So I finally watched Arrival, on the small screen, with ear protectors, and shielding my eyes from strobes-- should have work it with the eye patch.
Now it presents the strongest version of the Sapir-Worff hypothesis, about how language affects our perception of time.
English, Gullah-Geechee, Scots, and other Germanic languages lack any concept of the future, as opposed to choice (will+verb), obligation (should+verb), and so forth. Does this make it harder for us to value events after the present, and to acknowledge crises such as global warming?
Iâve heard and read, but have no links on hand, that the words for time and their concepts vary from culture to culture, with the determinative variable being lattitude.
Equatorial lattitudes, where the day lengths are always 10-14 hours and the temeratures warm to moderate have less need of nuance around the vocabulary of time, and donât have to plan as long term to not be done in by the elements.
Much as, say, the Inuit have a lot of words for kinds of snow.
If itâs possible to be a female Time Lord⌠
A neighbor told NBC affiliate WAVE of Louisville that the two men have had ongoing problems and that Paul was mowing the lawn at the time of the assault.
Sounds more personal than political. I bet if I were Pauls neighbor Iâd have a nice spite fence in place.
I think someone forgot their safeword.
we too have a lot of words for snow ( and ice ). off the top of my head: snow, slush, sludge, ice, icicle, iceberg, frost, permafrost, black-ice, sleet, hail, snowflake. related words like: slick, snow bank, snow drift, snow pack, ice shelf, avalanche, dusting, rime, tundra, glacier.
while i donât doubt that inuit have a fair number of words for ice â iâm not sure whether it has quite the weight people imply it does.
Flurry, powder, sleet, hailstones, pellets, freezing rain
Ice cube, ice chunk, ice crystal, snowball
Sapir Whorf (at least the Strong version of it) has been quite thoroughly debunked by now, not least due to the fact that the original âx number of words for snowâ factoid completely ignored the way Inuit languages conjugate and counted things like âfalling snowâ and âsnow on the groundâ as separate terms despite the fact that the core word (âsnowâ in this admittedly simplified example) remained the same. Thereâs a pretty good analysis of it here: http://www.putlearningfirst.com/language/research/eskimo.html
There might be some truth to the Weak Sapir Whorf theory but Iâm more inclined to think that the influence language has is cultural, rather than individual.
Itâs tempting to think that (for example) because Japanese has so many words for sorry, Japanese people are somehow more polite or naturally apologetic than people who speak other languages, but some of the rudest people I have ever interacted with have been Japanese. If Japanese really does have more meaningfully discrete words for âsorryâ and this really does directly impact individual behaviour directly, surely this wouldnât be the case? Whatâs more likely is that Japanese culture has a slightly more nuanced version of how to modify language based on the relationship between speaker and listener than other languages and that necessitates having a range of different words that perform the same function.
Equally, the idea of âlanguages with no concept of futureâ gets trotted out every so often as a reason to explain some aspect of a foreign culture (most notably Chinese and Japanese in my experience but Iâm also exposed to those languages more than others, so YMMV). I have to say, itâs complete and utter nonsense. Just because a language doesnât have a conjugation that reflects future tense doesnât mean that its speakers have no way to say something like âI will meet you next weekâ, itâs just that the change in tense comes from temporal words and not conjugation.
To be absolutely honest, most of these sociolinguistic ideas about language leading to uniqueness of thought stem from lazy attempts at othering and really arenât worth the paper they are written on. They get written up in a study (I use that term borderline sarcastically), journalists see a good headline and simplify the results even further, and then despite getting thoroughly debunked by studies with less of a focus on exceptionalism, they still end up popping up in conversation decades after they stopped being relevant.
Lets say there werenât another hundred and eight in their dialect - instead, let me go with for the number of words dwarves have for their degree of dislike of elves then, as it was only an analogy.
but they may be more inclined to repair the damage done, living on an island and all.
Not enough. What is the word for âthe fucking mountain range of hard-packed fucking snow the fucking snowplow leaves across my fucking driveway every fucking time we get two fucking centimetres of fluffy fucking powderâ?
Isnât that the literal translation of âDetroitâ?
So actually we do have many words for it: Detroit, Toronto, MontrealâŚ
and yet the english isles are even smaller.
i think itâs interesting to speculate on how language can influence our thinking. i think, in some sense, everything about our lives influence who we are as individuals - i just donât think we can really draw any deep distinctions amongst people like that.
most distinctions happen after the fact. because we can observe clustering of behaviors we label that clustering. to predict the clustering is basically impossible ( which would be needed to make it a science ), and to attribute causal effects?
most of it tends to be âit is because it is.â history. and, not something deeper and more scientific like genetics is regarding speciation.
fucking iceplowbergs. hate em.
with totally different topography.
I didnât come here to argue. Do you think my point about lattitude has any merit, or are you here to pick apart my unnecessary analogies as weak. Theyâre explanatory, not for proof. Iâd rather let those go and get back to the point.
Studies of mass extinctions suggest most occurred when large igneous provinces â giant fields of basalt lava â ignited fossil fuel reserves. This caused climate whiplashes due to extreme cooling in the short-term, and extreme CO2-related warming in the long term:
Fortunately modern humans can observe the mantle in enough detail to predict the eruption of large igneous plumes millions of years in advance, and we should be safe from that for the foreseeable future. Unfortunately, modern humans seem to be releasing carbon at rates comparable to those eruptions:
Climate warming, sea-level rise, ocean acidification, and dead zones are happening now as they did then. Itâs simply how the planet works. Earth is responding to us just as it did to [Large Igneous Provinces], and it is trying to kill us, now.
Not enough to cancel the apocalypse, but a start: