epistephilia:

slephoto:

yvonneemilie:

divineirony:

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.

“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?

Chen designed a study — which he describes in detail in this blog post — to look at how language might affect individual’s ability to save for the future. According to his results, it does — big time.

While “futured languages,” like English, distinguish between the past, present and future, “futureless languages,” like Chinese, use the same phrasing to describe the events of yesterday, today and tomorrow. Using vast inventories of data and meticulous analysis, Chen found that huge economic differences accompany this linguistic discrepancy. Futureless language speakers are 30 percent more likely to report having saved in any given year than futured language speakers. (This amounts to 25 percent more savings by retirement, if income is held constant.) Chen’s explanation: When we speak about the future as more distinct from the present, it feels more distant — and we’re less motivated to save money now in favor of monetary comfort years down the line.

But that’s only the beginning. There’s a wide field of research on the link between language and both psychology and behavior. Here, a few fascinating examples:

Navigation and Pormpuraawans
In Pormpuraaw, an Australian Aboriginal community, you wouldn’t refer to an object as on your “left” or “right,” but rather as “northeast” or “southwest,” writes Stanford psychology professor Lera Boroditsky (and an expert in linguistic-cultural connections) in the Wall Street Journal. About a third of the world’s languages discuss space in these kinds of absolute terms rather than the relative ones we use in English, according to Boroditsky. “As a result of this constant linguistic training,” she writes, “speakers of such languages are remarkably good at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes.” On a research trip to Australia, Boroditsky and her colleague found that Pormpuraawans, who speak Kuuk Thaayorre, not only knew instinctively in which direction they were facing, but also always arranged pictures in a temporal progression from east to west.

Blame and English Speakers
In the same article, Boroditsky notes that in English, we’ll often say that someone broke a vase even if it was an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers tend to say that the vase broke itself. Boroditsky describes a study by her student Caitlin Fausey in which English speakers were much more likely to remember who accidentally popped balloons, broke eggs, or spilled drinks in a video than Spanish or Japanese speakers. (Guilt alert!) Not only that, but there’s a correlation between a focus on agents in English and our criminal-justice bent toward punishing transgressors rather than restituting victims, Boroditsky argues.

Color among Zuñi and Russian Speakers
Our ability to distinguish between colors follows the terms in which we describe them, as Chen notes in the academic paper in which he presents his research (forthcoming in the American Economic Review; PDF here). A 1954 study found that Zuñi speakers, who don’t differentiate between orange and yellow, have trouble telling them apart. Russian speakers, on the other hand, have separate words for light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). According to a 2007 study, they’re better than English speakers at picking out blues close to the goluboy/siniy threshold.

Gender in Finnish and Hebrew
In Hebrew, gender markers are all over the place, whereas Finnish doesn’t mark gender at all, Boroditsky writes in Scientific American (PDF). A study done in the 1980s found that, yup, thought follows suit: 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.)

dude this is so fascinating

I love language and thinking about language and stuff, its so fascinating

VERY cool stuff.

p.s. go Finland!

Since i came to finland i started using “they” in english to refer to anyone unless i specifically want to tell their gender, and it’s been a really interesting exercise? But yeah having a gener-neutral language is the best i recommend it. (french sucks in this aspect because there’s no way of saying things like “i am happy” without specifying your gender, and no good way to have a sentence be “neutral”)

(via rexilsor)

capitalized-hwaet:

SOMETIMES WORDS IN ENGLISH GO THROUGH A PROCESS CALLED BACK-FORMATION! IT HAPPENS WHEN PEOPLE INTERPRET OR RE-ANALYZE AN EXISTING WORD AS HAVING SOME SORT OF AFFIXES OR INFLECTION ATTACHED TO IT, EVEN THOUGH IT ORIGINALLY DIDN’T, AND FORM A NEW WORD BY STRIPPING OFF THE…

fuckyeahlojban:

NBL stands for “Nothing But Lojban”.

This is a short desription of semi-large scale experiment I think would be worthwhile trying out.

Anyone who participates vows to only speak Lojban to other Lojbanists.
What I hope this will achieve:

Lojban is not yet being fully used for communication; its vocabulary remains limited because there is always the option to fall back on English if all else fails. This suggests to the subconscious that Lojban is not essential. It is my expectation that if a group of Lojbanists stopped relying on any fall-back language for an extended period of time, it would cause many holes in the language to fill themselves in a natural way. For example, say there isn’t yet a known Lojbanic way to express concept X, but person A feels the need to communicate it to person B, person A will try out different ways, many might fail, a few might come close so that B at least has a vague idea of what A is trying to say. This is stage 1, a raw, unpolished rock. The next time they speak, they might find that the same thing comes up again, and now it becomes apparent to both of them that they need to narrow it down, and hey, B is starting to get intruiged as well! B begins asking questions to see if their vague assumptions fit the intended concept. A will try their best to give meaningful answers and together they soon will have worked their way closer to the finish line. During this exchange, not only did they speak entirely in Lojban(!) to get to a result, they also must have tried out dozens of ways of saying nearly identical things, dozens of different angles on the same idea, in short: They must have used Lojban to its (current) limits and by doing so must have pushed that limit, must have expanded Lojban further. The one concept they finally managed to get a hold on is but the tip of an enormous iceberg, the ball got rolling. The longer this is kept up, the faster and more effortless it will become to figure out even more things while also solidifying the already-conquered parts.
I do not think this is wishful thinking, but I also don’t want anyone to expect this to be a cake-walk. Like anything else, it takes determination and willingness to experiment. However, I do think there are enough people that could partake in this and I’m sure it will increase the level of proficiency of everyone involved.
So, no English (or any other common language), which means that quoting English is also off limits. No tricks like “lu li’o sa’a li’u (to zoi gy. Elevator .gy toi)”. Never.
Certainly, you will come across things where you think “I cannot possible explain myself adequately in Lojban, so I must use English for this”, but don’t! If you keep relying on English to solve Lojban’s problems, how is Lojban supposed to grow? That’s why my motto has been: If you have a complaint about Lojban or something said in Lojban, either complain in Lojban or don’t complain at all. Say, for example, you don’t know how to talk about quantifiers in Lojban. Take the problem home with you and try to solve it there. Then present your solution next time the opportunity arises and see how close you’ve come. Do your homework, put in some effort. Lojban cannot grow unless it must. Same goes for any comment, idea, you name it. And we have the power to make it have to.
Do you dare?

Note: I think it might be useful to introduce a new concept/word for the sake of this project: jbojbo. Related to the older term lobykai, it means saying things in a way specific to Lojban. Natural Lojban. The way Lojban would be spoken if it was… spoken. The result of what happens when the NBL experiment goes on for a while, the diamond hidden within the rock. However, this does not mean that the goal of this experiment is to end up with a single uniform dialect of Lojban that everybody speaks, since I believe that would be a loss of diversity. Still, I guess now and then, one of these gems will show up out of the blue, and people will recognize it and might find it useful to call it jbojbo. Maybe not. It’s all hyptothetical until we try it out for ourselves.

Below is a list of people who are interested in participating. As a reminder, all of the people on that list must agree to only speak Lojban to each other, period.

mi troci da’u .u’o.ui