[marc_abonce]

Intuitively, I agree with the thesis. But the example for Spanish confuses me. One of the illustrations says:

"Absence of negatively biased mental verbs in English slows down the development of Theory of Mind. Children acquiring Spanish (which has verbs indicating false belief) have better performance in false-belief tasks."

But as a Spanish speaker I don't know what verbs is this referring to. On top of my head I can only think of the word "disbelieve" which doesn't have an exact, single word translation, but that's the opposite of what the quote seems to imply. Other verbs like deceive, doubt, misunderstand or imagine do have matching translations in both languages. What am I missing here?

[canjobear]

They gave the example of the verb yiwei in Mandarin. If you say “ta yiwei X” it means “s/he thinks X” with a strong connotation that X is in fact false. The Spanish equivalent is supposed to be the verb creerse [1], like if you say “Juan se cree que lo van a ascender” it means “Juan thinks that they are going to promote him” but with a strong connotation that he won’t in fact be promoted. English doesn’t really have a verb for “think” with the connotation that the belief is false. The claim (for what it’s worth, I am skeptical) is that English speakers are slower to learn the concept that someone can have a false belief, because English lacks such a verb.

[1] according to https://ojs.ub.uni-konstanz.de/sub/index.php/sub/article/vie... for example. I don’t know enough Spanish to say if the verb really works this way. Verbs like this are called “contrafactive”

[arjie]

Asking which-eth is hard in English but easy in Tamil. I’m going to tell everyone that this is why list.indexOf is slow.

[thaumasiotes]

> If you say “ta yiwei X” it means “s/he thinks X” with a strong connotation that X is in fact false.

I was interested to learn just now that Chinese dictionaries don't bother to mention this. I assume the reason is that the analogous construction in Classical Chinese has no such implication.

By contrast, Chinese-English dictionaries vary from noting that 以为 "usually" refers to mistaken belief to outright defining it that way.

[jandrewrogers]

English has words that are both connotative and denotative for “they think X” where X is false. The denotative verbs are simply “misbelieve” or “misthink” if you know it is false.

The connotative form which immediately comes to mind is the various forms of “notion”. Its primary use case is to indicate that the thing it refers to is likely false and has no connection to reality.

[marc_abonce]

Oh yeah, "creerse" and "creérsela" definitely have different connotations from "creer" even if they're technically conjugations of the same verb.

I found an article that offers "fall for it" as a translation for "creérsela" (te la creíste/se la creyó) and I agree.

https://www.tellmeinspanish.com/grammar/creer-vs-creerse/

In the form of "creerse" it can also mean "believe in yourself" which used to have the same connotation of being mistakenly overconfident, although in the last couple of years I've started to see more "debes de creértela" Linkedin memes which have the opposite (true belief) connotation, more like "fake it till you make it".

If anyone's confused, don't worry. This verb always means "believe", the only difference is in the subtle connotations but they never affect the actual meaning.

[RobotToaster]

The English term is misthinks or misbeliveves.

[whilenot-dev]

> English doesn’t really have a verb for “think” with the connotation that the belief is false.

How does yiwei/creerse differ from "Juan doubts that they are going to promote him"?

[toasterlovin]

The English approach here, as with other linguistic matters, is to solve the problem by using more words.

"Juan thinks they are going to promote him, but I'm not so sure."

[card_zero]

> English doesn’t really have a verb for “think” with the connotation that the belief is false

Really? Huh, maybe. I suppose, guess, imagine, assume, opine, claim, that none of these verbs carry a strong enough connotation of falsehood. There's take for granted, but it's unwieldy. I fancy that the verb fancy would be very suitable for the job, but it makes one sound like an 1850s Southern Belle.