Language Influences Thought

One draconic word which has been hard for me to grasp is "ke". It literally refers to the experience of time as a flow of space, a dimensional concept humans have trouble understanding outside of the purely intellectual. I had to spend a lot of time developing my spiritual senses and repairing old wounds before this sensation made sense to me. And with draconic mostly being an early, very simplified language (with few or no timepieces), ke refers to many different concepts of a flow or amount of time, in which translation depends on context. Fortunately, there are words for specific daily and yearly regions of time: daybreak, evening, sun-high (noon), hot/cold season, fullyear, and so on. That really helps. But when you want to translate the phrase "an hour", it's "ke na" (time comes), with few or no applicable modifiers for length (and "na" isn't always used).

And that's just one concept. It's like reading compressed computer code, sometimes: you have to understand the processor (mind) that generated it, or some concepts will escape you entirely.

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.

the thing i find funny about these articles is that english (a good example because it has such a large speaker base) covers SO MANY cultures, quite fluently. ani difranco, english. ronald reagan, english. what they convey could not be less alike....

(also, the "words for snow" joke? it's not inuit, it's english. ask an english-speaking skiier to talk about kinds of snow, and about thirty terms appear! they include words about shape of snow lying on the ground ("mogul"), snow texture ("mashed potatoes", not to do with mashing or potatoes), layering of the year's snowfall ("base").... it's quite the corpus actually.

i think to avoid cutesy and untenable conclusions about language diversity, it would be necessary to check for similar diversity in discourse communities within the same language. ('i'm not a skiier, to me it's usually just "snow".) but there's apparently not quite so much thrill of the exotic there.... the clothes-ripping example comes close, but all it really shows is "the way you describe things affects how people perceive them", and, umm, it seems kind of dull when put that way.

there is a theory called "semantic completeness" that states that any thought can be expressed in any language, with the implication that any language can expand to include any new notions. i believe in this, not least because of the vocabulary explosion i've observed in internet technology, which is reflected in many, many languages. (i've recently had reason to note it in japanese and icelandic, personally.)

english is a big language, sure.

i daresay japanese speakers would be a mite insulted at your implication that their language lacks subtlety.... i can't read sei shonagon in the original, but having seen a variety of translations to english, i think the "larger" language still has no perfect translations, because "there is no such thing as a synonym" :)

(Davv here, late post because of ISP troubles!)

This might go the other way, too. When I think about it, I find attempts to invent and use "new" neutral pronouns in place of the default "he" odd, as in that there would be little use for it.

However, reading what you wrote here, I got thinking again. My native language, Norwegian, assigns genders to every noun (for instance, "computer" is masculine and "refrigerator" is neuter). I guess this is like German, but the particular assignments are different. In any event, the assignments don't have to make sense except by their own internal logic - I don't find computers more masculine than refrigerators, for instance, even though they use that assignment.

So perhaps the reason I don't find the default use of "he" in English any problem is because my mind says "oh, it's just another arbitrary gender assignment" -- like the many nouns. I don't know if that is the case, but it got me wondering.

It's not absolute, though. The internal logic of English makes it feel grammatically wrong to use another pronoun as default. So I still refer to my creatures (who have quite unusual reproduction and thus don't fit any), in singular, as "he". Saying "she" would imply that they're distinctively female, and "it" that they're inanimate, and neither of those are true.

However, a crucial counterpoint is that English makes it easy to NOT lay blame, with the passive exonerative ("Mistakes were made.")

... which reminds me of some people trying to speak English without using "to be" at all. One can speak passively or indirectly even under that constraint, but the task becomes much harder.