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Does Your Language Shape How You Think?
Posted by david h in
31 Aug 2010 — 11:14am
31 Aug 2010 — 11:14am
Good book!
Through the Language Glass
Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages
Guy Deutscher
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31 Aug 2010 — 3:59pm
I read this in the International Herald Tribune this morning! Cool article, but not very type related.
31 Aug 2010 — 4:24pm
Thanks! Fascinating.
Related/recent:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html
"Cool article, but not very type related."
Well language (/culture) and type are quite closely related.
31 Aug 2010 — 9:56pm
It was the purpose of Newspeak to make thoughtcrime impossible.
-- George Orwell, in 1984.
31 Aug 2010 — 11:45pm
I grew up in a world where things were just things. I never thought of definite or indefinite articles, because the context of a thing was always clear. And then I started to learn English.
Today, me, and thousands of other younger Poles, speak "this water is too cold" or "take any pen" which are subconscious cliches of English use of "the" and "a". We have adapted a different point of view.
1 Sep 2010 — 4:32pm
There was a link to the New York Times article from the original page noted, and I found that quite interesting. Old ideas about Italian being musical and German rough had much less to do with the book than the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.
As I find it easier to keep compass points straight than left and right, which just seem so identical, I could relate to the exotic linguistic example they used for much of the article.
1 Sep 2010 — 5:13pm
I have observed, when looking at various translations of instructions included with some gizmo, that Italian seems to be the briefest and Spanish and German seem to ne vying for the longest. Perhaps this has to do with what is expected to be implicit or explicit; or, maybe not.