Honestly, weak form of Sapir-Whorf absolutely does reflect my every-day experience; I figured it out way before reading about it, by pondering my "inner dialogue" - I run it bilingually, switching from English to Polish and back on sub-sentence level, always using the language that makes it easier to think a particular thought.
> But if not, the burden is not great. One must speak at greater length, using more words, and forming the intersections and unions of their meanings, to obtain the exact nuance that you intend. This is the routine craftsmanship of every wordsmith.
This is a nice way of putting it, but I question how "easy" and "routine" it is. People can do this, which is why strong form of Sapir-Whorf sounds too strong, but it's not free - and like "Trivial Inconveniences" article shows, that's enough for it to not be done, especially if alternatives like "picking up a similar but not-quite-right word" or "not thinking the thought at all" exists.
I feel this could be especially impactful on imagination (the problem-solving kind), which can be viewed as a randomized reverse-lookup[0]. The brain suggests you things connected to what you're thinking about, and - at least in my experience - they usually come up as words or phrases. If you don't have a word for a concept, you may not think of that concept, and concepts related to it. Not that you couldn't think of it, just you usually and initially won't.
One could think of language as a cache of those "intersections and unions of meanings" that have proven themselves to be useful. Viewed like this it's an optimization trick, but we observe that everything we do and think is time and energy-constrained, so such optimizations can be the difference (especially on a population level) between how precisely you think a thought before you accept it as "good enough".
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[0] - Meta: the way I figured out this idea actually involved the brain suggesting me the word "reverse-lookup", and me going out from there. My native Polish language doesn't have a word for "lookup", and especially "reverse lookup", so I wonder what would I came up with if I didn't know English?
> But if not, the burden is not great. One must speak at greater length, using more words, and forming the intersections and unions of their meanings, to obtain the exact nuance that you intend. This is the routine craftsmanship of every wordsmith.
This is a nice way of putting it, but I question how "easy" and "routine" it is. People can do this, which is why strong form of Sapir-Whorf sounds too strong, but it's not free - and like "Trivial Inconveniences" article shows, that's enough for it to not be done, especially if alternatives like "picking up a similar but not-quite-right word" or "not thinking the thought at all" exists.
I feel this could be especially impactful on imagination (the problem-solving kind), which can be viewed as a randomized reverse-lookup[0]. The brain suggests you things connected to what you're thinking about, and - at least in my experience - they usually come up as words or phrases. If you don't have a word for a concept, you may not think of that concept, and concepts related to it. Not that you couldn't think of it, just you usually and initially won't.
One could think of language as a cache of those "intersections and unions of meanings" that have proven themselves to be useful. Viewed like this it's an optimization trick, but we observe that everything we do and think is time and energy-constrained, so such optimizations can be the difference (especially on a population level) between how precisely you think a thought before you accept it as "good enough".
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[0] - Meta: the way I figured out this idea actually involved the brain suggesting me the word "reverse-lookup", and me going out from there. My native Polish language doesn't have a word for "lookup", and especially "reverse lookup", so I wonder what would I came up with if I didn't know English?