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How does our language shape the way we think? (2009)

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Re: How does our language shape the way we think? (2009)

#51

Post by luketych »

diego_moita wrote: post #22

As a speaker of 3 different languages (English, German and Portuguese/Spanish) I believe that although correct this is a wrong discussion. Yes, languages does influence the way we think, but overall culture does influence a million times more. One example is the democratic debate in English speaking countries compared to the same debate in Portuguese/Spanish countries. I hear a lot of words that don't have a direct t…

Have you ever considered that language affects culture and culture affects language, and the two influence each other like a chicken and an egg? Thus it is very difficult to separate the two.

Re: How does our language shape the way we think? (2009)

#52

Post by diego_moita »

serans wrote: post #48
diego_moita wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, not "quite". They are actually very similar to each other. So much that, for non-native speakers, it becomes very hard to try to learn both at same time. Portuguese is just a modern version of Galician (Galego), a Spanish dialect from northwest Spain and northern Portugal. After the expulsion of the Moors invaders in the 8th century, it became Portugal's language. Castilian (Castellano), the root of modern Spanis…

I think it's more correct to say that Portuguese is a modern version of ancient Galician (usually known as Galician-Portuguese), just as modern Galician is.

Fair enough, thanks for correcting me.

Re: How does our language shape the way we think? (2009)

#53

Post by saraid216 »

kafkaesque wrote: post #41
diego_moita wrote: post #22

As a speaker of 3 different languages (English, German and Portuguese/Spanish) I believe that although correct this is a wrong discussion. Yes, languages does influence the way we think, but overall culture does influence a million times more. One example is the democratic debate in English speaking countries compared to the same debate in Portuguese/Spanish countries. I hear a lot of words that don't have a direct t…

I was an English Spanish translator in another life. While I agree with your general idea that there are some untranslatable words, most of the words you cite do have equivalents in Spanish, unless you are referring to false friends. In that case, it'd be great if you could elaborate. But generally speaking, the translations are regionalisms. Also, I'd like to add that language is very much embedded in culture and vi…

> I think words are concepts.

My notion of this is that words are pointers to something in a concept space. The words themselves don't and can't contain everything that the concept is; through cultural immersion, you gain a more complete notion of the concept and can more reliably refer to it by using an appropriate word.

This is why a lot of words are used to mean things completely unrelated (apparently) to their definition. The address they have in concept space simply changed.

And then there's the detail that concepts easily and frequently overlap.

I'm sure this has been covered by an Actual Linguist more credibly, though I've never seen it.

Re: How does our language shape the way we think? (2009)

#54

Post by yeureka »

diego_moita wrote: post #39
yeureka wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Portuguese and Spanish are quite different languages.

No, not "quite". They are actually very similar to each other. So much that, for non-native speakers, it becomes very hard to try to learn both at same time. Portuguese is just a modern version of Galician (Galego), a Spanish dialect from northwest Spain and northern Portugal. After the expulsion of the Moors invaders in the 8th century, it became Portugal's language. Castilian (Castellano), the root of modern Spanis…

I am Portuguese and I lived and worked in Spain for more than 3 years and to lump together Portuguese and Castellian as one language is very weird to me.

I had to learn Castellian to be able to be understood in everyday situations, to attend classes and to be able work in an office with natives.

Some words are spelled the same but the phonetics are completely different ( unless you speak Brazilian Portuguese which could be argued to be closer to Gallician-Portuguese ), and although Portuguese natives can understand a bit of Castillian ( not to the level of being able to read a newspaper though ), try to get two youths from the streets of Lisbon and Madrid to talk to each other and most likely they will sadly resort to speaking in broken English.

Re: How does our language shape the way we think? (2009)

#55

Post by schreiaj »

taejo wrote: post #29
7rurl wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? The arabic number system that most of the world uses is base 10. Also, I don't see why the base of the number system would make math any easier or harder.

The arabic numeral system is base-10, but English numerals are only sort of base 10: consider 2, 10, 12 and 22. In English, these are spoken as "two", "ten", "twelve" and "twenty-two". The words "twelve" and "twenty" are both derived from "two", it's true, but in two different ways. "Teen" and "ten" are similar, but there's nothing about "twenty" that indicates a connection to "ten". In Japanese (IIRC), 2, 10, 12, 22…

Interestingly, this is how I was always taught to think of numbers. Beads on a stick represent all numbers. 1 bead is 1. A ten is therefore a stick with 10 beads on it. A hundred is 10 tens (in a square). A thousand is 10 hundreds stacked on top of each other (or 10 "10 tens" in a cube).

This really made it simple to think of things like carrying (oh, that's just breaking the wire holding the beads together) and squaring/rooting (since 100 was a square of 10 it was trivial). It provided an interesting method of multiplication too (simply align two numbers orthogonally and fill in the grid). I still think in terms of this now.

Incidentally, when I learned Japanese many years later it felt more natural than saying twenty-two or the abomination that is seventeen.

Re: How does our language shape the way we think? (2009)

#56

Post by archangel_one »

scott_s wrote: post #30
taejo wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The arabic numeral system is base-10, but English numerals are only sort of base 10: consider 2, 10, 12 and 22. In English, these are spoken as "two", "ten", "twelve" and "twenty-two". The words "twelve" and "twenty" are both derived from "two", it's true, but in two different ways. "Teen" and "ten" are similar, but there's nothing about "twenty" that indicates a connection to "ten". In Japanese (IIRC), 2, 10, 12, 22…

Thank you. I had flirted with the thoughts before, but never really explicitly considered how odd the English words "eleven", "twelve" and then the "teens" are. Not only is "teen" not quite "ten", we also put it after the ones digit. That is, 19 is "nine- teen ", but 91 is " ninety -one".

This is true of Germanic languages more generally, where they have special cases for teens too but also read higher numbers as "five-and-twenty" etc. And then French has their vigesimal thing - 92 is quatre-vingt-douze, ie. "four twentys and twelve". English gets off relatively lightly with teens only...

Re: How does our language shape the way we think? (2009)

#57

Post by 2a0c40 »

oftenwrong wrote: post #42
7rurl wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? The arabic number system that most of the world uses is base 10. Also, I don't see why the base of the number system would make math any easier or harder.

I think the parent is referring to how numbers are constructed verbally. A number like 52347 would be said like "five ten thousands, two thousands, three hundreds, four tens, seven ones" Of course, this doesn't really apply above the ten thousands. To say 1,000,000 you have to say "one hundred ten thousands".

This is the case for chinese (japanese, despite being from a completely different language family, inherited the system). Digits are grouped by myriads (10^4) instead of thousands (10^3). Accordingly, you would write 10^6 like this: 100,0000

Re: How does our language shape the way we think? (2009)

#58

Post by eli_gottlieb »

taejo wrote: post #29
7rurl wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you mean? The arabic number system that most of the world uses is base 10. Also, I don't see why the base of the number system would make math any easier or harder.

The arabic numeral system is base-10, but English numerals are only sort of base 10: consider 2, 10, 12 and 22. In English, these are spoken as "two", "ten", "twelve" and "twenty-two". The words "twelve" and "twenty" are both derived from "two", it's true, but in two different ways. "Teen" and "ten" are similar, but there's nothing about "twenty" that indicates a connection to "ten". In Japanese (IIRC), 2, 10, 12, 22…

That's the same way we do it in Hebrew, actually.

20 is "esrim", meaning tens, which is actually a special case because Hebrew once had a grammatical dual form. Then comes "shloshim", meaning threes. "Arba'im", fours. And so on. So 22 is "esrim ve'shtayyim", tens and two.

Re: How does our language shape the way we think? (2009)

#59

Post by fernly »

jeltz wrote: post #10

"For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong." I dislike sensationalism. The idea that this can be tested is as old as the modern controversy. There were studies on words for colors in the 1950s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity_and_the_c...

All of which brings back memories of Loglan[1] which was specifically designed as a tool for testing Sapir-Whorf, although in the end and after many years of painstaking development it was never used for that. Loglan has a successor Lojban[2] which is still a hobby project for a small community.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loglan [2] http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Lojban

Re: How does our language shape the way we think? (2009)

#60

Post by mprovost »

yeureka wrote: post #54
diego_moita wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, not "quite". They are actually very similar to each other. So much that, for non-native speakers, it becomes very hard to try to learn both at same time. Portuguese is just a modern version of Galician (Galego), a Spanish dialect from northwest Spain and northern Portugal. After the expulsion of the Moors invaders in the 8th century, it became Portugal's language. Castilian (Castellano), the root of modern Spanis…

I am Portuguese and I lived and worked in Spain for more than 3 years and to lump together Portuguese and Castellian as one language is very weird to me. I had to learn Castellian to be able to be understood in everyday situations, to attend classes and to be able work in an office with natives. Some words are spelled the same but the phonetics are completely different ( unless you speak Brazilian Portuguese which co…

Portuguese has more distinct vowel sounds than Spanish, which means that for a Spanish speaker, two distinct words in Portuguese can sound the same. This makes it easier for a Portuguese speaker to understand Spanish, assuming the specific vocabulary is also similar enough. But it doesn't make for easy conversations when even one person is struggling to comprehend, as you've noticed.
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