Elizabeth Barrette (ysabetwordsmith) wrote,
Elizabeth Barrette
ysabetwordsmith
  • Mood: busy

Language Influences Thought

...in these 5 examples.

However, a crucial counterpoint is that English makes it easy to NOT lay blame, with the passive exonerative ("Mistakes were made.")  English is a popular business langauge, partly because of that passive exonerative: many other languages require  specifying who or what caused something (bad or good) to happen.
Tags: linguistics, news, reading
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  • 23 comments

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pfmoi

pfmoi

May 28 2011, 19:01:42 UTC 10 years ago

This type of thing happened to me the other day. I'm a Japanese language student and I was watching an anime in Japanese. I was also having an online conversation with a friend. She said something I can't even remember, and I wanted to convey "I understand," "I see what you mean," and a vague sense of "lol." I could NOT think of something to say in english, so I went with "sou~ka," which would have been like going with "real~ly" in english, but Japanese is better suited to doing that kind of thing. Languages are weird.
ysabetwordsmith

Yes...

ysabetwordsmith

May 28 2011, 19:30:30 UTC 10 years ago

I've done things like that. I'll codeswitch without even realizing that I've just dropped a word from some other planet onto a hapless monolingual American. Sigh. Back up. 5+ of circumlocution in English to explain something that takes two syllables in a language designed to handle the concept.

When I was in high school, there was one night I was studying Russian and the phone rang, and I answered in Russian. The caller kind of freaked. If I'm deeply immersed in another language, English doesn't always register. Drove me nuts when I visited Mexico, because I'd ask for directions to the bathroom in Spanish and half the time people would answer in English and I'd have to ask them to repeat it.

  • Photographs

    I took some pictures of my yard today. Read about what makes a good wildlife yard and Fieldhaven as habitat. The larger brush pile is still…

  • Birdfeeding

    Today is partly sunny and delightfully mild. I fed the birds. I've seen a small flock of house finches and a few sparrows. I walked around the yard…

  • Fieldhaven as Habitat

    If you follow my posts on gardening, birdfeeding, and photos, then you know that I garden for wildlife. Looking at the YardMap parameters, here…