Motivational Affordance - Fire, or Exit?

I have a friend called Dan. He's a smart guy. Been to college and everything.

Dan went to university in Wales. You'll need to know some things about Wales if you want to understand this story.

Some facts about Wales and going to university in Wales
Welsh is a linguistic (and political) success story. 7.5% of languages are in danger of extinction and Welsh was on a short list of endangered languages in Europe. But no more. Now about a fifth of people in Wales are fluent in Welsh.

One way they've done this is to make Welsh a compulsory option in many public places. Road signs, for example, should always be in Welsh and English (though, this sometimes causes problems). University is a public place so it's natural that Welsh is a feature of life there. When I was in Wales as a fresher, I had to sit through the Vice-Chancellor's welcome speech - an exercise in tedium if ever there was - twice. Once in Welsh (the only way I could tell it was over was when all the Welsh speakers gratefully shuffled out) and once in English (the only way I could tell it was over was when I was woke up with stale breath to a desultory round of applause).

Still, a couple hours of boring speechifying is a small price to pay for saving a language. Why do I think saving a language is so important? More on that later.

Dan's conundrum
Dan was reminiscing the other day about life in Wales. He regrets not taking the time to learn any Welsh. Not that he's completely ignorant, of course. For example, his name, he tells me, means either 'fire' or 'exit'. He's knows this because all the bars he hung around in have this sign everywhere, saying: Allanfa dân

Although this might seem like a totally dumb thing to say, it does betray a certain wisdom. He has shown awareness of the possibility of Welsh having different word order, for example. No, wait - it is a totally dumb thing to say.

Dan was in Wales for three years. He could have asked. Or visited this website. Or even worked it out for himself (have a closer look at the picture and work it out, it's elementary, Watson).

But he didn't. I asked why.

I didn't want to find out that my name meant 'exit'. I kind of liked the idea of my name meaning 'fire'.

(Incidentally, if you're a Welsh speaker, you're probably having thoughts about 'Dan' being different to 'dân' with it's to bach, or little roof, over the 'a'. Leave it. That thought is going nowhere. We're talking about Dan here.)

Ignorance is fun.

Why I love Welsh
I'm passionate about endangered languages. Why?

There is something called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (or something similar). And it basically says that the language you speak influences the way that you think (or, words to that effect). So, for every language that dies out, we not only lose a few pretty-sounding words and some amusing grammatical idiosyncracies - we lose a whole way of thinking. Or that's what I understood after I read about it in a science fiction book.

Is the Sapir-Whorf thing any more than a hypothesis? Is it a fully-formed thesis? I have absolutely no idea. And I don't even care. The idea is so startlingly beautiful and has such a motivational affordance that, like Dan, I would be disappointed if it weren't true.

(Like Dan, I could have visited this site any time I wanted to.)

Another argument for fun?
If you're helping people to learn, there will always be cases where not knowing is more fun than knowing. It's also important to realise that some people are more logical, more rigorous, more skeptical because it's more fun. Anger is fun.

It would be a sign of self-serving bias if you were to take credit for your beauty. Is it any more credible to take credit for being logical or skeptical?

Some people see helping people to learn (whether it's teaching or managing or coaching or marketing or whatever) as being all about:

my facts vs their ignorance

That's naive. Especially with adults. It's much more like:

my facts vs their facts

But even that is a dangerous illusion. This is the reality of teaching.

my fun vs their fun