Monday, January 24, 2011

The Sky is Black


Encyclopedia Britannica discusses world languages and how the language we speak defines how we see of the world.

From the piece...

The natives of Murray Island (one of the Torres Strait Islands of Queensland, Australia) call the sky black. The Greek poet Homer described honey as green, iron as violet, oxen as wine-colored. The description of the world differs from language to language. What accounts for this difference?

Each language exhibits unique nuances in vocabulary as well as in morphological and syntactic structures. This then forces speakers to think a certain way when formulating linguistic expressions, they need to consider or ignore certain aspects of the information conveyed. At one end of the spectrum are the heavily inflected synthetic languages that impose a special attention to declension, conjugation, gender, complex sentence structures, etc. Other languages have been grammatically simplified to eliminate the need for such complexity in one area or the other. Did anything get lost in that process?

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