Posted on 06/26/2008 2:40:54 PM PDT by forkinsocket
German is actually more precise than English in the sense that you can, supposedly, convey a concept in the fewest *number* of words or letters in German (assuming both side actually know what the word means - viz “weltanshaung”).
What makes English so special is something else - English is based on three nearly equal roots and has a really, really huge vocabulary, well over three times the size of Spanish for example - an English speaker can tap into words from the native Brits, words imported from Continental Europe, and words from the Norsemen, and often these words have slightly different shades of meaning. The upshot is that more “precision of meaning” can be achieved.
The end result is that you can convey a more subtle set of meanings than you can in German, and there is a lot of redundancy hence communication is improved.
Interestingly enough, from a communication point of view, English redundancy over German shows up that if you remove letters from German text at random, the meaning of the text evaporates quickly and you can’t understand it. With English, you can remove more of the letters in the text and still understand the meaning of the text...
Interesting advantage in the Information Age...
Meethinks that Chinese and Japanese probably win the prize in “meaning density”, (at least to read, speaking is a different matter due to overloading of the same sounds in Chinese/Japanese!), given that words can be expressed in a very few number of ideograms - you can read more quickly in Japanese/Chinese than perhaps in any other language: the eye and brain are quite capable of distinguishing a couple of ideograms as a word rather than reading twenty roman characters (and in German those twenty roman characters wouldn’t have any spaces!)
Of course, kanji has the same flaw as German in the sense that if an ideogram is corrupted, the whole meaning of a paragraph can be lost, besides you go blind trying to learn it!
Armenian has no gender too. I had an Armenian boyfriend & he had trouble using/mixing up he & she in English. In Lebanon, it was a cliche to say “you are an Armenian” to people who were screwing up their Lebanese, specifically referring to the gender issue.
This from the article made me laugh out loud: found that women classified themselves and others as more assertive when they spoke Spanish than when they spoke English.
Translation: "It's okay for me to call you a hateful scum male to your face because Espanol is a passionate language. It's not that I'm trying to be anti-male.
uh-huh. lol.!!!
My grandkids, living in different countries, are being brought up speaking different languages. They all know 2 or more languages (what is spoken at home, and what is spoken outside, and what they learn in school), but my grandson in Israel refuses to speak anything but Hebrew!
I like Yiddish, there are some things you can express in Yiddish better than in any other language. Even though it is a derivative of German, it is way more fun than German!
I learned the same with Gaelic, a language that comes with a built-in worldview.
Consider a language where you are positioned in some way with your feelings, or abilities, where they aren't just a singular element of your existence:
"I am sad" vs "I am under sorrows"
"I love you" vs "Love is at-me on-you"
"I am a teacher" vs "There is a teacher in me" (what I can do)
"I am a teacher" vs "I am now in my teacher-ness" (what I am doing)
(Even the literal translation into English loses something of the force, but it gives the idea.)
Did it make you, curiously, interested in becoming a guillotinist?
It is anything but. I work in the world of technical standards, and you learn the messiness of English in that realm (it's technical legalese). "A device may do XYZ..." -- does that mean the device is permitted to do XYZ, or does it mean that under certain circumstances a device could do XYZ? (In ISO/IEC Standards English only the former sense is permitted.)
If I had a few dollars for every instance I've seen of carefully crafted language for which somebody found a legitimate interpretation that completely violated the underlying intent... well... I wouldn't need to work anymore in the world of technical standards.
And it’s the only language I know of that offers gender parity.
Thank you, Madame Chairman. (Though English is generally gender-neutral excepting ships, countries and a few other things.)
It will serve you well in Mexican prisons.
Curiously, at 7:04 P.M. on this date, I finished the most horrible book I’ve ever had to read about how our schools should all be taught bilingually...I mean, in Spanish AND English...I mean, our kids should have to learn SPANISH!
It levels the playing field, donchaknow.
This is a very interesting article and thread. Thanks for posting it.
I might add that the “language” one uses can be different even when it is the same, and by that I mean tone, dialect, style, etc. can also influence how we think.
I have always liked reading Jane Austen, maybe weird for a male nerd scientist—so what? She improves me! I tell my kids that “reading Jane Austin makes me a better thinker (and speaker and writer).” For me, that’s the truth! And while she may write in English, it is definitely not the language I hear or speak every day.
Whatever “English” Jane writes in molds my brain. It takes a while before I lose that improvement. Then the web and the news and the unnecessarily “dense” scientific and medical writing I deal with every day takes back over.
Conversely, I deal with patients every day with tremendously limited vocabularies and language skills. They speak English but not the same English we all speak. And they think very poorly, and that often seems to be tied to their lack of adequate language.
Maybe I need to learn a second language! Which one other than English would be the best workout for our American brains?
You know, when I read Jane Austen or Bronte novels, I find myself trying to imitate that speech & writing for a while after. There’s something very...smooth? about it that I like a lot.
As for languages, you could try something similar to English like German, or something radically different like a Semitic language. Depends on your taste. I always thought Russian seemed kind of cool.
the biggest example of this is the current occupant of the white house george bush.
the guy is totally schizophrenic.
never never again elect a bilingual president. He just won’t have the best interests of the USA at heart.
Thereafter I moved into a University town and the differences were striking. They were not cultural but lingual. The same words and phrases but completely different meanings. I would catch myself staring at random conversationalists. I was hearing for the first time in years the language of my childhood. With the language came renewed precision and perception.
Great story!
When I was growing up, right here in America, we spoke English, Greek and some French in the house. When I went out to play, my friends spoke French, Later in school it was French everyday along with English. Years later I find that knowing three languages made picking up a fourth and a fifth, at least to the level of carrying on a civil conversation, very, very easy.
Given the hemisphere we live in, I think bilingual education from kindergarten through high school in Spanish is an excellent idea. I’d require Latin too as it trains the mind to think in an ordered fashion...and of course, everyone, especially Christians, should at least read Greek. :)
Does southern/west Tampa spanglish count as another language? Because I’ve had to learn to speak actual English too.
And don’t get me started on cajuns!
I was learning Spanish but I quit after my neighbor took a shot a me when I cut a hole in his chain link fence.
Damn Gringo.
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