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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.)"
Jetzt schreibe ich einen Satz.
... Just lost two pounds and made $10!
Morgen werde ich noch einen schreiben.
The Japanese eat very little fat and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or the Americans. On the other hand, the French eat a lot of fat and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or the Americans.
The Japanese drink very little red wine and suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or the Americans. The Italians drink excessive amounts of red wine and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or the Americans.
Conclusion: Eat and drink what you like. It’s speaking English that kills you
This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Sounds like the return of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis
Captcha: "nonsense".
I believe him, but a sample size of three languages is not convincing at all.
Hey don't blame me, IANAB
How many people think in pure emotion and logic? Most people think in terms of language, and in that way language is in itself a prison for the mind.
Unpublished of course, but I wrote a thesis in college about the role of language in the perception of time. Other than determining that an African language, Wolof, was particularly suited to discussing the particulars of time travel (it has some interesting tenses regarding subjective and relative time), I happened to come across a particularly fascinating report by a psychologist doing research for an advertising journal. He described various cultures' attitudes towards time that then influenced what they believed was important -- for example, Spanish-speaking cultures view time as cyclical, which made the present less important, or Native Americans, who don't exactly have a cultural perception of time at all, and tend to view time in consideration to the task at hand instead.
There are some interesting papers out there if you're really interested in this stuff.
In German that word is unnecessary; submitter is just trying lose weight, get rich, and live healthier.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
Yes, you knew it was coming and here it is: http://xkcd.com/552/
If you know more than one fat, language, is the increase linear or exponential? Moreover, if I learn german, will I fit size 32 pants again?
Silence is a state of mime.
How about the language of taking responsibility for oneself? In psychology, there's something called an "external locus of control" versus an "internal locus of control". An example of an external locus of control would be someone saying: "I lost my job because my boss is a jerk" whereas an example of an internal locus of control would be: "I lost my job because I didn't do a good enough job." The fact is, when you place the control on something other than yourself -- language, the media, your parents, whatever -- you end up relinquishing responsibility and by doing so, what changes? If it's language's fault, it's not yours so you're still fat and smoking and broke and thinking it's language's fault doesn't change that. However, thinking to yourself, "I got myself here," puts the responsibility in your own hands...it's you now, so you can do something about it...
Take my word for it or don't but compare me to my brother and you'll see taking simple responsibility for oneself is literally the difference between not only fat, smoking, and broke...but educated, healthy, and prosperous as well...
I expected this to be about programming languages. I've known a lot of fat, broke, chain-smoking COBOL programmers.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
So how does this study relate to programming syntax? Are you more likely to get rich and live happy & healthy if you use a Strongly Typed language or a Weak Typed Language? Are GOTO statements bad for your health an well being?
~theCzar
Five. The answer is five.
People are healthier in Germany? Maybe because Germany has universal health care.
People are better off financially in Germany? Maybe because Germany still has a strong manufacturing base and fair wages paid to workers instead of high CEO salaries.
Just a thought.
The basic structure of English hasn't changed a lot in fifty years. On the other hand, the body shape of English speakers sure has changed. We are much more obese.
My favourite stereotype of Germans is that they are a bunch of fat beer guzzling guys in lederhosen. If we chose the right times and places, we could show that Germans were fat and Americans were thin.
The thesis, that we as a nation are obese because of the language we speak, doesn't stand up to even cursory inspection.
Because they gave it to the greeks. The Germany economy is the largest in the EU and the fourth largest in the world. I think you are the one who needs to check his facts.
Ja. Funf.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
The sample size isn't 3 languages (the table of languages, familes, and how they were coded takes up most of 3 pages.) There are three specific examples noted in TFS, with the further note "(The study includes a broader swath of languages/nationalities, but that's a start.)"
Germany is heavily dependant on its European neighbours to import what .de is exporting. Lets revisit this in 5 years after the Eurozone has been enfeebled through austerity measures and attrition. I'd be surprised if such a strong correlation between language and syntax will be drawn in the near future.
I do blame language. Ruby and Python developers do look a little bit more chubby.
enfeebled
I think the word you were looking for is de-embiggened.
The CB App. What's your 20?
As a professional linguist I'm concerned about the linguistic analysis of English in this paper. The author claims that German does not have explicit future marking, while English does. He uses examples like:
"Morgen regnet es" --German, literally "it rains tomorrow", with no future tense marker
"It will rain tomorrow" -- English, with the future tense marker
He argues that the explicit future tense marking causes speakers to treat future events differently and thus damages savings or whatever. The statistical analysis in this paper looks pretty good to me, though I'm not familiar with the way economics people report linear regressions so it'll take more time to evaluate that. But the statistical analysis is no good if the linguistic analysis it's based on is wrong. Garbage in, garbage out.
The problem is that languages don't exclusively use or neglect to use future tense markers. For instance in German, you could use a future tense marker, as in "es wird regnen" (literally, it will rain). BUT you drop the future tense marker if you have a word like "tomorrow" that makes it obvious that the event is in the future, like "morgen regnet es" (tomorrow it rains). All languages make use of a variety of different patterns to mark future tense.
In English there is a similar pattern to German, for instance. People will very frequently say things like "I'm teaching tomorrow" or "I'm grabbing donuts with my friend tomorrow morning." The author ignores this, although it is very common in English usage, and even though it is a direct counterexample to his purported classification of English. He claims that English MUST mark future explicitly by pointing out that we don't say things like "I listen to a lecture"--but the problem with that sentence is NOT that it doesn't mark future; the problem is that we use the progressive in English contexts, and we could very easily say "I'm listening to a lecture tomorrow, so I won't be able to come to your party" or similar.
It turns out English and German have pretty much the same pattern of future tense marking. Maybe English speakers use explicit tense marking more than German speakers do, but that's a quantitative difference, which is ignored in this paper in favor of arbitrary categorizations.
If this fellow is so ignorant about the language he's writing in, how much can we trust his judgments about other languages? Or rather, how much can we trust him to be sufficiently critical of the linguistic categorizations that he's looking at, or to know what they really mean? Yes, his data was based on "expert" linguistic sources, but linguists are also prone to this kind of miscategorization, and are very often more driven by a need to make languages conform to certain modern theories than by a desire to make a legitimate description; furthermore the people writing about these languages are all operating according to DIFFERENT DEFINITIONS and different theoretical frameworks, a problem I have to deal with just about every day in my work.
tl;dr It looks like the author has given almost no thought to the lack of soundness in the linguistic categorizations he uses, even though his system breaks down in the very examples he cites. I don't think he knows what he's talking about.
Currently Germany is currently in a time of relative economic prosperity. Greece (which has retained more-or-less the same language for thousands of years) is not. English corresponds to a fairly large collection of countries that have little to do with each other. At least four of the countries are doing okay (UK, Canada, USA, New Zealand, and Australia) while many of the others (mainly former English colonies) are not. (Some of the former colonies (i.e. Bermuda) are doing fine.)
If this so-called "study" had been done during post WWI, we'd have to conclude that speakers of German were getting the ever-living crap kicked out of them.
If we spread the B.S. analysis out a few centuries, we'd come to the conclusion at various times that Chinese, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Latin, Aramaic, Japanese, Sumerian, Sanskrit, etc. was the "best" language for prosperity. (And I'm sure I've missed a few)
But it's a damn good clue
Australia, Canada and New Zealand all have lower smoking rates, lower levels of alcohol consumption and longer life expectancy than Germany. This is despite all three having large indigenous populations in significantly worse health than the general population. Australia and Canada also have a higher GDP per capita (PPP or nominal) and a higher GNI per capita.
Further, while the German household savings rate is certainly higher than Australia, Canada and New Zealand, German government debt levels are also significantly higher. Additionally, I'm not sure about Canada and New Zealand but low household savings rates in Australia can be explained much better by non-language factors:
1. Australians save by investing in property. The tax structure and government incentives favor investment in property over saving. Generally this means going into debt for a significant period to later come out on top.
2. Australia has government mandated private pension (aka. superannuation). All employers must pay an amount equivalent to 9% of an employees wage into a fund nominated by the employee. Assuming that this money would have otherwise gone to the employee, this means all Australians by government mandate save about 8.25% (0.9/1.09) of their wages without it appearing on the household savings rate.
To expand beyond Germany, Japanese is also an FTR language, yet smoking rates are also significantly higher in Japan. Japanese generally have a low tolerance for alcohol so drinking rates are lower. Life expectancy is slightly longer, although Australian males now have a longer life expectancy than Japanese males. Further, Japan doesn't have a large indigenous population in significantly worse health than the general population, which alone is probably enough to account for the slight overall difference.
While Japanese household savings rates are high, Japanese government debt is extremely high. Further the Japanese practice of withholding wages, and then paying them as a block bonus also probably promotes saving. Additionally the utter insufficiency of, and imminent collapse of the Japanese pension system is also probably promoting saving.
...I'd suggest blaming yourself.
It didn't say "cultural differences", it said "culture differences". "Culture" was the subject and "differences" was the verb.
Assuming said Yale researcher was accurately quoted and that this isn't the result of a translation of a translation, this may be the first time in the English language that that word has been used as a verb, and I certainly hope it will be the last.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
Interesting observations. Using some examples from my neck of the woods, I'd say it could be mixed up with agriculture and migration patterns.
Vietnamese is very strongly future-typed. No tenses but an auxiliary verb 'se' = 'will' which appears in front of the verb. It is used even when the word 'tomorrow' or 'this evening' appears in the sentence. Vietnamese are famous for their over-indulgence in alcohol and coffee, although culturally they're savers (in the form of gold or ornaments). Oh, and they're atrocious drivers. (And there's a Catholic influence - sin now, confess later.)
Thai is even more strongly future-typed, in that their word for 'will' ('ja') takes even more precedence in the sentence - eg "ja mai pai Pantip" - "I will not go to Pantip". Thais are known for their moderation in most areas and they're characterized as undisciplined when it comes to wealth/savings. But they do drive well. Talk about Thai attitudes and most foreign observers will sum up with "mai pen rai" ("no worries").
Both the Thais and Vietnamese are rice-growing societies who recently migrated (the Thais much more recently) from China, where they're very loose with future markers.
Contrast with the Malays. Spoken Malay has no future typing - they rely on words like 'tomorrow'. Their society is characterized by its indifference to planning and saving, feasting today, forget tomorrow. Not very organized agriculturally. They're also an island race - perhaps best not to think too much about the future when you're getting into that boat and you can see nothing on the horizon (but a full belly will help).
"Lets revisit this in 5 years..."
You must be English or Greek! Successful Germans don't make that type of distinction between present and future - apparently it's how they stay so successful!
It does, OTOH, mean that you are falling for the BS peddled by currency speculators.
"Oh, lets short the Euro for a while so they get cheap - buy a whole bunch - and then allow people to wise up a bit". That is what speculators do. "If you are selling life jackets, it pays to rock the boat".
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