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By Lera Boroditsky
LERA BORODITSKY is an assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience, and symbolic systems at Stanford University, who looks at how the languages we speak shape the way we think.
www.edge.org/3rd_culture...9_index.html
Worth a look-see.
LERA BORODITSKY is an assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience, and symbolic systems at Stanford University, who looks at how the languages we speak shape the way we think.
www.edge.org/3rd_culture...9_index.html
Worth a look-see.
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Re: HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK?
Mon, June 29, 2009 - 7:24 PMThe psycho has been trying to use language to accomplish enormous social engineering.
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Re: HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK?
Mon, June 29, 2009 - 9:17 PMThanks for posting that Thomist. An interesting article and book. I was under the impression that the ways that people of different nationalities thought differently had more to do with cultural influences but I am now prepared to believe that language also influences this at least as much as traditional culture. -
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Re: HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK?
Tue, June 30, 2009 - 7:47 AMIt absolutely does. Most peoples inner thought process is actually a dialogue with a sort of imaginary subject....some suggest this helped spawn a belief in dieties....in the vocabulary and grammar of their native tounge. You play both speaker and listener in your mind,a and it's done in language. When you learn a second language, you don't master it..or even start to internalize it..by direct translation but by THINKING in the language.
English is one of the most difficult languages to learn because it is full of obscurity, interchangability, homily, and metaphor..if you are not brought up in the language it is very very difficult to learn later. German is the language from which English descended, however it is much more direct, precise and non-ambiguous...I firmly belive the rigidity of German culture and the sillines of Anglo cultures (US and England in particular) is the result of the thought processes brought about by the grammar of the languaes. -
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Re: HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK?
Tue, June 30, 2009 - 9:01 AMYes, I've found the Germans, in general, to be more direct, even blunt to a fault. However the Anglos are ambiguous and silly, as you say. I wonder if we could tighten up our grammar to get rid of the lazy thinking. -
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Re: HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK?
Tue, June 30, 2009 - 9:40 AMAin't nuttin' ron wit a kolokwial
web.archive.org/web/200312...liloquy.htm
Modern "English" version of Hamlet's Soliloquy:
Livin large or 86 it? that's got me wack:
How to best represent my own self:
When da Man's in my lunch,
Go medieval on the candy-ass sucka,
and a pop a cap in him?
The big Chill -
No mo serious beatdown, no more
Pretendas wantin' to zero
Me out - that somethin sweet sweet
That you don't be frontin.
Stone Cold.
After mama done picked out my casket.
Will I be spinnin in my pine basket
When I have deceased existin
Whoa, that's jammin my flow.
There it is
Why you gets no luv,
Who gonna flip burger at McD's and drive the hoopty,
The scrub's dissin, the slob man's pissin,
The shanks from ex-bitches, Five O draggin you,
Big Willy dissin you, an the snaps
From punks when you just want be chillin,
When you can just off yourself
With a saucy shiv? Why should you keep it real,
When you bad-trippin with all this shit rippin,
But for some horror-the-horror pop up after death,
The undiscoverd hood be a dead end
For all road dogs, stump your ass,
So you chillin in your skanky hood
Not blazin off to some newjack hood?
I aint keepin it real,
And so all my bling-bling
Done got all greasy,
And all my mad phat plans
Done turned out sleezy,
And they just runnin on fumes.
You know what I'm sayin,
Fly Ophelia! - Boo, when you give a shout out
Gots to have all my bad recognized.
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Re: HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK?
Tue, June 30, 2009 - 9:58 AM -
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Re: HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK?
Mon, July 6, 2009 - 9:06 PMAs a German, yes, I can confirm your impression that we are a lot blunter than many Anglosaxons would be able to stomach without considerable discomfort at first, on the other hand, the "rigidity" is a rather outdated stereotype, and the "Anglosaxons" reading this are cordially invited to take a reality check on this one.
Also, would you please elaborate on the "silliness" which I am not so sure about, while I would agree with the "laziness of thinking" regarding at least the arrogant members of said tribe, though this, in my impression, is a lot more rampant in present day United States than the UK which may have a lot to do with the respective education systems. -
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Re: HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK?
Mon, July 6, 2009 - 9:45 PMlanguage reflects the culture, no doubt about it. german is very specific and very thorough. . .english has the largest vocabulary in the world, and is very fluid with meaning, lots of slang. . .lots of technical terms, etc. that others have adopted.
in french, they drop the endings of their words. . .what does that tell you?
in japanese, they have 3 systems of writing. . .hmmm. . -
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Re: HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK?
Tue, July 7, 2009 - 8:10 AMIn French they drop the endings of their words no more than you do in English, for all i know.
English has the largest vocabulary? References, please?
The three Japanese systems of writing are:
katakana カタカナ
hiragana ひらがな
kanji 漢字
Katakana is used for writing foreign words
Hiragana is used for writing Japanese word endings and transcribing kanji
Kanji are used for all the key parts of words and names
German has four writing systems: block letters and cursive letters for handwriting
and one more set that is only seen in old books and letters written by old people, it is no longer in use. The new one is called Latin script, the old one German script. -
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Re: HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK?
Tue, July 7, 2009 - 8:20 AMTurkish grammar is probably every bit as complicated as the one of Romanic languages, with conjugation and declension and several tempora, but totally regular, with no exceptions, no irregular verbs and such (which Spanish is full of), while the word order is the same as in Japanese, and Turkish is part of the Altaic language family, together with Hungarian, Turkmen, Mongolian etc., languages along the silk road. And it is remotely related to Japanese and does share a few of the same words, e.g. those for "good" (Japanese ii, Turkish iyi) and "foreigner" (yabanci in Turkish) which means Barbarian in Japanese (yabanjin)
The Turkish mentality is located somewhere between the European and the Asian one. Turks seem to have a hard time saying "no", just like the Japanese, they do not say things directly and saving and keeping face may be as important as in Japan, while they are much more humourous than Asians further East, and every bit as clever , streetwise and tricky as Balkan people, I would think, and Arabs.
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Re: HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK?
Tue, July 7, 2009 - 9:09 AMHere are some of the phrases that have been used to convince people that there's an issue when there isn't :
Exit Strategy
Global Warming
Health Care Crisis
Rain Forest
And so much more.
What they do is invent a lexicon or bastardize perfectly good words to imply that there's some dire imminent horror about to fall from the sky. Then they run about screaming their damn fool heads off till they attract a larger gathering of weaker minds. Then armed with some critical mass they are able to attract more and more people because the vast majority of people on the planet are fucking morons who see the lemmings running off the precipice and just HAVE to run along.
Fucking stupid puny humans
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Re: HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK?
Tue, July 7, 2009 - 9:21 AMMust all be one big conspiracy, shoot them idiots, yar. Lol, Cliff. ; ) -
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Re: HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK?
Tue, July 7, 2009 - 9:44 AMIt was once explained to me by a fellow German how our mother tongue works: we think in levels, in multiple layers. German sentences can be as long as an entire page, in some books written by researchers, philosophers and such (Schopenhauer, anyone?). The way to get a grip on what is being said, if you are a freshman in unviersity and not used to reading these kind of texts is taking several pens in different colours, finding the "main sentence", then analysing the structure of the numerous "sub-sentences" and underlining them in several colours. Within those parts of the sentence, you will again find intricate structures of complex thought, nouns with multiple attributes, in the form of adjectives, gerundiva, prepositional attributes, all built around one verb, in the form of a subject and more of the same built around the single or multiple objects of the verb. The more information needs to be related, the more complex the sentence structures will get, to the point that a scientific or philosophical book can become completely incomprehensible to the uninitiated.
In English, the same information will be presented in very different form: much shorter sentences of a "wrapped up" compact structure, with less words which again, as words, will be shorter than German words.
One school of thought says that a good scientist should be able to explain his/her ideas in such a way that they become easily understandable for most students. Sigmund Freud is one of them. Very easy to read. Karl Marx's work, on the other hand, is considered to be one of the toughest reads German literature has to offer. -
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Re: HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK?
Wed, July 8, 2009 - 7:03 AMTough German read??
Try any of the Three Bs. Bruno Barth and Bultmann
They'd go pages and pages with nary a punctuation mark.
The left uses things like the idea of a crisis to falsely conflate that whcih is normal into something to get all worked up about.
Take Health care.
Humand have been on planet earth for how long? Suddenly what is normal is a crisis?
Looking just under the surface of any of the SCREAMMING EMERGENCIES the left is selling these days and you can see things that are totally normal - have been in a happy steady state for hundreds, thousands, millions, or even billions of years and suddenly they want to steal and use your resources steal your property and enslave you as forced labor in their cause because they want to call it a crisis.
Since the early 1960s the post modernist movement has been infiltrating out public education with all manner of linguistic based ideas, a vast majority of which are rooted in communism.
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Re: HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK?
Wed, July 8, 2009 - 10:10 AMRight. It used to be fairly normal too in Germany, during the era of the poor weavers, to be too poor to call a doctor to get any proper care.
May I invite you to those days when people had to bring their own coals to the office when they wanted to work in a heated room in the middle of winter? That was normal once too. Good ole days, Cliff.
Actually it wasn't the communists that invented linguistics, it is a thing of the devil, and just as suspect as Darwin and his inventions about humankind. Isn't that what you meant to say? -
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Re: HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK?
Wed, July 8, 2009 - 11:21 AM**************May I invite you to those days when people had to bring their own coals to the office when they wanted to work in a heated room in the middle of winter? That was normal once too. Good ole days, Cliff.
Actually it wasn't the communists that invented linguistics, it is a thing of the devil, and just as suspect as Darwin and his inventions about humankind. Isn't that what you meant to say?*********************
Well lets take that apart and see what's what:
"people had to bring their own coals to the office when they wanted to work in a heated room in the middle of winter?"
Well they still do. as of 1994 when I did the research to learn a fairly standard cost to the employer for any given employee in an industrial setting was 310% of his base salary. So if you earned $10.00 an hour you have to be producing enough output to earn 310% more just to let your boss break even on keeping you in your job. If your boss wanted to make a profit he had to hope you could produce yet more still.
Those costs lost to that 310% figure were all the normal costs of keeping an employee including taxes unemployment insurances the building - - and heating and cooling the building. This is not a comprehensive list of the costs but, I hope you can see that you really do have to bring that bucket of coal to work. You have to earn enough to make it worth your while above and beyond the costs of keeping you there.
Then you said this incomprehensible bit:
"Actually it wasn't the communists that invented linguistics, it is a thing of the devil, and just as suspect as Darwin and his inventions about humankind. Isn't that what you meant to say?"
To which I can only respond: What the hell are you going on about?
It was the communists and the Nazis who refined language as a means of eliminating the "undesirables."
The shibboleth was too crude to compare to the stupendous job they did at inventing the agenda and nailing it down using linguistics.
Now the left is just an extension of Stalin and the Nazis using identical methods and means.
As for the devil: That is a fabrication There is no devil. There is only Kaizer Sose.
As for medical care:
I think it's a great idea. I think it ought to be a right and entitlement.
Just first explain how you plan to pay for it.
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Re: HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK?
Wed, July 8, 2009 - 11:24 AMYou are right. I give up. We need people like you on the Mideast politics tribe. For more entertainment.
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