Eine wort,
Una palabra,
Un mot.
Words, are spoken all over the world, everyday, and at every moment of a day, but do these words actually mean more than what is said?
There are over 7,000 spoken languages from all parts of the Earth and many of them have not interacted with each other which leads to the languages themselves to be different (i.e. Swedish and Swahili are two totally different languages and even have different character sets for their written versions).
I will use my first set of phrases at the top as my first example of how language is not only the way we speak, but how we speak and think about things. The four phrases you see above all mean the same thing 'a word'.The first two, English and German are in a category of languages called the Germanic languages and the latter two, Spanish and French, the Romantic languages.
These categories are denoting branches of languages that have spread over time, but still have some of the same characteristics of each other such as similar words and syntax. The English and German phrases have a similarly spelled noun "word; wort" however, the indefinite article "a" is very different. The reason why there is this difference is because in German there is a feminine, a masculine, and a neuter version of the word "a"; this phrase happens to be feminine.
Why is "word" feminine in German you may ask? It is simply because that is how the language was constructed in order to help better define and categorize things in the German language. Spanish and French also have masculine and feminine articles in their Romance languages, as do Portuguese and Italian in the same Romantic category. Spanish and French have very similar looking indefinite articles for the same word, however what may become confusing is to know that, although it is the same word in both languages, in Spanish "word" is feminine and, in French, masculine. Now why would two languages from the same branch of origin have different genders you may ask? It is the same answer as with German, over time it was how the language was constructed. Although Spain and France are side by side geographically, they will have their differences in language as they do in their cultures because as they developed on their own, that is how they became independent and individualized as countries.
Language fascinates me. What I have already described above is primarily information I have gathered while personally studying and learning languages, but since language is such an interesting topic, I read further into it on a wider scale than Western European language to find out even more incredible concepts, thoughts, and ideas in other languages.
Time is a concept that has been around for thousands of years. We use time to determine when the morning and the afternoon are, shifts at work, when a meal should be ready, bed times for young children, when young children reach a milestone in their life such as young adulthood. Time is used in many ways to bring order into our lives, so we would assume that everyone, no matter what language they speak, would have words in their language for time, right? Wrong. In the 1940s, a linguist named Benjamin Lee Whorf wrote about an idea he had that language influences thought. Whorf believed that groups of people thought differently due to the language they speak. He went as far to say at cultures such as the Hopi Native American tribe were unable to understand the concept of time because the word "time" wasn't able to be directly translated. This idea was thought to be true until the 1960s where it was rejected due to two factors; the idea itself seemed racist and, how could humans have created a word such as "time" if it didn't always exist in the first place? The idea that language influenced thought was still a very interesting idea to many and was further looked upon to seek the validity in it.
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| modern form to measure time - the wrist watch |
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| ancient form to measure time - the sundial |
A more in-depth academic article How Language Shapes Thought begins to unravel the mysteries of the relationship between thought and language based on simple concepts such as time, numbers, gender, family, and direction. A great example of this is written in this article:
"For example, suppose I want to tell you that I saw Uncle Vanya on 42nd Street. In Mian, a language spoken in Papua New Guinea, the verb I used would reveal whether the event happened just now, yesterday or in the distant past, whereas in Indonesian, the verb wouldn’t even give away whether it had already happened or was still coming up. In Russian, the verb would reveal my gender. In Mandarin, I would have to specify whether the titular uncle is maternal or paternal and whether he is related by blood or marriage, because there are different words for all these different types of uncles and then some (he happens to be a mother’s brother, as the Chinese translation clearly states). And in Pirahã, a language spoken in the Amazon, I couldn’t say “42nd,” because there are no words for exact numbers, just words for “few” and “many.”
These are all variations of a single sentence in only a handful of different languages.
With the verb in the sentence ("saw" or "to see" in the infinitive) it is in the past for us, but in other countries it may not even have a tense or past, present, future as English does. Languages without a future tense are known as "futureless languages". There is an idea that is argued that there is a difference in the economic standing for "future languages" and "futureless languages". In a TED talk video, Keith Chen, a behavioral economist, examines the pattern that a country with a "futureless language" may actually have a higher savings rate than a country with a "future language". He believes this to be true since those without a future tense tend to think of the future similarly as they do of the present. This may make "futureless speakers", such as those in Luxembourg that have the highest % of GDP, more conservative with spending as compared to "future speakers" such as Greeks that have the lowest % of GDP savings in the graph that Chen displayed during his presentation.
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| Graph shown in Keith Chen's TED talk |
Language is a complex concept to grasp and even more so with the increase in studies of what it effects, and how it effects a country, a person, and a single thought.
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| Thanks for reading! |
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