I was reading a post at the blog for Stack Overflow regarding their policy on English language postings (Summary: post in English). I always go on alert when I hear about language being dictated, but I think they have a solid policy here. First, Jeff has been very upfront from day 1 about not wanting to capture the market space in non-English speaking markets, which I think is a pretty clear statement that he wanted SO to be English-only. Second, he’s been very clear that he’s trying to build a community, and posts in different languages built silos, not a single community.

All that said, that post I mentioned contains this:

Now, if askers try to use English and put in “sorry, my English isn’t very good”, that’s fine. Heck, a lot of native English speakers aren’t very good at it, either! The reason we have collaborative editing is to learn and improve together. This is totally fine and even encouraged. (Please do try to make sense, as our users are often brilliant, but not telepathic as far as I know.)

I’m sure if I was a language researcher this is old hat, but think about this. Let’s say telepathy (“mind reading”) is real. You have, say, an Italian speaker who knows no other languages who is a telepath. Could that person “read the mind” of a speaker of a native Asian language? In other words, is the form of thought some constant across human beings, or is it dictated by the language in which a person is able to form thoughts?

OK, I purposefully picked two very different languages above. How about an Italian speaker and a French speaker? would the similarity of the languages matter?

What if you had a native Mandarin speaker who also knew French, and a telepath who spoke French? Would the Mandarin speaker have to form thoughts in his non-native French for the telepath to understand?

I have no basis for this, but my feeling is that emotions could be transferred via telepathy, but that a speaker of one language couldn’t read the “thoughts” of a speaker of another language, at least not in the sense we usually mean when we discuss “reading” minds.

Here’s the real mind-blower for me though. I believe that language and intellect are strongly influenced by culture, and culture is in turn influenced by language and intellect (I loves me some Sapir-Whorf, in other words). If we concede that telepaths can feel base emotions and “patterns” in thought, is it possible that these patterns are also culturally and linguistically shaped? In other words, if a French telepath reads the emotions of a Mandarin speaker, would the French speaker interpret them correctly?

If you had a starving peasant who was momentarily happy when given a ham sandwich, would a fat, first-world telepath correctly interpret the peasant’s emotions at that moment as happiness?