Language and thinking

[heliopausa]

Language affects thought.  I think... the article looked pretty convincing to me.  And I know from experience that it's really hard to see a difference when you don't have the language to identify the difference - or to see it as a real difference anyway, a significant difference, and not just hair-splitting. 

So how is my thinking tilted by the fact that I think in English with its multitudinous tense and moods for verbs?  "Would that he had been jumping!" for example.  Or even "I will have eaten breakfast."  Any ideas as to how thinking might differ in a language that doesn't put such huge emphasis on relative time and mood?  Would it be as straightforward as having a different way to view causality, or the past and the future?

Comments

[pulchritude]

I've always been a believer of this. I can't give examples like the one in that essay, but there are definitely things/concepts in Chinese that don't really translate into English, for example, and I firmly believe that a lack of a word for a concept in a language can often make that concept less likely to be understood or even conceived of in the first place by people who speak only that language.

[heliopausa]

Yes, definitely, even in concrete things. I mean, even physical objects are conceptualised differently according to the language available (or used) to refer to them, and abstractions (I suppose) must be more subject to difference. I'd really like to hear what words strike you as being untranslateable from Chinese languages to English. (Of course the immediate problem is that you can't put them into English - but even just an idea?)
And it's not just the names of things, either, but the grammar that can be used about them - for example pronouns, and how they're gendered or otherwise distinguished - what is and isn't implied by a pronoun - what can and can't be said. (The loss of the implications of the thou/du/tu pronoun from English for example, or the way some languages that don't habitually use a word that can be directly translated as "I".)

[pulchritude]

The one that always strikes me the most is 緣分, since I believe in this myself and have always struggled to explain it to my non-Chinese friends. The examples given under the 'Usage' section are pretty good (although I wouldn't use the term in certain of the cases mentioned...or rather, it's not a term that would necessarily spring to mind in any prominent way), but the explanation above that is pretty shoddy, and the 'Translations' section underneath doesn't really hit on all the nuances.

I also find it interesting that the modern Chinese logogram for 'she/her', 她 (the radical on the left is the one for 'woman') was created in order to translate foreign works, which all differentiated between s/he. All Chinese literature written before then (so the four great classics) used only one third-person pronoun for men and women, 他 (this logogram nowadays tends to only be used for men, as 'he/him', but the radical on the left is the one for 'human', which speaks to its roots as the only pronoun used for people originally - I had always wondered why men were 'people' but women were 'women', so it was doubly annoying to find out that 她 exists only because the scholars at that time felt necessary to create it in order to translate foreign works! (When personally I think they'd have been fine using 他 for both he and she, which everyone had done for thousands of years before then!))

Or also the system of honourifics. idk, languages say so much about the people who created them. :)

[heliopausa]

That's terrifically interesting, the concept of 緣分 - I'll re read and reflect. Where do you think that explanation goes astray?

As for pronouns - yes, as indicated, I think they're enormously important. The huge difference it makes, for example, when every "pronoun" is relational, as in "How is older-brother-type-person's health today?" or "Wow! Grandchild-type-younger-person is really hungry!" so that the mutual relationship is constantly reinforced, which might result (does it?) in a more cohesive society, or at least a society aware of the potential relationships binding everyone together.

The example you quote of upending a whole pronoun system for translation purposes is fascinating and a bit depressing, re women being then linguistically defined as not-as-human-as-men. I can see why translators would want to differentiate, but... that's why translation is such a hard game, I guess. (Working in reverse, translations which try to use relational words as pronouns always sound odd and over-formal in English, which is a different translation problem again.)

And honorifics! yes, whole interesting field in themselves - but people are very aware of them, and hence they can be subject to conscious (and sudden) change, as in "Your Majesty Marie Antoinette" becomes "Citoyenne" becomes "Widow Capet".

[autumnia]

I read the article during my lunch hour and thought it was fascinating! The example mentioned about how English and Mandarin speakers differ in their ways of thinking with regards to space and time was a good example for me to understand. I don't speak Mandarin but Cantonese speech patterns are similar in this case, and in the given example, I--as a bilingual thinker/speaker--would actually speak it as a Chinese speaker would even though English has long been my primary (but not my first) language.

[heliopausa]

Yes, the material re time, especially, fascinates me.
When you say you would "speak it as a Chinese speaker would", do you mean that you would use a phrase translating literally as "up month" for the concept which English has as "next month"? (The idea of the future as above does turn up very slightly in English, in the idea of something 'impending' ie hanging above, which raises whole new notions of the future as something which looms over and then falls on us. :D ) As for me, if I were asked to indicate the future in spatial terms as described in the article I would probably look forward, horizontally, as at something coming towards me, but if I were asked to do it on a piece of paper, I think I would have the past on the left and the future on the right, as in English-language writing.

As well as the spatial representation of time, I wonder about a more general implication - if the strongly tense-marked nature of English verbs cramps (so to speak) English speakers' ideas of time and of the present's relation to the past and the future, or maybe better to say 'cramps the conception of how the verb-action has effect'. And conversely, is there a freedom in time-thinking, or a sense that the past is still strongly connected to the present in languages which don't mark the same way? (Can I ask how it works in Cantonese?)

[autumnia]

So for the example about previous/next month -- my first thought was the Chinese way of speaking/thinking of the terms: 上月 for previous month (the characters are literally up/top month) and 下月 for next month (literal "down month"). I don't really think of it as directional but how it was taught to me as a child, or listening to other Cantonese speakers say it.

For me, using Chinese or English thought process is probably determined by context or environment. If I'm writing about time, I'll usually say or think I'm looking "forward" to next month or "back" to some event, etc but never think of the up/down relationship used in Chinese.

[heliopausa]

Thank you for this - more food for thought! (And I think I've seen those characters before... the "up" and "down" ones, in the context of "previous chapter" and "next chapter" :) )