Economist Keith Chen starts today’s talk with an observation: to say, “This is my uncle,” in Chinese, you have no choice but to encode more information about said uncle. The language requires that you denote the side the uncle is on, whether he’s related by marriage or birth and, if it’s your father’s brother, whether he’s older or younger.
Keith Chen: Could your language affect your ability to save money?“All of this information is obligatory. Chinese doesn’t let me ignore it,” says Chen. “In fact, if I want to speak correctly, Chinese forces me to constantly think about it.”
This got Chen wondering: Is there a connection between language and how we think and behave? In particular, Chen wanted to know: does our language affect our economic decisions? More >>
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Feb 21, 2013
5 examples of how the languages we speak can affect the way we think
Source: TED
See: TED
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United States
Local time: 18:42
Member (2012)
Japanese to English
+ ...
Language is an essential part of a culture.
For example, some languages in Asia (Japanese, Korean, Thai) have certain words, e.g. titles, for people older than them that cannot be expressed in English and expressions of modesty in regards to receiving items. Such expressions would not come to mind in a conversation in English and are utterly foreign for people who have not encountered or have knowledge of Asian cultures.
United Kingdom
Local time: 02:42
Hebrew to English
Quite how this guy can come along and try to present this (flawed) data in 2013 is beyond me.
Let's start off with his first assumption: that if something is encoded within a language, you must be consciously thinking about it. (The example he gives is with terms of kinship in Chinese). If anything, the reverse could ... See more
Quite how this guy can come along and try to present this (flawed) data in 2013 is beyond me.
Let's start off with his first assumption: that if something is encoded within a language, you must be consciously thinking about it. (The example he gives is with terms of kinship in Chinese). If anything, the reverse could claim the same. If I have to go to great lengths to specify kinship (as I would in English) by saying something like "my paternal/maternal uncle" etc. then I'm more likely inclined to be thinking about it (by sheer fact of having to retrieve the correct additional wording if nothing else).
I really started to scratch my head when he started talking about "futured languages". Anyone who knows even basic English grammar knows that English (technically) has no future tense (merely ways of expressing the future). Morphologically, English does distinguish between past and present, but not future. So he'd have been better off using a language which actually does mark the future morphologically for starters.
[Talking about English] "there’s a correlation between a focus on agents in English and our criminal-justice bent toward punishing transgressors rather than restituting victims"
The problem with this is that they are equating a focus on agents with assigning blame. I think that's a bit of a subjective leap.
Gender: "kids who spoke Hebrew knew their own genders a year earlier than those who grew up speaking Finnish. (Speakers of English, in which gender referents fall in the middle, were in between on that timeline, too.)"
The trouble with this study was that they might have surveyed three very different languages in terms of gender marking but they also surveyed three very different cultures. For example, they might have thought about studying different languages within the same culture (perhaps a group of Finnish immigrant children in the USA) to see if this made any difference or at least to try to see if it was language or culture which most affected gender identity.
I'm just not sure what lessons can be learned about people's saving habits by looking at their native language. All languages have ways of conceiving the future (even Chinese I believe), even if they don't encode them morphologically. ▲ Collapse
United Kingdom
Local time: 02:42
Russian to Ukrainian
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Local time: 02:42
French to English
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A cultured Swede I used to know, who spoke excellent English, once told me, semi-jokingly, that he envied English speakers their language because of its richness. He said that Swedes couldn't feel certain emotions that English speakers could because Swedish simply didn't contain the words for those emotions.
I don't speak a word of Swedish, so I've no idea whether his comment is true, but it's an... See more
A cultured Swede I used to know, who spoke excellent English, once told me, semi-jokingly, that he envied English speakers their language because of its richness. He said that Swedes couldn't feel certain emotions that English speakers could because Swedish simply didn't contain the words for those emotions.
I don't speak a word of Swedish, so I've no idea whether his comment is true, but it's an interesting idea and might possibly apply to other language combinations too. ▲ Collapse
United Kingdom
Local time: 02:42
Swedish to English
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A cultured Swede I used to know, who spoke excellent English, once told me, semi-jokingly, that he envied English speakers their language because of its richness. He said that Swedes couldn't feel certain emotions that English speakers could because Swedish simply didn't contain the words for those emotions.
As a native speaker of both languages, I can assure you that I've never come across an emotion that I can express in English but not in Swedish. There are of course instances when you have to use more words, but that applies in the opposite direction as well.
Belarus
Local time: 04:42
English to Russian
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To my mind, the answer is obvious. Any language is not perfect. It’s limited. That’s why al... See more
To my mind, the answer is obvious. Any language is not perfect. It’s limited. That’s why all the languages except for the dead ones keep changing. New notions are being created; we seem to be getting more and more loanwords. It sounds logical that the more meaningful units you have, the more ideas you can express. Thus, there is a difference between a language with a vocabulary of 3000 and a 300000 one. That’s where you would need borrowings and neologisms. I’ve learnt both Swedish and English and I can guess what the speaker meant: the shades of meaning are different in different languages (that’s why I sometimes prefer to express ideas in some foreign language). On the other hand, the Swedish language has much more words for describing marital status (which will soon find their equivalents in other Indo-European languages). And grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. ▲ Collapse
United Kingdom
Local time: 02:42
Swedish to English
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the Swedish language has much more words for describing marital status
Marital status is a binary proposition so the answer you will receive to a question about status can only ever be married/gift or single/ogift. I think you might be referring to the different ways two persons can choose to live together, or not. In Swedish there are a number of specific terms for this, but those states can just as easily be described in English - you only need to use a few more words.
"Sambo" (common-law-wife/husband), "särbo" (person in a relationship but living at a separate address) and "kombo" which is a newish term describing what in the UK is usually "flat mate" (I think "room mate" is more used in the US).
Does the existence of these single word terms mean that Swedes are more emotionally attached to their relationships? Of course not.
France
Local time: 03:42
French to English
come below the quote!)
A cultured Swede I used to know, who spoke excellent English, once told me, semi-jokingly, that he envied English speakers their language because of its richness. He said that Swedes couldn't feel certain emotions that English speakers could because Swedish simply didn't contain the words for those emotions.
As a native speaker of both languages, I can assure you that I've never come across an emotion that I can express in English but not in Swedish. There are of course instances when you have to use more words, but that applies in the opposite direction as well.
Maybe he simply felt better after swearing in English!
Netherlands
Local time: 03:42
Member (2006)
English to Afrikaans
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Could it be that genderlessness in a language lead to greater tolerance in its speakers for gender discrimination, because they are not forced to think about gender every time they speak about a man or a woman?
United Kingdom
Local time: 02:42
English to Latvian
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Could it be that genderlessness in a language lead to greater tolerance in its speakers for gender discrimination, because they are not forced to think about gender every time they speak about a man or a woman?
The religion and traditions have much bigger impact on gender discrimination that any influence that a language could possible have, is burried as a statistical noise.
Quite how this guy can come along and try to present this (flawed) data in 2013 is beyond me.
Economists do it in their own field all the time. Hasn't the current EU recession showed us how flimsy their core theories are?
United Kingdom
Local time: 02:42
Hebrew to English
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3756
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3764
and Mr Chen responds (albeit unsuccessfully really... See more
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3756
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3764
and Mr Chen responds (albeit unsuccessfully really):
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3792
I think it's interesting that Östen Dahl, a linguist who he had contact with, says this (and more in the comments of two of the threads)
"
Östen Dahl said,
February 13, 2012 @ 3:46 pm
I would like to note that I had a fairly extensive correspondence with Chen, who actually invited me to collaborate with him, which I declined. I did try quite hard to dissuade him from the idea, for reasons partly coinciding with what Geoff and Mark have written here. I also pointed out that his diagrams looked more or less equally nice with "rounded front vowels" replacing "weak FTR". The problem is that the countries in previously Protestant, nowadays secularized NW Europe, where both these phenomena are well represented, also contribute heavily to the countries where people are best at saving." ▲ Collapse
United Kingdom
Local time: 02:42
Hebrew to English
....with the usual feckless headline: "Why speaking English can make you poor when you retire"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-21518574
Although at least it's given a good kicking there too by both economists and linguists alike.
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