Eager_Question t1_iu7a22o wrote
Reply to comment by Josquius in How Morality Changes in a Foreign Language - fascinating ethical shifts come with thinking in a different language by fonliahea1994
I am Spanish/English speaker (live in English-speaking country with Spanish-speaking family. Speak Spanish daily). I swear, I am legit more socially conservative in Spanish.
I can't tell if it's the environment I grew up in or the language, or what, but it is much easier for me to understand conservative thought if I translate it to Spanish in my head.
On the other hand, I am much more economically progressive in Spanish too. It's like my English brain is a socially progressive quasi-libertarian sometimes, and my Spanish brain is a brocialist that doesn't like to consider social aspects.
My "actual" political beliefs are broadly progressive on both axes, but my instincts lean more one way or another and I have to fight my instincts and rely on principled convictions more in some aspects in one language and in other aspects in the other language.
I also speak some French (very little though) and in French, my brain seems to lean more removed, all principle, no intuitions. Probably because I haven't spent long enough in a French-speaking place to associate a political philosophy outlook with the language.
Terpomo11 t1_iu7kf2g wrote
It says a lot about how much of our day-to-day thinking is basically just our brain's autocomplete.
Eager_Question t1_iu7mq03 wrote
Yeah! And also how much of it is purely about what we think is normal. My default "normal" things in Spanish and English are different. And therefore what a "sanctity" or "this is unnatural" reaction looks like in both languages will change. The whole thing runs on availability bias.
A lot of moral philosophy I have read is super reliant on reverse-engineering moral ideas from a combo of moral intuition and phrasing. And yet almost none of it is linguistically comparative. I have never read a philosophy paper that discusses language differences at length that is not about philosophy of language.
There are a few papers I read recently that seemed kind of incoherent to me, where I think if the author was forced to translate their own work into another language, they would realize the narrowness of their perspective.
Terpomo11 t1_iu7n3id wrote
I've found myself mentally translating arguments in one language into my other to see if they still make sense.
Eager_Question t1_iu7psl2 wrote
A wonderful habit to have!
I'm wondering if you can do this on purpose. My French is very unemotional and theoretical, as I basically have to reverse-engineer sentences in it a lot of the time.
But if I read only Enlightenment works in French and never anything else, could I trick myself into making an "enlightenment thought" switch, like having a virtual machine inside another one?
I'm also learning Latin. If I read a lot of ancient Latin literature, will I get an "ancient Rome" switch inside my brain? Will it change my instincts in Latin vs French vs English vs Spanish? I know for a fact that I have found some books or short stories vastly more compelling in one language than the other (e.g. La Casa De Asterión is a masterpiece in Spanish. It's interesting and okay in English. Mistborn is a lot of fun in English. It is unbearable in Spanish).
I think the capacity to turn different moral intuitions on and off could prove astonishingly useful, and yet I rarely hear anyone discuss doing this on purpose.
chiree t1_iu84pa2 wrote
I'm learning Spanish from English and part of this, I think, is that certain PC language-isms in English don't appear in Spanish. Things are said much more bluntly, without much care put into "offensive" vocabulary. As such, my English brain tells my Spanish brain it's being racist, even if it's not.
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