Slashdot Mirror
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.)"
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".
Gesundheit.
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.
I think he's full of crap. More exactly, he merely restates the Whorf hypothesis (badly and out of context) and then proceeds to misapply it.
Also, he apparently doesn't speak German, which uses a construction quite similar to that of English for forming the future tense ("I will go"/"Ich werde gehen"), and allows for substitution with the present in informal speech to about the same extent ("We're going to the library next weekend"/"Wir gehen nächstes Wochenende in die Bibliothek" vs. formal "We will go to the library next weekend"/"Wir werden nächstes Wochenende in die Bibliothek gehen").
Oh, I should also point out that if you happen to be more fortunate than others, internalizing your good fortune is a great way to feel superior. Obviously, someone in that position is going to be biased into thinking he got there on his own, instead of being extraordinarily lucky.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
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.
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!"
A World in a Grain of Sand / Heaven in a Wild Flower,
Infinity in the Palm of your Hand / And Eternity in an Hour.
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.