Chapter 10
The distance of a learned tongue
Stand for a moment on the most famous footbridge in moral psychology. Below you, a runaway train is bearing down on five people who cannot get clear in time. Beside you at the rail stands a man heavy enough to stop it. The only way to save the five is to push him to his death. Would you?
Most people say no. When Albert Costa, Boaz Keysar, and their colleagues put the dilemma to 725 people, 18 in every 100 pushed the man when the question came in their native language. When it came in a language learned at school, 44 in 100 pushed (Costa et al. 2014). Nothing about the man, the five, or the bridge had changed. The only difference was the tongue.
The study's design rules out the suspicion that this is a fact about Spanish or English in particular. The participants divided into native Spanish speakers answering in learned English and native English speakers answering in learned Spanish. The higher number followed the learned language in both directions. And when the same team offered the tamer version of the dilemma, where a switch diverts the train down a side track and nobody is pushed, the two languages agreed: four in five threw the switch either way. The learned tongue was not making anyone wiser or crueler. It was cooling exactly the choice that runs hot.
The size of the distance
Psychologists call this the foreign-language effect, and it was first caught two years before the footbridge finding, nowhere near a trolley. Boaz Keysar's laboratory found that the classic framing effect, in which people gamble to dodge a loss they would never gamble to win, simply disappears when the problem arrives in a foreign language, and that loss aversion loosens its grip on real bets (Keysar, Hayakawa and An 2012). Their explanation gave this chapter its name: a foreign language "provides greater cognitive and emotional distance than a native tongue does."
A decade of studies followed, and the pooled picture holds while shrinking to honest size. Across ninety-one experiments, the odds of the cooler, more deliberate choice were about a third higher in the learned language, an odds ratio of 1.34, though the studies disagree with one another more than chance allows, and the interval that forecasts the next study's result dips below no effect at all (Del Maschio et al. 2022). A meta-analysis that took the domains separately found a Hedges's g of .22 for moral choices and .28 for choices about risk (Circi et al. 2021). That is a replicated effect of modest size, which the reader will by now recognize as this book's favorite kind.
The edges of the effect teach as much as its center. It appears where feeling does the deciding and not elsewhere: a foreign language moved nothing on the outcome bias or the representativeness heuristic, habits of judgment in which emotion plays no causal part (Vives, Aparici and Costa 2018). It wants genuine distance between the speaker's two languages: Swedish speakers showed the effect answering in French but not in English, which Swedes grow up alongside, and between Swedish and Norwegian, two languages within waving distance of each other, it did not appear at all (Dylman and Champoux-Larsson 2020).
And the question a learner most wants answered, whether the distance survives fluency, is genuinely open. In Costa's own data the rise in pushing was smaller among the more proficient, twenty percentage points against thirty-two. A study of sixty Croatian and German bilinguals who lived fully inside both their languages found no effect at all (Čavar and Tytus 2018). Yet neither meta-analysis found proficiency to moderate the effect, and the truly fluent remain scarce in the studies sampled. The fairest summary is a lender's: the distance is a loan against unfamiliarity, and nobody yet knows its term.
The loan and the lender
Phi has no claim on any of this. The effect belongs to foreignness itself rather than to any language's architecture, and a learner beginning Phi tomorrow would hold the same loan beginning Portuguese, on the same unknown terms.
What a designer does hold is a different decision, one the foreignness studies never touch. When a speaker wants distance from a claim inside a language, wants to hold the claim a little away from themselves and hand it on marked with where it came from, what does the grammar offer, and what does it require? On that question the invented century left a matched pair of answers.
The sentence that always testifies
The first answer is Láadan's. Chapter 6 told what became of that language; what it did not tell is how a Láadan sentence works.
Suzette Haden Elgin built disclosure into the sentence frame itself. The first lesson of her grammar states the rule: "The basic sentence begins with a Speech Act Morpheme to indicate what the sentence does, and ends with an Evidence Morpheme" (Elgin 1988). Bíi hal with wa: the woman works. The opening bíi declares the sentence a statement rather than a question or a request; with, no relative of the English word, is the woman, and hal is her working. The closing wa means "claimed to be true because the speaker herself perceived whatever has been said," and its alternatives claim a trusted source, a dream, an assumption. A Láadan speaker does not add evidence to a finished sentence. The sentence is not finished until the evidence is filed.
Elgin's reasons were protective. English and its close relatives, she wrote, "lacked ways to express emotional information conveniently," which left women "vulnerable to hostile language followed by the ancient 'But all I said was....' excuse" (Elgin 1999). Láadan armored the utterance: with the act declared at the front and the evidence sealed at the back, a hostile speaker has nowhere deniable to stand.
Set beside Phi's ruling, the armor shows a second face, and this reading is this book's, not Elgin's. A grammar in which every plain statement files its evidence puts its speaker permanently on the record. Even the design's one mercy, that the morphemes need not repeat across a run of sentences when nothing changes, confirms the default: disclosure is the resting state, and reticence about one's sources is the marked, effortful thing. Distance that cannot be declined stops being distance. It is testimony on a schedule.
The optional step back
Phi's ruling runs the other way, and its documents state it as doctrine: an unmarked sentence is a plain assertion that names no source, and "the unmarked form is the system's resting state." The four source markers the reader will meet in chapter 11, witness, inference, report, and assumption, exist so that disclosure can be an act, taken when the route to a claim is part of what the speaker means to say. Watch the choice work at household scale:
phemi so shua. guest FUT come. (A guest will come.) phemi so ti shua. guest FUT REP come. (A guest will come, according to a report.)
The first sentence sets a place at the table; the speaker stands behind the arrival. In the second, one syllable, ti, and the speaker has taken a single step back: what they vouch for now is the news as it reached them, and the arrival itself rests with whoever sent word. The step is real and audible, and it belongs wholly to the speaker. On a day when the same news deserves plain assertion, the sentence rests unmarked, and the grammar finds nothing missing.
This is what designed distance looks like in a language whose center is mindful speech: not a stance the grammar enforces but a room it keeps. A speaker who feels an afternoon running hot can mark the step that honesty wants, this I saw myself, this I infer, this came to me as a report, this I assume. The pamphlet that teaches the four markers drills them on one flooded path told four ways, the event constant while the speaker's route to it moves. Nothing anywhere in the corpus obliges a speaker to take any of the four. The two designs hold the same materials, act and evidence and speaker. One built a requirement. The other built an offer.
Walking around a missing word
One more finding belongs here, the humblest in the book and the only one in which a small constructed language has been carried into a classroom experiment on purpose. Paolo Coluzzi taught Toki Pona, whose story chapter 6 told and whose total lexicon he counts at 123 words, to six of his university students across four classes, then looked for changes in how they handled missing vocabulary in the foreign language they were studying. His conclusion claims exactly as much as six students and four classes can carry: learning Toki Pona "may indeed help the students to improve their communication strategies, and particularly circumlocution" (Coluzzi 2022). A pilot, not a proof. But the skill it points at, saying the thing you lack a word for by walking around it, is prized in every language classroom, and a bounded lexicon drills it as a way of life.
Phi's lexicon is finished, and its finishedness is a curriculum. When the world offers a thing the dictionary lacks, the language expects composition: a pearl is moriwhe kerou, a sea-stone; a museum is halemu womu, a remembering-house. The registry that holds these compounds is a public record of the walk-around done well, and chapter 4 watched it hand a learner three words for the price of one. A speaker who lives this way rehearses, sentence by sentence, for the moment every traveler knows, standing in a market abroad without the word for the thing in their hand. Whether that rehearsal transfers is a small, falsifiable question, and the six-student pilot marks how far the answer has gotten: barely past the trailhead, pointed somewhere real.
The footbridge will never be a comfortable place to stand, and this chapter does not end by recommending a language as its railing. The distance a learned tongue lends is real but modest, and it is borrowed: a learner who gives Phi enough seasons may find the loan quietly called in, because no language stays foreign to a person who makes a home in it. What remains after that is what was built rather than lent: a step back that is always one syllable away and never required, a lexicon that turns each missing word into a daily practice of finding the way around, and a quiet room, kept ready, that a speaker enters and leaves at will. Phi does not claim to know what the room will do for the one who sits down in it. It claims the room will be kept.
References
Čavar, Franziska, and Agnieszka Ewa Tytus. 2018. Moral judgement and foreign language effect: when the foreign language becomes the second language. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 39(1): 17-28. https://doi.org/10.1080/01434632.2017.1304397.
Circi, Riccardo, Daniele Gatti, Vincenzo Russo, and Tomaso Vecchi. 2021. The foreign language effect on decision-making: A meta-analysis. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 28(4): 1131-1141. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13423-020-01871-z.
Coluzzi, Paolo. 2022. How learning Toki Pona may help improving communication strategies in a foreign or second language. Language Problems and Language Planning 46(1): 78-98. https://doi.org/10.1075/lplp.00086.col.
Costa, Albert, Alice Foucart, Sayuri Hayakawa, Melina Aparici, Jose Apesteguia, Joy Heafner, and Boaz Keysar. 2014. Your Morals Depend on Language. PLoS ONE 9(4): e94842. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0094842.
Del Maschio, Nicola, Federico Crespi, Francesca Peressotti, Jubin Abutalebi, and Simone Sulpizio. 2022. Decision-making depends on language: A meta-analysis of the Foreign Language Effect. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition 25(4): 617-630. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1366728921001012.
Dylman, Alexandra S., and Marie-France Champoux-Larsson. 2020. It's (not) all Greek to me: Boundaries of the foreign language effect. Cognition 196: 104148. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2019.104148.
Elgin, Suzette Haden. 1988. A First Dictionary and Grammar of Láadan. 2nd ed. Madison, WI: Society for the Furtherance and Study of Fantasy and Science Fiction; lessons hosted at laadanlanguage.com.
Elgin, Suzette Haden. 1999. Láadan, the Constructed Language in Native Tongue. Essay first published on the author's SFWA member site, updated 2 April 1999; now hosted, under a slightly expanded title, at https://laadanlanguage.com/articles/articles-by-suzette/laadan-constructed-language/.
Keysar, Boaz, Sayuri L. Hayakawa, and Sun Gyu An. 2012. The Foreign-Language Effect: Thinking in a Foreign Tongue Reduces Decision Biases. Psychological Science 23(6): 661-668. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797611432178.
Vives, Marc-Lluís, Melina Aparici, and Albert Costa. 2018. The limits of the foreign language effect on decision-making: The case of the outcome bias and the representativeness heuristic. PLOS ONE 13(9): e0203528. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0203528.
Phi sources
The unmarked-sentence ruling and its resting-state sentence are in canon.md. The four source markers are taught in manual/part4_grammar/ch16_evidentiality/ and practiced in the evidentiality pamphlet, pamphlets/evidentiality/, whose flooded-path drill this chapter describes; the guest example follows the future-report pattern in pamphlets/evidentiality/07_a_journal_of_sources.md. The pearl and museum compounds are rows in manual/part7_reference/compounds.md.