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

[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".