, I've often wondered how a performer whose native language contained such words as "allegro", "largo", "andante" interpreted those markings vs me, whose native language does not contain those words.
To me, "allegro" is a tempo marking, not a state of being, for the most part.
I'm not actually sure who is getting the short end of the stick, in this particular instance, to tell you the truth.
It's easy to assume that a word has some sort of underlying notion, and that an Italian might think of "largo" slightly differently because it also means "generous" or "free". However, in practice, words often develop distinct meanings that don't necessarily affect each other. For example, the notion of bar (a musical notation, a pole, an alcohol establishment, or the law exam) are quite separate even if they may have had some common ancestry.
I am thinking it's a question of filters. I first encountered 'despacio' in a piece of music. Now that I'm living in a spanish-speaking country, whenever I come up to that word, the first filter is that piece of music; the second filter is the actual meaning of the word.
Your comment brings up a good question. Would a spanish-speaker transliterate those terms into a musical context, or into a language context first, since the words themselves are pretty equivalent?
Most are suficiently different (allegro would be alegre in spanish) or unused (andante) to keep the musical context. But it's easy to grasp the musical context from the language one anyway (in the case of largo and lento).
Amusingly one of these untranslatable words is is in fact both a direct back translation from another language and has actually taken on an entirely different meaning.
"Take the German noun Treppenwitz, which literally means ‘staircase wit’: that all too common phenomenon of a witty rejoinder that comes to mind just after an interaction!"
Well, I think the development was that Treppenwitz originally was just a Germanisation of l'esprit d'escalier. However Hertslet's book "Der Treppenwitz der Weltgeschichte" (The Treppenwitz of world history) mentioned on the Wikipedia page became a well known phrase and caused a shift in meaning, although the usage in the title of the book itself was still basically the original one.
Does anyone know if there is a word that roughly expresses: A feeling of anxiety or unease because you strongly believe there is a problem with a thing but don't know exactly what
Good call - I think it would be like foreboding except with a feeling respect to something that has happened rather than something that will.
"postboding" isn't a word but I think that might capture the feeling. Like in my example of sending an email, feeling uneasy and then the sudden realization that you forgot to attach something - so you fix it and the feeling is changes to relief.
close - but in this case, it's something you eventually end up finding, resolving and the feeling goes away.
for example - as a developer, I have felt this before about single functions and sometimes entire codebases - I pay a lot of attention to my intuition - and I feel like it's part intuition, part paranoia, part anxiety that maybe you have rushed and done something wrong.
so - kind of like an anxiety resulting from intuition that you have made a mistake, and the feeling is reinforced by previous experiences - and it can be resolved by addressing the issue if you can identify it...
or maybe you sent an email like 5 minutes ago and get the feeling, then realize you forgot to attach a file
A similar idea is that of abandoned tech and terminated/less lucrative branches of tech within functional branches, like image display tech (I.e. mechanical TV>crt>plasma>lcd>oled)w where research grinds nearly to a halt. We can learn a lot by looking back and seeing some odd tech that was a neat demonstration 100 years ago, that we basically forgot about, but might make commercial sense today.
For those who speak multiple languages: can you think of some examples (besides technical words) that don't have clean translations into languages besides English?
Surely there must be some... English speakers (especially native ones) just don't consider them to be notable due to familiarity.
There's no such thing as the "Untranslatable" Word if universal grammar is for actual. At least up to turing completenes, as any language should suffice to describe a turing machine. Yeah, I don't know about "Magic".
The fact that the author was able to write this article and convey these concepts in English shows that the idea that vocabulary limits our experience is incoherent.