wonderful article today in the Wall Street JOurnal......Weekend Section page W3. Great discussion on language, its translations, it meanings, how people read it, and think about it
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Still has no connection with Christianity, except for a brief moment when one wonders if it shapes the Bible and the attitudes of people living around 4 BC.
Confounded Language!duxrowJuly 25 2010, 12:13:39 UTC
Gen 11:7 KJV "Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech". Apparently 'they' came down in succession, and began our multitude of languages. Did they just wake up one morning and couldn't figure out what their neighbors were saying? Sounds hilarious to me!
Yeah fascinating stuff, Mimi. I heard about the Piraha before, in another interesting article.
I didn't know spanish has such thing too. I had a crush on a spanish girl once and I was an idiot and made a mistake and it was over. I tried to ask for forgiveness, but the girl seemed to think it was a matter of fate. It didn't matter that I thought "I broke the vase" ... she thought that fate broke it, that it broke itself. So she didn't believe that things can be repaired because they are in our power. Instead of that she is scared of her very own fate because so many "vases in her life broke themselves".
Perhaps I am carrying this too far but this is what I thought when reading your good post.
Regarding how people think with language, there is an idea called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which essentially claims that one's understanding of the world is moulded by one's language. It is an interesting idea, although the exact degree of determination by the language has been under much debate.
I have seen some interesting examples of it in practice: a Japanese student of English in her 20s saying that she felt that she could be more friendly with a Japanese classmate in his 50s when speaking English, because she was not then obliged to use the distancing, formal addresses required in their own language.
This highlights what I believe to be quite common, which is that people who are not terribly reflective about their own cultural (and linguistic conditioning) can have their thoughts very much conditioned by their language, whereas those who discover other linguistic options are particularly likely to re-examine their default assumptions. In other words, learning another language can introduce one to thinking in new ways.
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http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703467304575383131592767868.html
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Apparently 'they' came down in succession, and began our multitude of languages. Did they just wake up one morning and couldn't figure out what their neighbors were saying? Sounds hilarious to me!
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I didn't know spanish has such thing too. I had a crush on a spanish girl once and I was an idiot and made a mistake and it was over. I tried to ask for forgiveness, but the girl seemed to think it was a matter of fate. It didn't matter that I thought "I broke the vase" ... she thought that fate broke it, that it broke itself. So she didn't believe that things can be repaired because they are in our power. Instead of that she is scared of her very own fate because so many "vases in her life broke themselves".
Perhaps I am carrying this too far but this is what I thought when reading your good post.
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I have seen some interesting examples of it in practice: a Japanese student of English in her 20s saying that she felt that she could be more friendly with a Japanese classmate in his 50s when speaking English, because she was not then obliged to use the distancing, formal addresses required in their own language.
This highlights what I believe to be quite common, which is that people who are not terribly reflective about their own cultural (and linguistic conditioning) can have their thoughts very much conditioned by their language, whereas those who discover other linguistic options are particularly likely to re-examine their default assumptions. In other words, learning another language can introduce one to thinking in new ways.
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