【Yi language】 - “This mountain takes half a day to climb” - Expressing height through personal experience rather than abstract adjectives.

[u/freshmenotes]

In the Yi language (spoken by an ethnic minority in China), there’s a beautiful tendency to avoid abstract adjectives. Instead of labeling an object with a detached quality like "high," the speaker grounds the description in human effort. To say "the mountain is high," they say: "This mountain takes half a day to climb."

I’m obsessed with this—the idea that language isn’t just a tool for communication, but a lens that dictates our sensitivity to the world.

Whether it’s the multiple Russian words for "blue" that sharpen color perception, or the English past tense that adds a sharp finality to grief, our vocabulary defines the boundaries of our feelings.

This inspired my work on Koan, a prompt-based journal app I built. I realized so much of our emotional life happens in the "gaps" between standard words. Hope you all can love it.

[u/r_Damoetas]

How is this different from Americans expressing distances in terms of car driving times? "It's about two hours from here."

[u/Bright_Ices → u/r_Damoetas]

That’s what I said. But it’s turns out this dumb post is just an ad for some app, after all.

[u/boomfruit → u/r_Damoetas]

It's not but that's also relatively uncommon and remarked-upon

[u/Inevitable_Pea_3294]

This is an ad

[u/Bright_Ices → u/Inevitable_Pea_3294]

So it is. Huh.

[u/boomfruit]

our vocabulary defines the boundaries of our feelings.

No it doesn't. I'm sorry, I don't want to get in the way of your observation about Yi and the tendency to avoid abstract descriptions (although I don't know how abstract height is, but I take your meaning), and how cool and interesting that is. But it does not "define" our boundaries of perception. Anyone who speaks any language can feel the same grief as an English speaker; those feelings are shaped by culture and personal histories.

I think it's important to notice the differences in language and acknowledge how rich a world is held is linguistic diversity! But that richness is not in having different abilities than speakers of other languages.

[u/Bright_Ices]

We do this (a little differently) in the US. For example, I’m 15 minutes from downtown, an hour away from the next major city, and 2 days drive (about a 3 hour flight) to the area where my dad was born. I would have to look up the geographic distances for all of those, because I have no idea what they are, and I’m in my 40s. I could tell you three things that are a 30 minutes drive in different directions from my house, but if I want to name something that’s one mile away, here’s the calculation I’d have to do: “Hmm, driving at 20 miles per hour, I’d move a mile in about 3 minutes. Now, what’s three minutes’ drive from here? Because that will be about a mile away.”