If You're Fat, Broke, and Smoking, Blame Language

First time accepted submitter derekmead writes "A Yale researcher says that culture differences how much money we save, how well we take care of ourselves, and other behavior indicative of taking the long view, are all based on language. His study argues that the way a language's syntax refers to the future (PDF) affects how its speakers perceive the future. For example, English and Greek make strong distinctions between the present and the future, while German doesn't, while English and Greek speakers are statistically poorer and in worse health than Germans. (The study includes a broader swath of languages/nationalities, but that's a start.)"

Comments

Whorfianism

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like the return of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

Captcha: "nonsense".

Re:jetzt

[antek9]

Morgen werde ich noch einen schreiben.

... and there you made your mistake. While that's a grammatically and semantically correct sentence, you're more likely to phrase it as, "Morgen schreibe ich noch einen.", actually using present tense to convey a future statement. I won't bother to RTFA, so I'll never know the argument it's proposing, but there might be some sense to it. There _is_ a tendency to melt present and future in German, and maybe that does re-program everyone's synapses accordingly, maybe not.

Anyway, the whole point would even be more valid for the Japanese who don't even know a future tense.

And here, dear children, are two sayings that might convey the article's thesis, one in German, and one in Japanese:

"Was Du heute kannst besorgen, das verschiebe nicht auf morgen!"
"Ashita yarou wa bakayarou!"