Grant Barrett said:
There's a point when children understand just enough of their native language to be confused by homophones and metaphors. What misunderstandings do you remember? Maybe you thought cat burglars stole only cats, or that you might be swept out to sea by the undertoad? The hosts discuss childhood misunderstandings about language.
In my sixth-grade school play, I played the role of Pontius Pilate, and my brother (in second grade at the time) was cast as a thief in an earlier scene. Mike came home and broke the news to my parents: "Zeb's going to be Pilot, and I'm going to be a thief and steal his plane!"
Does the language you speak shape how you think? The hosts discuss an essay on that topic adapted from the new book "Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages," by Guy Deutscher.
As luck would have it, I had just finished reading this book when this show aired. It's not immediately apparent from the synopsis, but the word "Looks" in the title is more literal than you'd think, since the first five chapters concentrate almost entirely on how different cultures divide up the range of colors visible to the human eye. It took me a while to think of a non-visual counterpart to Deutscher's example of Russian using the words siniy and goluboy for what we would call "light blue" and "dark blue".
An anime series I used to collect had a character who underwent one magical transformation when he was doused in water, and the reverse transformation when hot water was used. I often wondered at what temperature the direction of the spell was reversed; learning that the Japanese word for "hot water" is unrelated to the word for "water" solved that mystery.
Martha (as I recall) mentioned "'taint yours, and 'taint mine." It's part of a quote attributed to Mark Twain, though I'm hard pressed to find the exact source: "His money is twice tainted: 'taint yours and 'taint mine."
As I listened to the conversation on rubric, I was stunned with appreciation when Grant said "gaining inertia," employing the scientific meaning of inertia, rather than the common one. It was much more effective than the prosaic "gaining momentum." Bravo.
Last week I down loaded a Lingua Franca podcast from the ABC (Thanks Grant for reminding of this intriguing show. I used to listen when I was working in Australia but after returning to the North America had stopped) on this very topic. It focussed on how this pattern in language affected the perception or at least presentation of time.
Time is often represented spatially, like a timeline. If you are discussing something and putting them in temporal order and happen to gesture as an English speaker you are likely to wave your left hand if something happened before and your right hand if something happened after. People with cardinal direction only languages, tend to gesture from East to West and thus the hand gestures change with the direction they are facing. The researcher looking into this effect had people place photographs into temporal order (A chick being hatched form an egg was the example given). English speaker as you would expect arranged the pictures from left to right. Cardinal direction speakers arranged the pictures from east to west. If the speaker was facing North the pictures would run from right to left, if the subject was facing west the pictures were placed in an order running away from them, etc. [This makes me wonder about other languages such as Arabic or Chinese that aren't oriented from left to right.] I was so fascinated by this story I sent a link to the episode and a link to the research paper (I was so interested I looked up the research paper) to my wife
Here are some links
the Lingau Franca episode:
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/linguafranca/stories/2010/3007980.htm
The research paper:
http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/absolute-time.pdf
Oh and I just noted that When I googled the paper just below was an article about Mandarin that answered question at least for one language:
http://psychology.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/mandarin-time-2010.pdf
And then this evening I ran across Richard Feynman discussing why mirrors flip images from right to left but not top to bottom.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msN87y-iEx0
And makes me wonder how the Pormpuraawan would view the effect.
Mogen_david said:
And then this evening I ran across Richard Feynman discussing why mirrors flip images from right to left but not top to bottom.
Ah, but they do reverse top to bottom! Just put the mirror on the floor and step onto it, and note how your reflection's feet are above its head.