Languages and Thought

Another good point... and the reason why Orwellian "newspeak", even if genial, is the weakest part of "1984".
If there was no word for freedom, people would invent one.

The German language requires a lot of mental organisation, in the sentence structure, at least this seems so the the native English speaker, and I have often thought that may have influenced the German character (and not the other way round) to its stereotypical attributes of logic, thoroughness, conformity, order etc.

Yes, well, the Protestant Reformation and the proliferation of printed copies of the Old Testament had a lot to do with the anal retentiveness so popular in central Europe, as well.

Rosborne
Thanks for the question! my 2cents "worthwhile"

So how do you guys think we came up with the names for colors?
Scientific chart of some sort or examination?

For what it's worth, if anything, in the Navajo language you can't say "dog" or "horse". You can have a blue horse, a roan horse, etc., but not just a horse. I believe, but can't be certain, that all nouns require some sort of modifier to be used. Intuitively, this just has to affect the way those things are thought of.

Conversely, it's perfectly conceivable that they might have a single word covering fork, spoon, knife, ladle, etc...



Certainly it's meant that a lot of libretti have been written in Italian...

I think it has less to do with the universality as being attuned to physical space and motions therein. I used to teach beginning ASL classes, and would do an exercise where people would have to try to replicate a simple drawing based on their partner drawing it in the air. So there would for example be a square on top of a triangle on top of a sideways oval, all drawn in the air, and the partner would need to then draw the shapes on paper. Hearing people who had never done this before found it just impossible. They couldn't retain the whole series of shapes in their mind's eye. Watching, I found it jaw-droppingly obvious. It was just how our eyes are trained differently.

Signed languages are very different from each other, but those who use them are very good at figuring out visual cues, retaining the fact that there was a square on top, then a triangle under it, by the time they see the oval being drawn.

Fbaezer

Is there really a different usage for perderse as opposed to perder? I didn't know that. What about olvidar?

I would guess that "having" hunger would be along the same lines as "having" age. I guess there's two ways of thinking of yourself - as a complete whole (which includes hunger and age) that is always changing, or as something separate and unchanging that "has" qualities such as hunger and age that change. I doubt the speakers' thoughts about themselves are defined by the language though - it's just how it was decided that the semantics would work out for that language. Like, Hebrew technically has a copula (the verb "to be") but it's always implied and never actually used, unless there's an important tense marker that wouldn't otherwise be expressed. ("The dog is big" = Hacelev gadol "the dog big", but "the dog was big" = Hacelev haya gadol "the dog was big.") There's also no word for "to have" in Hebrew - the idea is expressed by the frase "there is to x". I have a dog = Yesh li celev "there is to me a dog". Estar does also indicate temporariness, but in English if I said "I am in this room" or "I am hungry" or "I am 19", the "am" has a different meaning than "I am female" or "I am American". But, as we were talking about in the altruism thread, perhaps those aren't really sufficient to a description of onesself either.

Patio

As far as I know, children who grow up without ever learning a language never learn any, if they grow past about 10 or 12 without verbal human contact. I don't know much more than that about their developement, though. Kind of makes you wonder how the first languages came about, I guess. I do know that children who grow up around pidgins, which are not fully developed conglomorations of words from different languages, develope a creole, which is like the pidgin in vocabulary, but unlike the pidgin, has rules and grammar and syntax. Eventually, the creole becomes a dialect.

Setanta

Sign language is a language as much as any other, and can be learned as easily. People who are immersed in another language can sometimes pick that up quickly (depending on how old they are) and I'd assume that sign language is no different.

Ros

Language doesn't affect the way your eyes work, just the way you name things. You can still differentiate between every microscopic color difference in the spectrum - not just between pink and red, but between all the shades of pink as well. We just label them the same way, because it's easier than naming every shade. There's also sort of a universal division of shades - not in number, but in where they are on the spectrum. So, if there are two colors, they are red and green, if there are three, than I think it's red and green and purple. I can't remember the whole list, but I think it's pretty universal for all languages (maybe I'll check the eHRAF on the one).

McTag

English evolved from German, so it should have some of the same qualities. Latin, too, is extremely organized, but the Romans weren't known for their thoroughness, order, or conformity.

I've heard someone suggest that the reason there were so many German philosophers was because German has such a large vocabulary of abstract nouns. Like patio said, I don't think that this limits other languages at all, but it might cause German speakers to think about abstract things on a more daily basis, if those nouns are used more often. Kind of like all the sports and sex metaphors in American English.

Roger

I doubt that the Navajo pay as much attention to something like snow as they do to their horses.

How very pedantic, and silly, of you, Rufio . . .

Hey, I think it's interesting.

Actually, the point was objects, not horses, rufio. What is your world picture if you have no general word for horseness or snowness? Wouldn't it likely be somewhat different?

Well, I doubt that there just isn't a general word. I mean, we have words like sleet and graffiti that mean very specific things, but that doesn't prevent us from having general words like snow and writing.

I might add that even if there is no freestanding word for horse, there's probably a morpheme for "horse". I can't think of an English equivalent right off the top of my head, but I'm sure ther are some.

I doubt your right to so thoroughly instruct the members of this site in such matters, Rufio, which is why i posted what i did. Sozobe is the one to whom i would look for an expert answer in matters concerning sign language. Of all the history i know, i know the history of the Romans as well as any other, and your statments were not simply wrong, they were completely the opposite of any reasonable statement about Romans in general.



In fact, those are the very qualities which the Romans possessed in such abundance that they were able to dominate their world for a thousand years, despite lacking the brilliance of the Greeks, the sheer personal élan of the Gauls, the seafaring experience of the Carthaginians--in short, the Romans developed a system of such thorough order and conformity, that it was proof against any mediocrity. Those who had civic duties had equivalent religious duties and equivalent military duties. For a millenium, every Roman knew what was expected of him, in the temple, in the Forum, on the field of battle. The uniformity of equipment, training and method, and the thoroughness of civic organization assured that Roman armies performed to a reliable standard, even when their commanders were incompetent, and that they were able to raise new armies to defend their city and renew the struggle when their armies in the field had been destroyed. Their engineering gave a world which knew only dirt tracks and forest trails a set of roads which exist to this day; and it produced water and sewage systems in use to this day. More than anything else, exposure to the Romans would be the reason i would give to explain why the Germans both have such a structured language and exhibit the stereotyped qualities you have listed.

To contend that English is derived from German is just plain silly.

Well, I'm minoring in linguistics. I don't know how much meaning that has in this forum, but there you have it. From what I've learned about sign language, I've heard it has a grammar and a syntax. Is this not true? Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, oh great gurus of ASL.

I guess the behavior of the Romans and the Germans is rather subjective, then isn't it? As a matter of reference, the only Germans I've ever met were quite slovenly, and I haven't had the pleasure of meeting any Romans at all. From what I remember learning about them, they liked to party, and build theaters, and liked to participate in spectator sports. That doesn't sound particularly orderly to me. I think you'll find that there are parts of any society that are "orderly" and parts that aren't. I don't like the way people generalize about societies and say "the Japanse are obediant" and "the Germans are structured" and "the Apaches are war-like." I think it's a very restricting form of anthropology.

English is a Germanic language, and is related to German in structure. We form compound words, have a genitive noun case, and the function morpheme -er. These things aren't especially common in modern languages other than English and German, at least that I know of.

(Assuming this is me.)

Sign language does affect how you retain images in your mind's eye. That's not how about how your eyes work per se. There have been studies about where the activity is in the brain when you sign or watch sign. People who don't know sign and are monitored while watching it are using the visual part of their brain almost exclusively. People who are fluent in sign and are monitored while watching it are using some of the visual part of their brain and a big chunk of the language center of the brain, including some of the parts that are usually used for auditory intake.

By "the eyes are trained differently", I don't mean that they can, like, pop out or something... but it's not just about "naming", either. It is that completely different sections of the brain are being used by those who are and are not fluent in sign, observing the same thing.

Your remarks on the similarities between German and English in no way authorizes a contention that English derives from German. As for generalizing about socities, that is precisely what you have done and it is to that which i objected.



This is one of the most hilariously ill-informed comments i've ever read. Here's a short list for you:

Titus Livius, Ad Urbe Condite, a history of Rome written in the Augustan age, in more than 130 "books" (four or five of these books make a slim paperback).

Suetonius, The Twelve Caesars

Tacitus, The History of Imperial Rome, The Annals of Imperial Rome, Germania, Cerealis. The first two are fragmentary, but largely complete. The Germania is the earliest description of these people available; Cerealis is a life of his father-in-law, who governed Britain briefly, and who was the first to circumnavigate the island, of whom we have a record, at any event.

Polybius, The Histories. This is an extremely important work. Polybius was a Greek, writing for the Greeks of the Amphictyonic League, to explain to them the people who had overwhelmed their world. Tacitus, Livius and Suetonius wrote for other Romans, and assumed a great deal (reasonably) about what their audience knew of their own history. Polybius was at pains to explain to his fellow countrymen what the Romans were all about, including their public institutions. A must read for anyone who would understand Rome.

Plutarch, The Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans. Just about the earliest attempt at coherent biography, Plutarch wrote biographical sketches of his subjects, which were necessarily short, as he seems to have confined himself to what he considered reliable information. Many of his biographical sketches are in the form of comparisons of one personality with another.

Let me know when you finish those, the list is a great deal longer than that. Those are primary sources, as well--i.e., the starting point for any historian.

Certainly, sozo, interpreting things is different than seeing them. It's not your eyes that are working differently, it's your brain. However, that post was directed at rosborne, about colors.

Setanta, I really have no interest in becoming an expert on the Romans. If you read that in my post, I'm sorry I wasn't blunt enough to hammer through your skull. I don't know much about the Romans. I really don't give a **** about them except as far as their language was concerned. But even I can think of a few things that don't fit with your "Roman personality". You don't even have to be very educated to empirically disprove generalizations, because all you need is ONE example? Funny how that works, isn't it?

As for German, it's a well-known fact that German is related rather closely to English, perhaps you should educate yourself. Look, I'm not even going to go make you read book after book and tax your reading comprehension skills further. Here's a VERY breif history of the English language - online, too, no less:

http://www.wordorigins.org/histeng.htm

<sigh>