English-speaking skiers have more words for "snow" than Inuktitut-speakers. It's the culture that shapes the language, not the language that shapes the mind.
Now, this does affect how you think. We need different words (including multi-word combinations) to point to different things. But we also need to see similarities between things and this is how we choose the form for these words or word combinations.
To rewrite a problem in different and more generic terms is a know heuristic to get a better understanding of it and maybe gain an insight. (Note that more generic terms mean that you start using more multi-word combinations and will see both differences and similarities.)
A different metaphor may also open up different possibilities. E.g we are trying to model a permission system and phrase it in terms of users, groups, and resources. We may come up with a different solution if we switch to users, keys, and rooms. Entities in the model are neither groups nor keys; they have their own nature we try to imperfectly capture with words pointing to things that have a superficially same relationship. The words are not quite good; but we need some pointers.
This is why trying to find the perfect name for a variable is a fallacy. There are no perfect names. What helps more are names that are different in one way and similar in another and form a consistent set.
i dont see the connection to the structure of thought at all. words are just arbitrary utterances that come after thoughts. how could they possibly affect thought?
English has so many "standard" words because the speech community became unusually eager to borrow them from other languages after the Norman conquest (The Anglo-Saxons were actually quite reluctant to do so before). Many speakers of other languages are now just as eager to borrow words from English (or other languages). Look at the pervasiveness of Spanglish and Hinglish, even though they are broadly considered non-standard by the speech community. A Spanish speaker will find just as many different words to describe something as an English speaker if they bother to try.
The hoax is that a language systematically shapes the patterns of thought of the entire speech community in profound ways. There is actually consensus among linguists that it can shape thinking of very subtle ways, however. Noun-gendering is one. A bridge is masculine in French: "le pont". It's feminine in German: "die Bruecke". A French-speaker is more likely to think of a bridge as "strong" or "sturdy", and a German is more likely to describe it as "elegant". But this does not rise to the level of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis that a language limits its speakers' view of the world.
Portuguese is an example of this - there was a deliberate narrowing of the lexicon in the 20th century, even extending to losing certain tenses like the future perfect, and this has resulted in a narrowing of the field of expression.
For example, in English you can say “by next week, I will have finished the work”, but in Portuguese you boil it down to the simple perfect, and it becomes unclear as to whether you have already done the work or not.
You also just literally can’t translate stuff like “she must have been going to go” or “she would have had to have gone” or “I will have been living here for five years in two weeks”.
This results in a loss of temporal thinking, hypothetical chains, and allocations of causality and responsibility, and while I don’t at all wish to besmirch the good Portuguese people, the results are a real and long-lasting impact on things like economic productivity and the ability to forward plan.
Or maybe it’s just a hangover from Salazar and I’m barking up the wrong tree, but often when I’ve attempted clarification on this stuff the distinction has just not been comprehensible to my interlocutor. I try to use stuff like the future perfect (as it still theoretically exists, but is almost entirely disused) and people just do not understand - either the structure or the concept.
Indo-European languages tend to have a subjunctive mood, and while it's nearly gone in English, we still have the robust distinction between real and unreal situations that mood reflects. This is much hazier in Chinese; it's hard (for an English speaker, and I assume any Indo-European speaker) not to notice that Chinese sentences often don't bother to make a distinction.
The thing about western countries like the USA, which people often don't get is: they are old, they've built their sh*t decades and centuries ago, they were the first one building and use new fancy technologies, and now they have to live with it and can't just switch them as easily as people wish for it. Countries like China, who just now start building modern stuff have the benefit of coming late to the game, have not technical debt and old expensive infrastructure they have to honor.
So they advantage is not better planning, or throwing more money at it, but mainly being late to the game and learning from the mistakes of others.
Planning for future capacity is a mystery to English speakers for some reason.
>So they advantage is not better planning, or throwing more money at it, but mainly being late to the game and learning from the mistakes of others.
Have you ever looked at the five-year plans the Chinese government publishes? It's quite interesting how much of their economy is planned in advance.
There was no planning involved, it was just a housing-bubble which busted some years ago and devastated some companies along the way. USA had this in 2008 too.
Also, do you seriously think china will reach 4+ billion citizen in the next 10 years? They have less than half of this now and aim to have even less.
> Have you ever looked at the five-year plans the Chinese government publishes? It's quite interesting how much of their economy is planned in advance.
Yes, it is, and so do other countries. And all those plans are also struggling and failing regularly, in all countries. China is overall as good or bad as every other country in what they are doing, it's mainly their situation which makes a different in the outcome.
If you genuinely believe this, we must live in different realities or something.
Have a nice day, PurpleRamen.
As opposed to the US which has no high speed rail whatsoever. It's good to have infrastructure for the future!
Source: trust me bro.
History books are littered with authors trying to explain that their language/culture is superior and the source of their society's success. They _never_ establish a connection besides a few examples like you did, a lot of handwaving, and the fact that their society is currently thriving.
And no one in this thread said superior. They said different.
Portuguese does have a future perfect, and it's basically the same as in English.