You are free to talk about any topic you want, but you are not free to talk about them everywhere. On private property (like a game), the game admins have the right to remove you for not complying with the rules.
Yeah, I have this diner, and we only serve white people. Because since it's private property, we can chose to deny service to anyone we want!
In other news, homosexual marriages in the United States are not legal, because "while you may be ok with it, some other people in the world, might not have your maturity level."
German, as well as any other language I know of, has a rule about sticking two words next to each other - its grammar.
Grammar dictates everything even morphology, seeing as how morphology is simply a part of grammar (since grammar covers everything in language between phonology and pragmatics). The fact that German uses grammar to put two words together into one larger compound word does not disprove my point that this compound word is still none-the-less rightfully a word, and not a higher language construct.
German compound words are build through morphology (word construction) not syntax (sentence construction). This should be apparent to anyone who actually speaks German, which is why I can only assume that you neither speak German, nor have you studied it in sufficient detail to make such a statement that the compound words of German are in fact being built through syntax, and not morphology.
To task, I will analyse the word "Älterzähne." Being that it is constructed with two words "Älter" and "Zähne", we're tasked with how to put two such words together. Well, using syntax, we can make the phrase: "Zähne eines Älters" (teeth of an old person), or "Zähne des Älters" (teeth of the old person), "Zähne dieses Älters" (teeth of this old persons), but we don't want to express any of these, we want to express the same notion as is perceived with "Älterzähne".
Well, let's assume that "Älter" is a modifying noun that is syntactically attached to "Zähne". Being that "Zähne" has plural gender, this would require a syntactic compliance of gender and number (for all purposes plural can be treated as a seperate gender in German), thus we would have the form: "*Ältere Zähne" being that the strong adjectival ending for modifying words is "-e" in the nominative and accusative for plural nouns. Now let's singularize "Zähne" to "Zahn", which is masculine. Now, instead of "*Ältere Zähne" we have "*Älterer Zahn". But in the singular of "Älterzähne" we have "Älterzahn" neither have any grammatical ending on "Älter".
Interesting enough though, "älter" is an adjective in German as the superlative of "alt" (old), so the expressions "älterer Zahn" and "ältere Zähne" do exist, and are distinctly different from nomimal word compounding, which is done in German.
Considering that native speakers of German perceive these words as compounds rather than seperate words, and considering that there is absolutely no support for the assertion that there is a syntactical rule for composition of these words, it can only fall that these are morphological compounds. In fact, what rules do exist for compounding words show the same features of every morphological construction, namely vocal harmony. The fact that one or the other morpheme may mutate, or have another interdicting phomene placed between them in order to maintain the harmony of the word.
I admittedly am interested but ignorant on this whole topic, but why does this follow? I am thinking on a much too high level here, and maybe there is some unavoidable issue in brain and/or language structures, , but why wouldn't my language influence me, even though not everything is language? I'm sure the music that is played in different parts of the world has an influence on the brain's perceptions too. Dunno, seems so obvious:)
The idea behind the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (more accurately, the common conception of this hypothesis) is that language controls and defines what we can even think about. That people who speak a language that lacks a certain notion or idea are incapable of thinking of that notion or idea until it is given a linguistic construct in their language.
The best example is 1984, where a form of thought control is exacted through the language. They had the word "free" but only as in beer, never as in speech. Thus the idea of "freedom" wouldn't exist, and people who would speak this ficticious language would be unable to even conceieve that they are missing their "freedom" because they don't have any linguistic construct to represent such an idea.
Most linguists dismiss this notion entirely, and use evidence that thought is not (at least not entirely) language bound. That people subjected to such a forceful oppression within their language, will naturally resist, and their minds will know of "freedom" even though they have no word for it, and they will either invent a word, or extend the usage of a word, or something in order to represent an idea which does not have a word.
I found a paper: http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Students/njp0001.html which gives some information. Of importance is what Sapir and Whorf concluded from a study by Franz Boas in 1911 of the Hopi language. Boas had made the determination that the Hopi language has no concept of time as an objective entity.
Of note from the article: His idea for proving the linguistic relativity theory was finding a concrete example of how the Hopi's lives were affected by their different linguistic concept of time. He claimed that the way the Hopi rely on preparation, announcing events well in advance, for example, showed a concept of time continuing along instead of being divided up as Western societies do, which matches the linguistic differences. This, according to Whorf at least, shows language determining thought, in other words Strong (or Extreme) Whorfianism.
The point of interest here is that Whorf never actually met a Native American, let alone a Hopi, and made these inferences from data that were not his own. In fact, the Hopi *do* have a concept of time very similar to ours.
So, basically, it mostly comes down to, language effects our language and our memory, but not until this study has anyone shown really anything that shows that language effects our perceptions of the actual world itself (which is what Whorf was claiming).
So is proper puncutation. You should try it sometime.
You complain about my punctuation, because it does not comply with your educated standards.
My choice of punctuation was chosen specifically to indicate the pauses in speech that I wanted expressed, and which would have been expressed had I been speaking the words myself.
Namely, I *wanted* a pause in speech after paragraphs. To break it appart and indicate the use of topicative speech in English, as best as it exists. This would be similar to the usage: "Beans, I like them."
Just because my puncuation use varies from your strict and narrow confines of perceived authority, does not make it wrong.
Surely this is what the whole article is about. Speakers of some languages are measurably better than others at telling the difference between two different shades of blue-green. Admittedly this is a rather abstract task, but the principle is the same.
No, this article is concerned with that people tell the difference between two different shades of blue/green *faster* if their language makes such a distinction, and it is in their left field of view. There was no difference in performance on the right field of view.
This still means that no language is better apt at discussing the differences between blue and green. In English you say "blue like the ocean, and green like grass." In Japanese you say, "aoi like the ocean, and aoi like grass." (if you speak Japanese, I know they have picked up "guri~n" now, but at on point this was true.)
They can still understand the difference in color, they just don't name the difference in color. If you want some fun, Russian has a word for a color that English does not have as a basic color. Note, this distinction must be made... as English has a nearly infinite number of names for variations in color. A basic color is one of the colors in the set where one can't tell you that it's just a ___-y variation on the color ___. In English orange is a basic color, as we think of orange as being "just orange" not "a yellowy red" or a "redish yellow". Meanwhile peach is not a basic color, as we think of peach as just a variation of basic colors.
For fun, figure out what this color is, and then ask yourself if we should be speaking about colors in Russian or English, because it has more basic colors than English.
There's no difference between sticking two words together and putting them side by side, as far as the expressive power of a language is concerned. As such, your example is irrelevant.
I disagree. German actually has grammatical rules concerning how words can be compounded. As such, they form full words. The only question remaining, can it be more expressive? Well, duh, it's meaning can be expressed in another language with a finite number of words, but so can anything.
What would be relevant is a single word of what we'll call reasonable length which would take a much greater number of words to translate into another language (not as a dictionary entry; in a sentence).
At this point, we're dealing solely with German into English. To ask for a word which will take a greater number of words to translate into another language (this presumed to be arbitrary) doesn't work, because of Agglutinative languages, which can construct things like:
For example, the official Guinness world record is Finnish epäjärjestelmällistyttämättömyydellänsäkäänköhän "Wonder if he can also... with his capability of not causing things to be unsystematic".
I don't see how it is such a stretch that this tool's peculiarities influence how we experience the world. Why would my ingrainedness with the rather rigid German system of tenses not let me think about time different from someone who uses languages with completely different systems to express time? (Or none at all... wouldn't surprise me in the world of language where most things seem to have been tried)
That's the thing, it's not a stretch at all for people to reach this conclusion, and most people do, even linguists before hand.
The problem with the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is that it requires that all thought be restricted to language. Thus, everything that we think about, would have to be language. Like I said (at least SOMEWHERE attached to this article) there have been a number of experiments that prove that we do not think entirely in pure language. Some of our thoughts are non-linguistic.
So, it's basically driven that the language we speak are this bottleneck between our non-linguistic thought, and our expression of it, and also our abstract memories (for example, when I remember that I have 17 dollars in my pocket, I don't remember the actual objects being in existence in my pocket, rather I remember the abstract linguistic content that I have 17 dollars in my pocket. YMMV depending on how your memory works here.)
So, in a way, the language we speak influences the speech we use (which is a tauntology), but it also effects our abstract memories, which would create a feedback loop on abstract topics, but not "real" topics... like what your mother's face looks like. And while sometimes we may fail at being able to express a notion that we're thinking, it doesn't mean that we're incapable of thinking it (which is what the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and 1984 are about.)
All linguists agree that some effect of language is on how we think, and some effect of how we think is in our language, but the real sticking point is just how much? This paper in the article says it's much closer to the S-W end, than the end that our language doesn't effect our thoughts at all. In truth, it's probably too entwined to tell. In fact, this paper suggests that in fact, the answer depends even upon which side of the brain we're using to perceive the input.
This is very interesting. I wonder if an argument could be made that certain languages are more or less suited to certains tasks or subject domains. For example more "native" languages such as Lao, Hmong, Farsi, Oromo, etc may be better for family and community communications and have larger/richer vocabularies for these topics. But "imposed" languages like Swahili, English, Thai, etc are better for trade and science, etc. I wonder if anyone has tried to study this.
This is a common layperson msiunderstanding. There is nothing about one particular language that makes it more suited for discussion of any one topic than another. What happens is that the brain associates topics with the language with which you spent the most time interacting with that topic.
For example, I think about most poetic issues in German. The first time I realy studied poetry was in college during a German poetry and lyric course. Because of this, I often have difficulty remembering the word for "alliteration" now, because I keep coming up with the word "Stabreim". Before I studied poetry and lyric in German, I didn't have this problem.
I hardly think anyone would say that German is better suited for poetry than English is. But since that's what I studied with, that's how my brain likes to process it.
On the other hand "everyone knows" (except people who watch Mythbusters) that if you shoot a 150-lb person with a 10-gram bullet, that the velocity of the bullet will cause the person to fly back several feet.
Quite quite... much better example. I was trying to think of something that everyone just "knew", but understood wrong. I suppose the notion that there's no gravity in space would have worked also.
Hmm, I will coin the word "bliters" to describe old person's teeth, as a portmanteau of "biters" and "blighted", as old people's teeth are often damaged, yellowed, and failing.
There:) Now we have an English equivalent for your German word!
Yes, you have. But the thing is that English spell checkers will mark that wrong, and it's not evidently clear from the word "bliters" what you mean. Meanwhile, "Älterzähne" clearly means what it means, because it is composed of the words "alt" (old)/"Älter" (elder) and "Zähne" pl of "Zahn" (tooth).
So, your word while having been coined to mean what the word I presented means, would still require explanation and still then would be a suboptimal choice. In the German though, it has a transparent meaning, it's regularized, and its construction and coining is normal and not at all unusual in German.
Yours is a neologism, mine is a regularized output from a grammatical rule.
I'm exaggerating with the use of the word "most"? I'd be exaggerating if I said "all", but seriously, most linguists refute the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis outright. There are quite a number of experiments out there that show that we do not think exclusively in language, and thus, the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis can be immediately discarded.
Right, but off my point. Which was, I think, that people who have to deal with something all the time will develop both a language to discuss the nuances of the subject matter and a perception that allows to notice them. Yes it's obvious, but how the 2 interact is still interesting stuff.
No more than typesetters having a name for every different font. I don't find that particularly spectacular news in and of itself... but somehow the fact that Eskimos have a hojillion different words for "snow" *is* interesting to most people, likely because it suggests a confirmation of many of our common sense notions.
Alright, I'll give you a word in German that definitely doesn't have a word in English: Älterzähne. It means "old people teeth" or just "old teeth". Of course an expression of the meaning exists in English, but a specific word itself doesn't exist singularly.
BTW, this word was coined during a German poetry class I took in college, but it follows the correct German word building process, and thus would not be marked as incorrectly spellt by a proper spellchecker.
Wow, people without a word for "8" and "10" cannot remember whether they were shown eight or ten elements previously. It's like they'd have to visually remember it.
I'll give you a task. WITHOUT counting, tell me how many periods are at the end of this sentence..........
Now, without counting tell me if it matches the number after this one.........
The reason we can tell the difference is because we count up the dots then memorize the number, then count up the other dots then we relate those numbers together, not the dots themselves. But without counting, we can't relate them any better than a language with only the words 1, 2, and many.
IANAL (Linguist), but I'm pretty convinced that language does inform your thinking and perception.
Most non-linguists are pretty convinced of the same. After enough education to get over common sense, most linguists change their mind. Just like physicists and the idea that if you hit a large 50 lbs block with a 1 lb block that the 50 lbs block won't move. Common sense says it won't, but physics tells us that's BS.
The Eskimo kid would learn early-on that snow has different forms, and that life depended on knowing how to behave in their vicinity. The fact that those types of snow probably were adressed by a multitude of recursive suffixes to a root noun can only have some effect on a learning brain. Why should a brain under these conditions develop the same patterns as the brain of a kid that lives with guys that call everything "the white stuff"?
This is no more relavent nor special than saying the same thing about English speaking children in snowy areas. The construction of these complex words for snow is not all together that different from English composition of sentences.
So, should we be surprised that Eskimos use words for snow more often? Um... no. Their environment makes that an almost certainty. Is there something special about their language that makes that happen? Nope. Nothing at all. Just the fact that snow is literally all around them.
Most people have so entwined the notion of "thought" to thinking aloud internally, that they have have difficulty understanding that we think below that level, and then we think of words to either remember, store, or express those thoughts to ourselves or others.
What if that language doesn't exist yet? Is it possible that my brain could have thoughts and emotions, but can't because I can't use language to express them.
This notion is the exact position that the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis takes. And nearly the entire linguistic community has concensus that this strong assertion Sapir-Whorf is not correct.
Consider any arguement/debate you've been in, and you hit a brick wall trying to think of a way to say something. "I know what I want to say, I just can't think of the words to say it."
Boom, strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis beaten right there.
The language you speak does not limit your thoughts, it just limits your expression of those thoughts. I run into this particularly often in that I speak English and German a lot. When I'm playing WoW (which I play in German) with my English speaking friends, I'm often tripped up by things, because I say "I need to find more... stuff... magic worked stuff... magi... mageweave!"
It's not that English lacks a word for it, it's just that I'm more familiar speaking about it in German.
I met a German during my High School years, who was a foreign exchange student. Since German lacks dental fricatives ("th") he pronounced them either as/s/,/z/,/t/, or/d/ depending on the sound properties surrounding it.
One day, I questioned him about it. I asked him, if he could pronounce the sounds or not, and he did, perfectly. The problem was, that when he went to actually speak English at a normal pace, his mind just ignored the sound, and produced the accent.
I've also spoken with some people and had them reproduce the vowel sound that should be in my last name (Foesch, if you speak German it's the ö (o-umlaut) noise). It doesn't exist in English, but people given enough time can "work it out". The problem is that they forget it, or just straight up replace it in their normal speech.
I wonder if this is like native asians and the letters 'r' and 'l'-- if you don't learn the difference when you are young then your brain will have problems thinking that way.
This is a nature of phonemic distinction. Few people retain the ability to adapt to new phonemics after a certain age (somewhere around puberty). The is the cause of all accents, not just asians (specifically Japanese) and the letters 'r' and 'l'.
They learned a language with a phomene that is different from both 'r' and 'l' as they are pronounced in English, and after their critical age, they lose the ability to adapt, and pick up being able to hear/produce this difference, and they compensate during their language aquisition to be able to identify words where 'r' and 'l' make a critical difference in meaning using context and other cues.
Yes, actually, it never really gets cold enough here in Seattle that I have to use my electric heater in the apartment.
I have my computers on 24/7 for convenience, and I actually have to keep my window open just so my apartment doesn't get too hot.
Thus, by mere desire for convenience, I generate the heat I need to survive comfortably anyways, and I've never turned on the heater, which is electric, and would cost me more money to run regardless of if I were turning my computers off or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Blizzard can choose to deny service to people who harass other patrons, or otherwise create a nuisance by saying things that others find offensive.
Black people offend my other patrons, and harass them by their mere presense in my diner. I don't see why you don't see a parallel here.
If all of my patrons are upset about my allowing colored people into my diner, I don't see why I should be required to serve them.
Dankon. Mi ne memori kiel al diri "LoL" en Esperanton.
Awesome, even with such a spectacularly easy language as Esperanto, a machine translator screws it up hard.
"Dankon. Mi ne memoris kiel diri 'LoL' esperante."
You are free to talk about any topic you want, but you are not free to talk about them everywhere. On private property (like a game), the game admins have the right to remove you for not complying with the rules.
Yeah, I have this diner, and we only serve white people. Because since it's private property, we can chose to deny service to anyone we want!
Hej! Mi povas paroli esperanto, you insensitive clod!
In other news, homosexual marriages in the United States are not legal, because "while you may be ok with it, some other people in the world, might not have your maturity level."
I don't find perscriptivism funny.
Asking for paragraphs so that it doesn't look like a big steaming pile is quit a bit different than nitpicking over a fucking comma.
German, as well as any other language I know of, has a rule about sticking two words next to each other - its grammar.
Grammar dictates everything even morphology, seeing as how morphology is simply a part of grammar (since grammar covers everything in language between phonology and pragmatics). The fact that German uses grammar to put two words together into one larger compound word does not disprove my point that this compound word is still none-the-less rightfully a word, and not a higher language construct.
German compound words are build through morphology (word construction) not syntax (sentence construction). This should be apparent to anyone who actually speaks German, which is why I can only assume that you neither speak German, nor have you studied it in sufficient detail to make such a statement that the compound words of German are in fact being built through syntax, and not morphology.
To task, I will analyse the word "Älterzähne." Being that it is constructed with two words "Älter" and "Zähne", we're tasked with how to put two such words together. Well, using syntax, we can make the phrase: "Zähne eines Älters" (teeth of an old person), or "Zähne des Älters" (teeth of the old person), "Zähne dieses Älters" (teeth of this old persons), but we don't want to express any of these, we want to express the same notion as is perceived with "Älterzähne".
Well, let's assume that "Älter" is a modifying noun that is syntactically attached to "Zähne". Being that "Zähne" has plural gender, this would require a syntactic compliance of gender and number (for all purposes plural can be treated as a seperate gender in German), thus we would have the form: "*Ältere Zähne" being that the strong adjectival ending for modifying words is "-e" in the nominative and accusative for plural nouns. Now let's singularize "Zähne" to "Zahn", which is masculine. Now, instead of "*Ältere Zähne" we have "*Älterer Zahn". But in the singular of "Älterzähne" we have "Älterzahn" neither have any grammatical ending on "Älter".
Interesting enough though, "älter" is an adjective in German as the superlative of "alt" (old), so the expressions "älterer Zahn" and "ältere Zähne" do exist, and are distinctly different from nomimal word compounding, which is done in German.
Considering that native speakers of German perceive these words as compounds rather than seperate words, and considering that there is absolutely no support for the assertion that there is a syntactical rule for composition of these words, it can only fall that these are morphological compounds. In fact, what rules do exist for compounding words show the same features of every morphological construction, namely vocal harmony. The fact that one or the other morpheme may mutate, or have another interdicting phomene placed between them in order to maintain the harmony of the word.
I admittedly am interested but ignorant on this whole topic, but why does this follow? I am thinking on a much too high level here, and maybe there is some unavoidable issue in brain and/or language structures, , but why wouldn't my language influence me, even though not everything is language? I'm sure the music that is played in different parts of the world has an influence on the brain's perceptions too. Dunno, seems so obvious :)
The idea behind the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (more accurately, the common conception of this hypothesis) is that language controls and defines what we can even think about. That people who speak a language that lacks a certain notion or idea are incapable of thinking of that notion or idea until it is given a linguistic construct in their language.
The best example is 1984, where a form of thought control is exacted through the language. They had the word "free" but only as in beer, never as in speech. Thus the idea of "freedom" wouldn't exist, and people who would speak this ficticious language would be unable to even conceieve that they are missing their "freedom" because they don't have any linguistic construct to represent such an idea.
Most linguists dismiss this notion entirely, and use evidence that thought is not (at least not entirely) language bound. That people subjected to such a forceful oppression within their language, will naturally resist, and their minds will know of "freedom" even though they have no word for it, and they will either invent a word, or extend the usage of a word, or something in order to represent an idea which does not have a word.
I found a paper: http://www.aber.ac.uk/media/Students/njp0001.html which gives some information. Of importance is what Sapir and Whorf concluded from a study by Franz Boas in 1911 of the Hopi language. Boas had made the determination that the Hopi language has no concept of time as an objective entity.
Of note from the article: His idea for proving the linguistic relativity theory was finding a concrete example of how the Hopi's lives were affected by their different linguistic concept of time. He claimed that the way the Hopi rely on preparation, announcing events well in advance, for example, showed a concept of time continuing along instead of being divided up as Western societies do, which matches the linguistic differences. This, according to Whorf at least, shows language determining thought, in other words Strong (or Extreme) Whorfianism.
The point of interest here is that Whorf never actually met a Native American, let alone a Hopi, and made these inferences from data that were not his own. In fact, the Hopi *do* have a concept of time very similar to ours.
So, basically, it mostly comes down to, language effects our language and our memory, but not until this study has anyone shown really anything that shows that language effects our perceptions of the actual world itself (which is what Whorf was claiming).
So is proper puncutation. You should try it sometime.
You complain about my punctuation, because it does not comply with your educated standards.
My choice of punctuation was chosen specifically to indicate the pauses in speech that I wanted expressed, and which would have been expressed had I been speaking the words myself.
Namely, I *wanted* a pause in speech after paragraphs. To break it appart and indicate the use of topicative speech in English, as best as it exists. This would be similar to the usage: "Beans, I like them."
Just because my puncuation use varies from your strict and narrow confines of perceived authority, does not make it wrong.
Surely this is what the whole article is about. Speakers of some languages are measurably better than others at telling the difference between two different shades of blue-green. Admittedly this is a rather abstract task, but the principle is the same.
No, this article is concerned with that people tell the difference between two different shades of blue/green *faster* if their language makes such a distinction, and it is in their left field of view. There was no difference in performance on the right field of view.
This still means that no language is better apt at discussing the differences between blue and green. In English you say "blue like the ocean, and green like grass." In Japanese you say, "aoi like the ocean, and aoi like grass." (if you speak Japanese, I know they have picked up "guri~n" now, but at on point this was true.)
They can still understand the difference in color, they just don't name the difference in color. If you want some fun, Russian has a word for a color that English does not have as a basic color. Note, this distinction must be made... as English has a nearly infinite number of names for variations in color. A basic color is one of the colors in the set where one can't tell you that it's just a ___-y variation on the color ___. In English orange is a basic color, as we think of orange as being "just orange" not "a yellowy red" or a "redish yellow". Meanwhile peach is not a basic color, as we think of peach as just a variation of basic colors.
For fun, figure out what this color is, and then ask yourself if we should be speaking about colors in Russian or English, because it has more basic colors than English.
I disagree. German actually has grammatical rules concerning how words can be compounded. As such, they form full words. The only question remaining, can it be more expressive? Well, duh, it's meaning can be expressed in another language with a finite number of words, but so can anything.
What would be relevant is a single word of what we'll call reasonable length which would take a much greater number of words to translate into another language (not as a dictionary entry; in a sentence).
At this point, we're dealing solely with German into English. To ask for a word which will take a greater number of words to translate into another language (this presumed to be arbitrary) doesn't work, because of Agglutinative languages, which can construct things like:
But very well, there's your one word that takes a large number of words in order to translate into English, or any other nonagglutinative language.
Serious dude... paragraphs, are awesome.
I don't see how it is such a stretch that this tool's peculiarities influence how we experience the world. Why would my ingrainedness with the rather rigid German system of tenses not let me think about time different from someone who uses languages with completely different systems to express time? (Or none at all ... wouldn't surprise me in the world of language where most things seem to have been tried)
That's the thing, it's not a stretch at all for people to reach this conclusion, and most people do, even linguists before hand.
The problem with the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is that it requires that all thought be restricted to language. Thus, everything that we think about, would have to be language. Like I said (at least SOMEWHERE attached to this article) there have been a number of experiments that prove that we do not think entirely in pure language. Some of our thoughts are non-linguistic.
So, it's basically driven that the language we speak are this bottleneck between our non-linguistic thought, and our expression of it, and also our abstract memories (for example, when I remember that I have 17 dollars in my pocket, I don't remember the actual objects being in existence in my pocket, rather I remember the abstract linguistic content that I have 17 dollars in my pocket. YMMV depending on how your memory works here.)
So, in a way, the language we speak influences the speech we use (which is a tauntology), but it also effects our abstract memories, which would create a feedback loop on abstract topics, but not "real" topics... like what your mother's face looks like. And while sometimes we may fail at being able to express a notion that we're thinking, it doesn't mean that we're incapable of thinking it (which is what the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and 1984 are about.)
All linguists agree that some effect of language is on how we think, and some effect of how we think is in our language, but the real sticking point is just how much? This paper in the article says it's much closer to the S-W end, than the end that our language doesn't effect our thoughts at all. In truth, it's probably too entwined to tell. In fact, this paper suggests that in fact, the answer depends even upon which side of the brain we're using to perceive the input.
This is very interesting. I wonder if an argument could be made that certain languages are more or less suited to certains tasks or subject domains. For example more "native" languages such as Lao, Hmong, Farsi, Oromo, etc may be better for family and community communications and have larger/richer vocabularies for these topics. But "imposed" languages like Swahili, English, Thai, etc are better for trade and science, etc. I wonder if anyone has tried to study this.
This is a common layperson msiunderstanding. There is nothing about one particular language that makes it more suited for discussion of any one topic than another. What happens is that the brain associates topics with the language with which you spent the most time interacting with that topic.
For example, I think about most poetic issues in German. The first time I realy studied poetry was in college during a German poetry and lyric course. Because of this, I often have difficulty remembering the word for "alliteration" now, because I keep coming up with the word "Stabreim". Before I studied poetry and lyric in German, I didn't have this problem.
I hardly think anyone would say that German is better suited for poetry than English is. But since that's what I studied with, that's how my brain likes to process it.
On the other hand "everyone knows" (except people who watch Mythbusters) that if you shoot a 150-lb person with a 10-gram bullet, that the velocity of the bullet will cause the person to fly back several feet.
Quite quite... much better example. I was trying to think of something that everyone just "knew", but understood wrong. I suppose the notion that there's no gravity in space would have worked also.
Hmm, I will coin the word "bliters" to describe old person's teeth, as a portmanteau of "biters" and "blighted", as old people's teeth are often damaged, yellowed, and failing.
:) Now we have an English equivalent for your German word!
There
Yes, you have. But the thing is that English spell checkers will mark that wrong, and it's not evidently clear from the word "bliters" what you mean. Meanwhile, "Älterzähne" clearly means what it means, because it is composed of the words "alt" (old)/"Älter" (elder) and "Zähne" pl of "Zahn" (tooth).
So, your word while having been coined to mean what the word I presented means, would still require explanation and still then would be a suboptimal choice. In the German though, it has a transparent meaning, it's regularized, and its construction and coining is normal and not at all unusual in German.
Yours is a neologism, mine is a regularized output from a grammatical rule.
Aren't you exaggerating there?
I'm exaggerating with the use of the word "most"? I'd be exaggerating if I said "all", but seriously, most linguists refute the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis outright. There are quite a number of experiments out there that show that we do not think exclusively in language, and thus, the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis can be immediately discarded.
Right, but off my point. Which was, I think, that people who have to deal with something all the time will develop both a language to discuss the nuances of the subject matter and a perception that allows to notice them. Yes it's obvious, but how the 2 interact is still interesting stuff.
No more than typesetters having a name for every different font. I don't find that particularly spectacular news in and of itself... but somehow the fact that Eskimos have a hojillion different words for "snow" *is* interesting to most people, likely because it suggests a confirmation of many of our common sense notions.
Alright, I'll give you a word in German that definitely doesn't have a word in English: Älterzähne. It means "old people teeth" or just "old teeth". Of course an expression of the meaning exists in English, but a specific word itself doesn't exist singularly.
BTW, this word was coined during a German poetry class I took in college, but it follows the correct German word building process, and thus would not be marked as incorrectly spellt by a proper spellchecker.
Wow, people without a word for "8" and "10" cannot remember whether they were shown eight or ten elements previously. It's like they'd have to visually remember it.
I'll give you a task. WITHOUT counting, tell me how many periods are at the end of this sentence..........
Now, without counting tell me if it matches the number after this one.........
The reason we can tell the difference is because we count up the dots then memorize the number, then count up the other dots then we relate those numbers together, not the dots themselves. But without counting, we can't relate them any better than a language with only the words 1, 2, and many.
IANAL (Linguist), but I'm pretty convinced that language does inform your thinking and perception.
Most non-linguists are pretty convinced of the same. After enough education to get over common sense, most linguists change their mind. Just like physicists and the idea that if you hit a large 50 lbs block with a 1 lb block that the 50 lbs block won't move. Common sense says it won't, but physics tells us that's BS.
The Eskimo kid would learn early-on that snow has different forms, and that life depended on knowing how to behave in their vicinity. The fact that those types of snow probably were adressed by a multitude of recursive suffixes to a root noun can only have some effect on a learning brain.
Why should a brain under these conditions develop the same patterns as the brain of a kid that lives with guys that call everything "the white stuff"?
This is no more relavent nor special than saying the same thing about English speaking children in snowy areas. The construction of these complex words for snow is not all together that different from English composition of sentences.
So, should we be surprised that Eskimos use words for snow more often? Um... no. Their environment makes that an almost certainty. Is there something special about their language that makes that happen? Nope. Nothing at all. Just the fact that snow is literally all around them.
Most people have so entwined the notion of "thought" to thinking aloud internally, that they have have difficulty understanding that we think below that level, and then we think of words to either remember, store, or express those thoughts to ourselves or others.
What if that language doesn't exist yet? Is it possible that my brain could have thoughts and emotions, but can't because I can't use language to express them.
This notion is the exact position that the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis takes. And nearly the entire linguistic community has concensus that this strong assertion Sapir-Whorf is not correct.
Consider any arguement/debate you've been in, and you hit a brick wall trying to think of a way to say something. "I know what I want to say, I just can't think of the words to say it."
Boom, strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis beaten right there.
The language you speak does not limit your thoughts, it just limits your expression of those thoughts. I run into this particularly often in that I speak English and German a lot. When I'm playing WoW (which I play in German) with my English speaking friends, I'm often tripped up by things, because I say "I need to find more... stuff... magic worked stuff... magi... mageweave!"
It's not that English lacks a word for it, it's just that I'm more familiar speaking about it in German.
I met a German during my High School years, who was a foreign exchange student. Since German lacks dental fricatives ("th") he pronounced them either as /s/, /z/, /t/, or /d/ depending on the sound properties surrounding it.
One day, I questioned him about it. I asked him, if he could pronounce the sounds or not, and he did, perfectly. The problem was, that when he went to actually speak English at a normal pace, his mind just ignored the sound, and produced the accent.
I've also spoken with some people and had them reproduce the vowel sound that should be in my last name (Foesch, if you speak German it's the ö (o-umlaut) noise). It doesn't exist in English, but people given enough time can "work it out". The problem is that they forget it, or just straight up replace it in their normal speech.
I wonder if this is like native asians and the letters 'r' and 'l'-- if you don't learn the difference when you are young then your brain will have problems thinking that way.
This is a nature of phonemic distinction. Few people retain the ability to adapt to new phonemics after a certain age (somewhere around puberty). The is the cause of all accents, not just asians (specifically Japanese) and the letters 'r' and 'l'.
They learned a language with a phomene that is different from both 'r' and 'l' as they are pronounced in English, and after their critical age, they lose the ability to adapt, and pick up being able to hear/produce this difference, and they compensate during their language aquisition to be able to identify words where 'r' and 'l' make a critical difference in meaning using context and other cues.
I'd say they probably told it about St. Peter and St. Paul, but then we'd have no one watching the gates of Heaven at that time...
Yes, actually, it never really gets cold enough here in Seattle that I have to use my electric heater in the apartment.
I have my computers on 24/7 for convenience, and I actually have to keep my window open just so my apartment doesn't get too hot.
Thus, by mere desire for convenience, I generate the heat I need to survive comfortably anyways, and I've never turned on the heater, which is electric, and would cost me more money to run regardless of if I were turning my computers off or not.