interesting

[magicicada]

cislyn pointed me towards a very useful article on the Piraha indians.

Under Whorf's theory, people are only capable of constructing thoughts for which they possess actual words. In other words: Because they have no words for numbers, they can't even begin to understand the concept of numbers and arithmetic.

if there was ever a way to describe why everyone should learn a second language, this is it. this is why i study french. this is why my daughter will be learning spanish. learning a new language enables new thoughts which would be difficult or impossible to form without the words to express them.

Discuss.

Comments

[cislyn.livejournal.com]

What I find most fascinating about the Piraha is the lack of subordinate clauses - for some reason the loose vocabulary of numbers seems to captivate more people. I guess it's easier to simply say "they don't count" than "they don't reference things in relation to other things" (yeah, that even sounds clunky to me) and so it stands out more as an easy point of reference for how they're different.

My take on the whole thing is that it's terribly curious and interesting. I think that language and thought and culture are all wound up in a big, tangled ball. How the separate threads of each merge and interact is what gets me - as far as I know, nowhere else in the world do people not use subordinate clauses in their grammar. That's ... really neat. And yes, learning a new language helps to put a new perspective on the world. But then, I'm the chick who believes that in order to understand the ancient Greeks well you ought to read ancient Greek, so that's no surprising sentiment coming from me.