Well, he did say “from orbit”… And now that I think of it, he didn’t say from what orbit.
It occurs to me that languages with only a couple degrees of comparison (i.e., all those I know of) started to feel a bit “tight” a bit after learning to count above a hundred, but I didn’t become aware of the feeling until very recently (i.e., decades later).
You know how people that speak languages with fewer color names do better on some color-based tests? I wonder if that would also work for a language with seven or so degrees of comparison.
Yes, I know one can use phrases to express finer degrees, but I think the option must be much deeper in the language. One can speak English well enough without using words like “crimson”, but you need rather unusual circumstances to do without “red”. Actually, I think the ginormous number of fake words, the astronomical frequency of hyperbole in casual speech, the not quite absence of scale-related euphemisms, and even the rather frequent use of QUITE a few distinguishable levels of emphasis on comparative modifiers in both speech and text seem to suggest that I’m not the only one feeling this particular language feature restraining.
You may now return to your regular scheduled posting. I apologize for the digression.
There were also reports of a few languages that didn’t have words for numbers other than (AFAI can remember), one, two and many, and their adult speakers apparently really couldn’t learn basic arithmetic or even reliably distinguish between four and five objects.
Very few studies, very hard to experiment, very many confounding variables, draw your own conclusions about validity. But it is interesting and fun to speculate :-)
...and miss rather badly, at that.
Well, he did say “from orbit”… And now that I think of it, he didn’t say from what orbit.
It occurs to me that languages with only a couple degrees of comparison (i.e., all those I know of) started to feel a bit “tight” a bit after learning to count above a hundred, but I didn’t become aware of the feeling until very recently (i.e., decades later).
You know how people that speak languages with fewer color names do better on some color-based tests? I wonder if that would also work for a language with seven or so degrees of comparison.
Yes, I know one can use phrases to express finer degrees, but I think the option must be much deeper in the language. One can speak English well enough without using words like “crimson”, but you need rather unusual circumstances to do without “red”. Actually, I think the ginormous number of fake words, the astronomical frequency of hyperbole in casual speech, the not quite absence of scale-related euphemisms, and even the rather frequent use of QUITE a few distinguishable levels of emphasis on comparative modifiers in both speech and text seem to suggest that I’m not the only one feeling this particular language feature restraining.
You may now return to your regular scheduled posting. I apologize for the digression.
I wasn’t aware of the colour results. A hazard of verbal overshadowing?
As far as I know the issue isn’t close to being settled, and from a glance at your link it doesn’t seem to be a related effect.
See http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2008-03/color-and-language and http://www.nature.com/news/2007/070430/full/news070430-2.html for examples of what I was thinking of. I’m pretty sure I’ve seen discussion about this on LessWrong, if you’re interested enough to search.
There were also reports of a few languages that didn’t have words for numbers other than (AFAI can remember), one, two and many, and their adult speakers apparently really couldn’t learn basic arithmetic or even reliably distinguish between four and five objects.
Very few studies, very hard to experiment, very many confounding variables, draw your own conclusions about validity. But it is interesting and fun to speculate :-)