How does our language shape the way we think? (2009)
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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 translation to a single word: entitlement, pork, accountability, delusion, bullying, patronage, solipsism, ... Because words similar to these don't exist in Spanish/Portuguese I feel that the democratic debate is sometimes so truncated and clunky.
Another example might be how any discussion in English is so strongly focused on providing empirical evidence for claims; even today Anglo-Saxon remains the culture of Sir Francis Bacon and the inductive method.
Attributes of many languages are highly influenced by the culture where it is spoken. For example, Japanese may have a word for some concept which English does not have. This is because that concept may not be important in the culture where English is spoken.
pork (pork barrel) = tocino (barril de tocino)
accountability = no direct translation but "responsabilidad" serves the same purpose and "acontabilidad" is slowly entering our lexicon.
bullying = no change. We just adopted the word.
patronage = padrinaje, apadrinaje
solipsism = solipsismo
You say that Anglo-Saxon culture is dominated by inductive reasoning. Is there a different system of reasoning dominant in other cultures? Not trying to be flippant, I'm ignorant of this topic and am interested in hearing what someone who can speak 3 languages knows.
These people/cultures use other ways of convincing and arguing instead of reasoning: strongly held prejudices, religious frameworks, proverbs, tribal loyalties, etc.
Besides, inductive method is not the only form of reasoning; I find it interesting how the Germans are so much at ease with deductive reasoning using so precisely defined words and expressions.
Like reasoning, another example of a western notion that we think as universal but it isn't: the humanist notion that every human being is worth the same regardless of gender and race. I find it shocking how many people find themselves as being worth less just because they are not white and/or male. In Latin-America this is changing fast and a lot but still is a widespread feeling among native South-Americans, blacks and women in rural settings.
Perhaps it's fair to generalize that the more specific the concepts behind a language's vocabulary (maybe just the more frequently used words) the greater the average speaker's tendency to use deductive reasoning. Or at least, that's a good point of departure for more investigating.
Thanks for the insight!
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 Spanish, is a close sibling to Galician.
Good and fluent speakers of Portuguese, Galician and Castilian can understand each other without too much effort.
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.
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 vice versa. They work off each other and influence each other.
I think words are concepts. Some of the discourse of translatability in the Spanish-speaking world, especially when the source language is English, usually deals with the illogical sense of English words. Bullying is a good example, actually. Bullying comes from the Dutch word "brother" and its definition has drifted far away from "fine fellow". In Spanish, the word "bullying" in the 21st century English-speaking sense would be related to mean "acosador", which comes from the Latin cursus/currere which can probably best be defined as "to proceed" in English. So "bullying", as you suggest, might not have a one-word translation, but it could be translated as "acosador escolar". However, because Spanish-speakers understand the importance of world integration, "bullying" is also used, though you get purists and word-rebels in some regions who, incidentally, are also anti-American, anti-consumerism and sceptical of the English-speaking world in general.
A similar phenomenon occurs in the UK. You see certain people use an indigenous equivalent instead of adopting a standard "London English" word. It certainly happens in South America. So yes, culture and language are very much tied together.
Personally, I think Portuguese, though a romance language, really shouldn't be grouped together with Spanish, even though I can understand most of it, though I've never taken a single Portuguese course in my entire life. My understanding it has to do with studying Latin and Italian. I think the average, educated Spanish speaker would be able to read maybe 50% and understand spoken Brazilian Portuguese even less. Some words and pronunciations have seeped into Argentina, Paraguay and Bolivia, however.
When I wrote "direct translation" I meant that I don't know a single word in Spanish or Portuguese that easily translates the whole meaning of those English words. There might be words translating some partial meaning but not fully (e.g: "responsabilidad" vs. accountability). But the main problem is that all translations are too generic and abstract, without the strong specificity of the English original. You showed it very well with the example of bullying, very few people use the translation. I feel that, because these words become vague and generic, they loose some of their original and focused strength. When there is a strong word in Portuguese & Spanish it becomes much more natural (e.g.: "asedio/assédio" means "military siege" in English but is used very colloquially as a translation for harassment).
I already posted below in this thread about how the origin of Portuguese and Spanish is so close. I grouped them because for the purpose of this discussion, they are a lot closer among themselves then English and German are. But I surely agree they're not the same language, sorry if I gave this impression.
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.
I'm a Turkish native speaker. The other day I was looking for the Turkish equivalent of the English phrase, "calling dibs on something." I asked my mom, my dad, and my sister, and none of them knew. But they knew exactly what I was talking about. Turkish people also call dibs on stuff, they just don't say it out the way English speakers do. At the end of the day you're announcing your claim on something (usually an object), and that's a very common concept.
I think the same would apply to the examples you gave.
Consequently although Edge.org says its all about conversation and advancing knowledge, I suspect its really just about selling pop-science books.
It would be a much better site if it was a proper forum (for the 'great minds' that are members) and we could all watch the discussion, disagreements, flameouts and ragequits. Seriously.
This event is put under the site's conversations section, and a quick perusal of this section reveals tons of similar conversations with multiple contributors all responding to each other, and they've been doing this for years.
Maybe this is the conversation being referred to.
(I got this from Stephen Pinker's books.)
Cauchy and Riemann really did understand what they were doing - when Weierstrass finally put analysis on a formal footing, every one of their results turned out to be correct. But they were unable to communicate it to their students, because even though they understood it, they couldn't express it in language.
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...
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loglan [2] http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Lojban
xu baupli la .lojban. .i mi nintadni
In Japanese (IIRC), 2, 10, 12, 22 is spoken "ni, ju, ju-ni, ni-ju-ni": "two, ten, two-tens, two-tens-and-two".
It's not that one base is better than another: the idea is that a single consistent base is better than inconsistency.
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.
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.
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".
..."spoken mathematics" is to teaching math like COBOL or Visual Basic are to teaching programming :) As the old saying goes, "shut up and do the math", don't try talking about it.
https://webstorage.worcester.edu/sites/rbisk/web/marlboro%20...
http://www.ams.org/notices/199908/rev-howe.pdf
http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic...
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