As a speaker of 3 different languages (English, German and Portuguese/Spanish) I believe that although correct this is a wrong discussion. Yes, languages does influence the way we think, but overall culture does influence a million times more.
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.
In Puerto Rican Spanish we have adopted some of those words and we do have translations for others. But this is due, in part, to our close relationship with the USA.
pork (pork barrel) = tocino (barril de tocino)
accountability = no direct translation but "responsabilidad" serves the same purpose and "acontabilidad" is slowly entering our lexicon.
Completely agree. It is the culture that influences how we think, not the language. I speak English and Hindi. English is my second language and I never feel like speaking/thinking in English makes me different than I do in Hindi.
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.
Reasoning must be equivalent across cultures, even where language varies, right? If not, wouldn't sciences be culturally relative (y'know, beyond a certain threshold of like not worshiping a sun-god)? So, to me, what's actually being addressed in this article and with the research involved is merely that language shapes the way we perceive, but not necessarily how we think/reason. It's interesting, but more along the lines of anthropological insight, less how does the way I speak affect the way I write code/solve problems.
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.
I was an English <> Spanish translator in another life.
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.
An additional confounding factor is that a lot of the people who are currently in power in these countries grew up and started their careers under the former dictatorships. Indeed the previous systems of entitlement, bullying and patronage nicely describes the way the political parties work in these countries. It will probably need another two generations or so of democracy before the effects of the dictatorships wear off and the limitations or otherwise of the languages start to be visible.
Just because something does not have a direct translation in a person's language doesn't mean it doesn't exist in that person's thinking.
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.
Have you ever considered that language affects culture and culture affects language, and the two influence each other like a chicken and an egg? Thus it is very difficult to separate the two.
Not just the word but the whole concept of accountability seems to be lacking in spanish speaking cultures. The language reflects the culture of its speakers...
Edge.org presents things as 'conversations' but they are generally just essays, with no possibility for other edge members to leave comments. Thats not a conversation. There's no dialogue, nothing anyone says is challenged. None of these 'great minds' at Edge are actually presented talking to each other.
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.
Well I'm looking at the front page story, "A Conversation with Lee Smolin." It leads with a monologue from Smolin followed by a response from Arnold Trehub, followed by a response from Sean Carroll, followed by an entry from Lee Smolin responding to Carroll's response. Bruce Sterling enters the conversation to express sympathy with ideas Smolin as raised then Trehub comes back with another response and finally Amanda Gefter gives a reply to Smolin.
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.
I'm just guessing here, but the video for a lot of the "conversations" seem to be a conversation between the subject and the camera person that was edited down to make a more cohesive video. The videos are fairly well transcribed though, so I don't think this comes across in the text.
From what I understand, the original Sapir-Whorf thesis (now the strong version) was (correctly) discredited because it was about language limiting and determining thought. The weak version, that it influences the way we think, is now widely accepted.
Counterexample: Cauchy and Riemann, when pioneering complex analysis. They "proved" many results, but with nonrigorous techniques. When they tried to teach complex analysis to their students, those students applied the same techniques and "proved" absurdities.
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.
depends on what you mean by language, people can express themself and communicate different ways without words (music , drawing,art in general...). If you consider music and drawing as a language then there is no limit.
All of which brings back memories of Loglan[1] which was specifically designed as a tool for testing Sapir-Whorf, although in the end and after many years of painstaking development it was never used for that. Loglan has a successor Lojban[2] which is still a hobby project for a small community.
This is extremely subjective but as a speaker of two languages (English and French), I find it interesting how certain things come to me in one language and other things in the other. I have friends more or less in the same boat as I am and it's funny to see how we switch languages when expressing different ideas without even thinking about it. Funnily enough, I happen to talk in my sleep on occasions, and I apparently speak a mash-up of both languages, but in a fairly consistent manner (i.e. words will be one language or the other). The brain's a wonderfully intricate thing :)
Yep. And I think this linguistic influence means way more for programming languages than for natural languages - when thinking or communication to a human you can always "escape the language traps" by thinking visually or drawing/sketching or just showing things, but when you "communicate" with a computer your minds is basically "trapped" in the language (the only escape is being able to think the "domain language" instead, like thinking an algorithm in mathematical language or a business problem in business terms).
There are much more thorough and research-based explanations about why mathematics performance is generally better (recently) among Chinese people than among Americans.
Any math teacher that uses language association to teach math is doing it completely wrong. If you want to teach math to children younger than 7, stop talking and start drawing! (scribbling arabic numerals is good, but things like the Japanese "multiplication by drawing" are awesome in teaching kids to "feel math") Teachers that teach children do things like "say out loud kids, what is two plus seven?* are basically handicapping ~50% of the children's ability to think mathematically for the rest of their lives.
..."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.
What do you mean? The arabic number system that most of the world uses is base 10. Also, I don't see why the base of the number system would make math any easier or harder.
Very simple - the way you cursing affects how you think. Some cultures are exceptional in using "bad words". Russians, for example, using all the dirty details of a sexual intercourse, while, say, Italians using some blasphemy. Here lies the answer.)
[+] [-] diego_moita|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] adolfojp|13 years ago|reply
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
[+] [-] rajeevk|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] loupeabody|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kafkaesque|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] smackay|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] enraged_camel|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] luketych|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] solarexplorer|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yeureka|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] codeulike|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] glenstein|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] toasterlovin|13 years ago|reply
Maybe this is the conversation being referred to.
[+] [-] RyanMcGreal|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] david927|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robmclarty|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lmm|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] netrus|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] camus|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jeltz|13 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] fernly|13 years ago|reply
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loglan [2] http://www.lojban.org/tiki/Lojban
[+] [-] robmclarty|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] franzwong|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tokenadult|13 years ago|reply
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...
Better teaching makes for better results in learning.
[+] [-] nnq|13 years ago|reply
..."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.
[+] [-] 7rurl|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dschiptsov|13 years ago|reply