🚀 go-pugleaf

Howard Stateman (howards@sec.sel.sony.com) wrote:
: >On 22 Apr 1996, Ross Thompson wrote:
: >> Oh, man, won't this myth ever die?  The notion that people's thoughts
: >> are limited by the language that they speak has been debunked for
: >> decades, and yet you still see it being quoted every month or so.  The
: Debunked? What cave have you been living in? Anyone who speaks more than one 
: language, especially languages from different language groups, will tell you 
: that language shapes the way you think. Sometimes it's limiting, sometimes 
: it's mind-expanding. For instance, there is no genderized pronoun in Thai. You 
: can't tell if someone is talking about a man or a woman, unless the person 
: says the name of whom they are talking about. On the other hand, in formal 
: Thai a man ends every sentence with the word "kraap" and a woman ends every 
: sentence with the word "ka". So even in writing, you always know if something 
: is being said by a man or woman - something which is not a feature of English. 
: This time, in English, if you don't know the name of the author, you have no 
: idea if it's a man or woman.

: To my way of thinking, these are limitations which language places on the 
: people speaking those languages.

: Chinese, Thai and Malaysian/Indonesian all have a strict sentence structure. 
: Adjectives *always* follow nouns, never preceed them. Adverbs *always* follow 
: verbs, they never come before a verb. In English, one of the more common 

	I beg to differ.  Adjectives do not always follow nouns in Chinese.
	In fact, in modern Chinese, adjectives usually preceed nouns. 
	(Poems and proses from the Tang and Sung Dynasties had a very
	relaxed sentence structure).

: tricks in comedy is to build up a string of adjectives, get the audience to 
: expect a particular noun, and then switch to a different noun. It can be 
: hillarious, but it can't be done in Chinese.

: So what gave you the idea that language doesn't limit thought?



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