LIES we believe about language
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The eskimo have a hundred words for snow. Ancient Greeks couldn't see blue. European languages are better suited to mathematics.
www.patreon.com/languagejones
#italki #languages #culture #linguisticanthropology #sapirwhorf
As a Canadian, I can attest that we have quite a few different words for snow in English. Half-melted snow on the ground is slush. Wet snow falling from the sky is sleet. Snow that falls without accumulating on the ground is a flurry. Snow being blown by a strong wind is a blizzard. This is because we Canadians are a primitive people who are very in tune with nature.
As someone with mixed heritage who grew up in England, I can tell you that Brits have quite a few different ways of talking about rain. It's because we have so much of it.
In Colorado we have “champagne powder”. The kind you ski on. And I don’t mean Bolivian marching powder, but you can ski on that too, and people do.
In swedish we have quite a few words too. Snö (snow), modd (the kind of 'snow' you get when you drive cars on it), slask (melting snow), skare (the kind of ice surface the snow can get if the temperature goes up and down a lot), lega (the snow collected in sort of drifts on trees). And then you can make composite words so "kramsnö" ('hug snow' as in perfect for making snowballs, not too dry and not too wet) "pudersnö" (powder snow) e.t.c.
@@stoferb876 I grew up in Canada & have lived in 9 cities in 4 provinces, and know at least a dozen type of frozen water, and exactly the the types of snow you are referring to, though I've often wished for words to describe some of them, especially "skare" and "lega". THANKYOU
Us underevolved and backwards Swedes have single words for clean and freshly fallen snow (nysnö), snow that's easy to make into snowballs (kramsnö), snow that's melted and frozen again forming a harder top layer (snöskare), snow mixed with dirt and mud (snömodd), snow being blown around in a whirling fashion by the wind so it gets in your eyes and is really annoying (yrsnö), large amounts of snow being blown by the wind (drivsnö), snow being formed into larger crystals by pressure and temperature changes and is dangerous because it can cause avalanches (sockersnö), snow mixed with rain (snöglopp), snow that doesn't easily stick together (lössnö), melty snow with a high water content (blötsnö), snow that falls at Christmas (julsnö), surprise snow that falls in early summer (majsnö), snow falling during a thunderstorm (åsksnö), fresh snow when it's really cold that makes a creaking sound when you walk on it (knarrsnö), snow with big hard crystals that hurt when it hits you in the face (pärlsnö), and....
Of course all of these are just descriptive compound words, and you can make virtually infinite compounds if you want. Many of them could have (or already do have) equivalents in English that are 2-3 words - I was just extra verbose above because it makes it look more like we have a cultural obsession with minute descriptions of snow.
We *do* have a lot of snow expressions (we have a bunch that aren't compounds too), but it says nothing about us apart from what our weather is like.
That island analogy was perfect lol
Thank you! It was admittedly inspired by that classic paper assigned to undergrads about the nacirema people 😂
@@languagejones6784 Hee hee - I read the "nacirema" paper in 1980, and I was thinking of it, like, 45 seconds into this video. :)
Given the title, as soon as he mentioned an island I thought, "He's talking about England, isn't he?"
@@vampyricon7026 Same, I thought it was about England and tea!
@@languagejones6784I received the Nacerima lecture as a junior in high school (1998)
When my grandson was in kindergarten, and he had learned that a light shade of blue was sky blue, he concluded that lavender, a light shade of purple, was sky purple. It was adorable.
I mean, I've seen the sky turn lavender on several sunsets, so he's not wrong
I wish English were that simple. Learn an association and it's basically universal. "Light color" has more white in it. Cool! ... wait... what's this "pink"? What do you mean Lead and Lead aren't pronounced the same?!
@@Tome_Wyrm Not to mention ivory black (a charred bone pigment).
@@Tome_Wyrm I called a donut "hole-bread" as a child. I wish I lived in the universe where that was correct
The 'many words for snow' reminds me of Terry Pratchett discussing the Dwarf language and its number of words for 'rock' - "It's also said that dwarfs have two hundred words for rock. They don't. They have no words for rock, in the same way that fish have no words for water. They do have words for igneous rock, sedimentary rock, metamorphic rock, rock underfoot, rock dropping on your helmet from above, and rock which looked interesting and which they could have sworn they left here yesterday. But what they don't have is a word meaning 'rock'. Show a dwarf a rock and he sees, for example, an inferior piece of crystalline sulphite of barytes."
Reminds me of when I spent the bulk of a year studying conifers, and walked away with the ability to see a forest with more detail than just "yup, that sure are a lot of trees over there." I mean before, I could pick out a maple, and the color of a blue spruce, and the bark of a (false)cedar if I were close enough to it, but now I can see pines from a distance (they're fuzzy), and hemlock (the top bends over), and the general shapes of trees are something my brain can pick out a bit better even if I don't know the specific tree I'm noticing.
It intrigues me that this literally made forests look different to me. Just by learning some of the details that *can* exist, I started to pick up on details that *do* exist, even if I still can't put names to them.
Tangentially Related: In one of the conlangs I was working on ages ago, it was for a group of gnomes, small people who were afraid of many things on the surface and wanted to be up there as little as possible and definitely avoid any open ground. So for one, they wrote using knotted rope (readable in the dark), and for two, they had a complex locative system. In much the same way that we would say "in" and "out" and "up" and "down" and "left" and "right" -- short words, conveying a clear picture -- they could say something that amounted to "reach into the hole/doorway and feel the inside of the wall the hole/door is in; it's on the top left corner, within arm's reach." This allowed them to have less confusion about where to aim if they had to chance being on the surface or around dangerous big entities like humans.
@@Arkylie how very cool! I am mediocre at tree identification, my wife is much better.
Your conlang sounds super interesting too - I wonder now about their perception of space....
In first year geology lab they would pass me similar rocks and ask me to name them. I couldn't see any difference, let alone name them. I hope to not come back as a dwarf in my next life.
@@HweolRidda :)
Perhaps dwarfs have a sense humans do not?
@@HweolRidda and if not, perhaps you would be like Casanunda...
There's a good chance the ancient Greeks couldn't see Vantablack. At least not without the aid of a time machine.
They could see it, they just couldn't use the word because of trademark issues.
I'm so glad someone decided to speak up about this. I've seen comments floating around the internet pertaining to certain tribes that "can't count" because they lack words for specific numbers. As if the concept of objects existing in distinct quantities doesn't occur to them. This all despite the fact that if you ask them to hold up the same number of fingers as the number of items being counted they get it right every single time.
The pirahã! Many of whom speak, and count in, Portuguese
@@languagejones6784 I think this example shows that the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is wrong, nothing stops Pirahã from learning to count. But it's also an argument in favor of the weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, having the Portuguese number words available enables them to do perform mental activity that would be impossible without such words.
Thank you for pointing this out in your analogy about the island, because so many people treat other languages and cultures as these weird exotic things without ever thinking that their culture does something so similar! I hate when Americans say but I don't have a culture! Yeah, you do!
…but mine is normal!
@@languagejones6784 I don't know that I can say the same for me, because whatever shaped me ain't normal.
Related: "I don't have an accent". Everyone does! Come on!
My other favorite one is "I don't have an accent".
No, you have (where I live) an American accent, most likely a Pacific Northwest accent, which is very close to a General American accent... but even that's still an accent.
Actually that's a question for an actual linguist. Can you have a language which is widely spoken with no accents? I don't know the technical definition of accent from a linguistic point of view. Colloquially it's something along the lines of "the funny way people say the same word differently"
@@pandurendradjaja8994
“I don’t speak a dialect!”
That opening was very fun. Cool stuff!
I love this analogy! The professor who taught me to be sceptical about strong Sapir Whorf, based mostly on the direction thing, said it's basically all accommodation, and we all accommodate various 'coordinate systems' in speech every day. Like if I speak to my niece about something and say 'ask your mom', it's not that I'm not aware that her mom is also my sister, my parents' oldest daughter, a person named Jane, Miss Smith the assistant manager at work and so on, it's just that in this conversation the most effective way to point her out is to accommodate to the child's point of view. Really helped me with this idea
"Sing, o muse, of the hero, clad in fuschia's fire, who strode forth boldly heart fierce with desire, under skies where the periwinkle whispers weep, and the sun cast down its corn silk light soft and deep…" Just lovely. 😆
If your next video isn't titled "Subjugating the Subjunctive" you are missing out on a pretty unique opportunity
That’s now in the running
@@languagejones6784 Is it important we be more aware of the subjunctive in English?
@@barrysteven5964 Excellent question I hope gets answered
If it were to be, I would be thrilled!
@@Zeromus725 Would that it were!
I think the main reason Homer didn't use any of the Ancient Greek words for blue to describe the sea is that it would be simply boring. He was a poet, not an annalist.
That opening reminds me of the short paper we read on the "Nacirema" group of people in my high-school anthropology class.
That was the inspiration!
Oh, gosh. Was that the one where they drove "racs" on paths that had been so trampled that nothing whatsoever grew on them, and being allowed to ride one was a right of passage that was celebrated even though they could easily be deadly? Or was that a different one.
Somehow the cheesiness has stuck with me for three decades since I read it.
I once wrote a long paragraph about how we English-speakers are stuck with just one word, "snow", for all frozen water that falls from the sky, whereas Inuit people have words that let them distinguish flurries from a blizzard, powder from névé, a mogul from a drift, and so on. And on, and on. I don't remember whether I got to a hundred or not. I kind of think so. I'll guess that they have about as many as we do.
there is the example of how Hungarian people think we have so many more words for the word "walk" or "go" than English. There's a lot of linguistic myths related to Hungarian anyway, some unhinged enough to say it is the most ancient language, there's a RUclipsr who has quite a few videos debunking these ideas, but he basically gets death threats from the proponents of these "theories"
@@andreakoroknai1071he found them out, so they are out to get him. Dangerous stuff.
English speakers have several hundred words for self-propelled vehicles
@@andreakoroknai1071 i need to know the name of that channel
Even beyond this, English sometimes just borrows Inuit words when we don't have them. Pingo (a conical hill formed in largely permafrost regions) is Inuvialuit, and we did not have an established word for them since there are none in Europe (most of them are in Canada/Alaska, Eastern Siberia, and the Tibetan Plateau).
In English, unlike a lot of other languages, we have no word for 'day before yesterday.', or 'day after tomorrow.'
This because we have very short term thinking.
That's gold!!
Ereyesterday (that was in The Hobbit I think?) and overmorrow 😊
So we used to have longer-term thinking and then we forgot how to do that?
@@bobbyg1068 That's pretty much it. In the era of the Internet and social media, attention spans have shortened.
@@stevencarr4002 I've seen the word "aftermorrow" used for day after tomorrow. I like to use it, even though nobody knows what I mean, lol.
German: vorgestern, übermorgen ?
As a learner of Chinese, I have always been extremely confused by the assertion that Chinese speakers conceptualise time "the other way around" - especially when it was other learners claiming to be struggling because of it! Much like your "before" example, I can think of several more from both English and German that are no different. We just don't notice it when we're speaking because we know what these words (or expressions) mean, so we don't have to think about it.
The best one (for me) is "can we move the meeting forward from 11 to 10, please?"
I got played so hard wtf
same, that intro was amazing
I accidentally read this comment as I opened the videos so as soon as he mentioned the cardinal directions on the island being off from their true directions I KNEW it had to be manhattan
In hindsight, I should’ve realized as soon as he said stained or hooded. That seemed familiar but I didn’t connect the dots in time
I had a suspicion I was being played, but I was trying to figure out how these things map onto the uk lol
@@Fnessaaaa Same haha
New Yorkers have no words for 'left' or 'right'.
Mind you , here in Britain we do have words for 'left' and 'right', but we swap them around! That is why we drive on the side of the road that is the right one for us.
I now try to remember to ask people if they can tell left and right apart before giving directions or instructions that require them to be able to distinguish the two. Otherwise I find myself saying, "Left ... _left ... _*_left ... LEFT!!!_* and hoping the other person doesn't think that I am about to mount an attack!
@@resourcedragon I do that sort of thing but it's a problem with my brain, not theirs -- I say "follow my hands, not my words!" Because I will absolutely say something like "right" when I mean "left" (even though, if I take a moment, I can easily distinguish them), but I'll never point the wrong direction from what I mean!
On my driving test, I was driving on a loop road around a shopping mall and the examiner told me to get in the "inside lane" and I presumed she meant towards the middle of the loop (which would have been the right lane) and what she actually meant was the lane towards the middle of the road (which was the left lane). Luckily we sorted it out quickly and she didn't hold the confusion against me, but that was not a good moment for confusion!
Oh! I thought you adopted this from the Australians, who simply do that because they are on the southern hemisphere (like the thing with the drain swirl)!
@@resourcedragon Eh IDK. I confuse left and right sometimes, but it will take me a lot longer to work out cardinal directions. Landmarks depend but left and right is still most reliable.
Last time I was this early I wrote this comment in Sumerian.
You still owe me for that lousy substandard batch of copper you shipped 😠
@@RedwingBB did they also treat you with contempt by sending back your messenger empty-handed through enemy territory?
Swedish words for snow, not including compounds:
fimmern, flister, fnyk, fällbruttu, guckudämp, gudamjäll, hagel, manchester, modd, mjäll, platina, puder, själja, skare, slask, snö, tö, upplega
My favorite is "manchester"
@@carlsmeller7177 it's the snow in a ski slope right after it's been prepared
@@Liggliluff in the US skiers call that Corduroy, like the pants with the ridges.
5:43 I don’t feel like it primitivizes the Inuit. From an outsider perspective, I feel like it makes their language seem more advanced if anything…
I was thinking the same thing. It still falls into that realm of "othering" them in some way but I never interpretted it as "look at them, so primitive that they can't tell it's all the same thing". Being able to distinguish between different parts of your environment is just a sign of observational skills and intelligence idk
@@ArchangelTenshi I think it might be more of the idea that it's like "See, us civilised people do not need that, and while it's nice to have this many terms, it's only useful for the savages who have to live in the middle of it all the time, and it doesn't mean much in a world of science in which we know it's all just crystallised dihydrogen monoxide and in a world of technology where we can just get rid of it with big motorized shovels and some salt if needed".
It's kind of like what he mentioned in his video about AAVE: If the grammar were less complex, they would say it's less intelligent because they lack important distinctions, and if the grammar is more complex, then it's less intelligent because they need more to say the same and they lack the elegant simplicity of Standard English. You can't win using the racist's own logic.
@@ArchangelTenshi same though here
Personally I've always taken it as a demonstration of the environment's impact on language
I have an affinity for the subjunctive because too often I've had to explain how "I were" is grammatically correct, and to native English speakers.
Depends solely on the context, not always
@@星火猫
“I were” is *usually* incorrect, but “if I were” is correct, as an example.
OK, you got me with the island trick. Well played!
Ahahahha I love this so much. I love your content so much. You deep dive and delve into the nuances which is why I find language so fascinating. I also love that you’re brave enough to call out bad faith polyglots with a touch of class and an eye roll, which is well-deserved. Doing my part to support you and your growing family. Love and thanks from this not-native-but-been-living-downtown-for-twenty-years-New-Yorker-by-way-of-south-of-the-mason-Dixon-of-Afghan-Jewish-and-Muslim-descent, Zohra
Thank you so much!
Man you talked so calm in the ad read I didn't even realise I was watching the ad after a while
On the snow question... I'm guessing that they have about the same as we do, around 10, plus qualifiers for specific conditions.
I'm Norwegian, and we have some words for snow. Can be translated to powder snow, or wet snow or more. This is an important distinction to make, if you go skiing. It makes sence for me why innuits would have more ways to talk about snow, just look at the landscape. Americans have a lot of names for designer products sold at the hype-store, just look at the landscape!
Knew instantly you were talking about coffee haha... I live in NYC and recognized myself :)
Like all good anthropology!
I'm glad you finally made a video about this
i published a poem making fun of the words for snow myth
Translated From Inuit
Come away from the steaming blubber
so you do not melt. Snow on me,
my snow. Snow on the floor so,
unsnowshod, I may sink into you.
I gladly give you my seals.
When the snow changed the snow
beneath my dogs to snow,
I whipped them with thoughts of you,
at which they eagerly yowled,
shook the snow onto the snow,
and drove on. Your memory
was snow upon the snow,
our needed traction. Let us be
fire for each other, changing my snow
to snow and your snowy eyes
to snow. In the snow of your hands
my back is snow, feel the snow of it
ridging. I wonder if your heart is snow,
safe from wind, or snow, like my heart,
flying to the waterland of whales.
(first published in River Styx)
what's fun is that i can still understand evey type of snow that the poem wants to describe just as easily, poetry is very powerful and even a language barrier doesn't detract so much from it as i'd have thought
@@Anna-Thea7173 interesting you say this, cause i had a hard time visualizing what was going on in the poem
perhaps it's because i lived my whole life in a place thousands of kilometers away from any type of snow
The main good thing about the Sapir Whorf hypothesis is that it is the genesis of "The Story of You," which was adapted into the movie "Arrival."
That is its strongest point
The key benefits to the hypotheses were in their debunkings. Like, Chinese people can reason counterfactually, and the language provides for it. The initial experiment was just written by people who sucked at Mandarin.
honestly, the intro to this was probably the best explanation of cardinality-specific directions I've ever heard. Like, I always felt it was weird that all explanations (I'm sure if I had tried properly, I could've found something more concrete) relied on east/west/north/south, implying every language with them bases them on the sun/astronomical things (idk how reasonable it would be to assume the concept of going north/south many thousands of kilometers would imbibe well into the use of the words). Having them based on geographical locales makes much more sense and makes it seem a lot less hyper-unique to those languages (eg. this would be very similar to describing something as up or down river, or up or down down, or in phrases like "out in the boonies").
ok nvm, i totally fell for it lmao (i don't want to delete it cause it completely proves your point).
I'm excited to see your upcoming video on the subjunctive in Romance languages! :-)
I could probably come up with about a dozen English words for snow. I imagine it's similar in Inuit.
With help from a thesaurus: Snow, powder, hail, sleet, avalanche, blizzard, flurry, snowflake, blanket, slush, snowpack, frost.
There's more. Started to get harder after a dozen.
@@Sam_on_RUclips arguable snowflake and snowpack doesn't count since they're compounds, and if you include that, well you have infinite.
Oh, and I thought you were talking about Montreal. We have a word “north” which usually means “towards the Mountain” (which is a hill in the middle of the island).
I'm not sure where the idea that English has few words for snow comes from. We have snow, slush, sleet, blizzard, hoar, pack, powder, corn, drift, barchan, glacier, berg, brash, I mean I am not a skiier, a mountaineer or a navigator, but there have got to be over fifty of them, and they do _not_ all share a handful of transparent common roots the way the Inuktitut terminology does. I think it is true that when you deal with a phenomenon regularly you are going to need a word for it.
Oh, and thanks for calling out those bogus French “words” in the preverbal complex. Sheesh.
But I have to ask: it's been a long time since I read Whorf, but I don't remember him as coming across all cultural-imperialsit and we-should-fix-how-the-Hopi-think. He doesn't read like a trained scientist, and certainly not one who shares contemporary attitudes towards attribution, but nor did he seem like a bad stick-if anything, he seemed, for his day, embarrassingly eager to learn. Indeed, he seemed to think that “those people” were exactly like us, and we should learn the best ideas from each other as fast as possible if we wanted to avoid workplace fires. Am I remembering wrong?
Finally, were I to answer your question about what I'd most like to understand about the subjective? Why people believe it's lacking in English.
You’re not wrong about Whorf, and he’s not bad for his time (admittedly, not saying much there). He’s like the Nietzsche of linguistics, where his name has become a shorthand for the ideas of his admirers
@@languagejones6784 Jesus and Darwin, too, meseems. Safer not to think! :-}
I was rolling my eyes pretty aggressively at the begining. "It's only champagne if it's from the Champagne region of France". Thank god I waited before clicking on something else
I hate the Greeks couldn't see blue nonsense. It makes, zero sense. First of all it assumes for some reason that Homer isn't writing metaphorically about the "wine dark sea". The sea was dark and stormy and darkly colored not that it was literally purple. Second there are traces of blue pigment left on ancient Greek art. What do we think they saw if not blue. And this is not even accounting for how valued lapis lazuli (which is blue) was through the Mediterranean.
But I really understood how ridiculous the idea was when I visited Greece a few years ago and saw the bluest seas and skies I'd ever seen in my life. What do we think they were seeing if not for blue.
I'm looking forward to learning about the subjunctive in _any_ language! I just hope I generally use it correctly in Greek and English, because I have no idea what it is and when and how you're supposed to use it.
(This rubbed my English teachers the wrong way when I was a kid, because I could read, write, listen, and speak English fluently ... but I couldn't speak _about_ speaking English. I couldn't describe _why_ I used this word or that tense except by repeating, "It just sounds better than the alternatives" ad nauseam. Funnily enough, my online friends in the US couldn't care less and often said things my teachers considered wrong and "bad English" 😛)
I caught on to the joke in the opening, but completely failed to guess which culture you were exoticizing. I was leaning towards Britain, but they make a lot of their own beer.
As for the idea that certain languages are intrinsically better-suited for understanding certain intellectual topics, while the notion is racist, is does brush against a real problem, which is that there are many African languages where *social forces* have made it so that those languages are not capable of conveying information about technical fields. Could anyone in Ivory Coast have deep discussion on mathematics in their native language? Probably not, not because the language is inferior, but because these languages are left by the wayside in the educational system and anyone who studies mathematics will do so in French.
In South Africa, the government works to actively promote native languages like Zulu, letting be used to a fuller (not fullest) potential in academia, but many African countries still lag behind. Even countries that are trying to change tacks often make pitiful efforts (the "sovereigntist" military junta in Mali has been trying to promote native-language literacy in Malian schools, but the ministry of education is literally having ChatGPT write the stories, which is embarrassing).
Obviously, it is good for Africans to learn global languages like Arabic, English, French. But it is sad when this bilingualism comes at the expense of native languages.
In tune with nature, of necessity. People who shovel and drive in snow have many terms for snow (including curses). And how many words for snow and snow conditions do winter sports have?
Actually, the people who have a lot of precise terms for different types of snow are skiers. The physical properties of snow vary a lot, and those properties definitely affect how the skis behave as you go down a slope. This is not to say that they have completely different words, but rather that they use adjectives to modify the basic word "snow" in order to specify the particular qualities of the snow at a given time and place.
So, for example, the term "corn snow" was used in my region to describe the sort of snow one sees in the spring time, when the snow is melting in the daytime, but refreezing at night. This produces chunks of refrozen snow that are about the size of corn kernels, and, because each "kernel" is covered by a thin layer of melt water during the day, it is extremely slippery, which makes for very fast skiing. The kernels are also very loose, so it is easy to dig into them with the edges of the skis, which gives very good control on turns.
In contrast, hard-packed snow, on a cold cloudy day in mid-winter is very dry, so it is not very slippery, and it is also harder to cut into it when turning, so instead of turning easily and precisely, the edges of the skis have a much stronger tendency to skid away from you downhill, which makes for sloppy, skidding turns in many cases. The extreme case of this is solid ice, on which it is very difficult to turn at all, much less precisely. Again, except for actual solid ice, the term is still "snow", but with modifiers like "packed" and "dry".
My undergrad was in Anthropology. That intro reminded me of the "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema."
this has become one of my favorite channels on yt. i’m learning spanish and italian simultaneously and your vids have been great advice. feels like one of my college lectures but in an enjoyable format lol. god bless you doc jones🖤
This is the best language channel on RUclips. Thank you for being awesome
As soon as you got to the potion I knew what you were doing 😂
@@noahjaybee I was afraid it would be too obvious, what with the b roll of my actual barista 😂
I actually knew immediately that he's talking about Manhattan lol
Im kinda proud I started thinking about New York when you said the thing about cardinal directions. Its so easy to think of Upper Manahattan as North and not NorthEast
And it’s just as confusing as his description made it sound to outsiders coming to New York for the first time! I was forever looking to the sun to try to work out which way people were telling me to to, and finding that there weren’t roads in the direction I was told! Cultural context is a funny thing, especially where outsiders don’t know/think to consider cultural difference
The snow myth is weird. Skiers do have many, many words for snow (and not all of those have agreed on definitions) but that's just to easy communication.
"Dude, don't go hit Pine Marten Express its full of death cookies because the corn froze overnight and the groomer ruined it trying to make corduroy."
Or
"How was sunrise? We had fun. The snow is great up top, powdery and light. But toward the bottom it gets manky."
I think we just tend to focus on what we find interesting or odd, for example, as a Spanish speaker I find it really mind blowing that Filipino people cook lechon manok which is "chicken lechon", since lechon in Spanish means "baby pig". Then I remember that Spanish has a ton of words for pig "lechón, cerdo, puerco, marrano, chancho, cochino" and besides lechón most of them are just synonyms or regional variations that don't bare any difference in meaning.
We just don't see what our culture makes different because we're surrounded by it, but every culture creates words for things that are culturally relevant to them, just think about how many different words there are to differentiate between dog breeds.
That thing about lechon manok short-circuited my brain for a good 20 seconds.
About to go back to college for Spanish classes! Also, I secretly love grammar so please share as much of your knowledge as possible please!! :)
Well excited about the subjunctive video, mostly because I keep asking french teachers 'no but what does it _mean_ ' and like all french teachers when asked what anything related to a verb _means_ they don't answer, they just give you yet another conjugation table as if knowing how to spell it in different persons will make you divine its meaning. (I have a korean friend currently battling with the perfect, which seems to hit the same problem of 'this _means_ something and I can't quite articulate what it is'. Language is fun.)
Also props for putting out videos in the middle of the tishri holiday pile-up. גמר חתימה טובה
The verb and meaning is the same. So I don't understand why you ask them "what does it mean?" it's like asking "what does present progressive mean?" it's still the same tense as present simple but with the nuance of emphasizing ongoing action.
@@mep6302 yes, and that nuance conveys a difference in meaning - "I walked" means something different than "I walk" which means something different than "I would have been walking" and a conjugation table does not elucidate those differences. The present progressive _means_ something different than the present simple, and that _meaning_ is neither communicated nor illuminated with 'have you tried practicing spelling the different tenses and moods of this verb?'
"je dois" and "je doive" _means different things_ and claiming that either "devoir means 'to have to'" or "je doive, tu doives, il doive, nous devions et.c." in any way explains that difference of meaning, which as far as I can tell all french teachers do, is, imo, dumb.
I love this channel, keep up the good work
¡El maldito subjuntivo! Thank you so much in advance for covering it in your upcoming video.
There is one underdiscussed issue with the change in nomenclature from Eskimo to Inuit. This change began in Canada where all of the peoples onve referred to Eskimo are Inuits. However, in Canada this is only true of the Inupiak from Alaska's North slope who are under half of Alaska's Eskimo. The majority are Yupik, a closely related sister group of the Inuits. While it is benificial to stop using Eskimo due to how it's been misused historically it is unfortunate that we're not mislabeling this group of Alaska natives
I thought the idea of the past being in front of us is quite fitting. If we move towards the future like walking backwards, the past is in front of us. We can see it and study it.
The future is then unexpected. We can only speculate what it may look like based on the past, but that's it. It's unseen and surprising.
After watching this video, I've been thinking about it like rowing on a river - because when you are rowing, you face opposite to the direction of natural travel. The river bends in ways that are partially, but never fully, predictable. Sometimes, the bank will be straight, and watching it lying straight before you you can predict that for the next few strokes it is also likely to be straight- but you know that this will not be the case for ever, and it might already be curving just behind you (hence, in reality, looking over your shoulder at intervals to check). Where there are lots of trees sticking out from the bank, you can sometimes see what looks like the edge of the river going in a clear direction, and then, if you follow that line, you can find yourself stuck in a bush.
Ok Dr Jones, this is a good one. This is the stuff that those of us in adjacent disciplines need to hear from linguists. It's so easy to have outdated and malformed ideas about other disciplines. And yet, you manage to also address popular perceptions about language as well.
Bravo.
As someone who studies ancient languages, I hope to see discussion of the subjective in Latin and Ancient Greek in your next video! Love your content.
Right on with the Manhattan analogy! Please cover the subjunctive.
I saw a video about the Greek color thing that made it all very clear. She referenced someones skin as being the color of olive oil. Green skin? But she showed a clip of the oil pouring out of a press and it really does have the exact same luminance and glow as a deep tan. It just has a different hue.
1:05 not knowing where this goes, but are we talking about Whisky?
Definitely your best so far. I love the island analogy.
I'm excited to learn about the many snow words because i've totally integrated that story (never heard it as 100, usually around 20). I justified it by showing how many words we have for "dirt": mud, soil, loam, topsoil, clay, silt, sand...
As someone who majored in Spanish, I am super excited for next weeks video!!!!
Super interesting video. I really appreciate how you're able to make me better understand both my own and other people's assumptions about different societies and cultures and frame it linguistically.
A long time ago someone (not a linguist) told me that you can discern the importance of something to a culture by the number of words used to describe it. The example he used it that the people who speak Quechua and Aymara in Peru and Bolivia have many words for the potato because of its importance to the people of that area.
For the algorithm! i love giving a bad example in the "wrong" direction any time the 100 words for snow thing comes up. "yes and british english has 1000 words for rain!". Also the subjunctive is a pretty neat thing, i do wonder about the circumstances that make it not exist, i find it that neat.
Thank you: your videos are always precious!
I really would die for a Language Jones + Linguriosa collaboration on the subjuntivo
You have no idea how badly I wish I could like this video more than just once. Thank you for this.
never been more hyped for a video than the subjunctive video! I think I pretty much understand it after learning about subjunctive in English but also having someone who knows more than me talk about it will help me clear up things I think it get but don't lol
There was a claim that in ancient times people didn’t use the word blue save for a possible instance in the Old Testament.
Also the term orange is relatively new.
As a kid, I used to have synesthesia. It was never strong, but certain numbers just WERE certain colors, as well as a few other color - object relationships and time and space relationships. Now, I really don’t experience synesthesia. I don’t know when it went away, but I wonder if it was when I learned a second language (Spanish), and if that was related, or if it was just a natural part of becoming an adult.
My father has MUCH more intense synesthesia related to numerical spatial positioning, but he is also bilingual.
In one of your videos you mentioned that when your brain wants to say a word in the second language, it will “suppress” the corresponding word(s) in the first language. My theory is that maybe this act of suppression also suppressed or broke down some of the color-number connections. If so, that could be an interesting evidence for the weak form of S-W.
Realistically though, I probably just grew out of it.
I remember reading a book that claims to explain the development of color words in the world's languages and then the writer said "Homer literally could not see the color blue", and I was flabbergasted that someone could actually entertain the idea given that blue cone cells had been distinct for as long as vertebrates existed. (Most mammals lost the red-green distinction, but primates redeveloped it.) Side note: Biological evolution in large organisms is so much simpler because you don't have to worry about areal effects. I caught myself thinking "what if the development of color vision is an areal innovation" while reading about it.
A video on subjunctive sounds like exactly what I need!
the Monk biography behind you is killing!
Another great video! Loved the intro. Excited for the subjunctive deep-dive too, I only know when to use it in French from some subjunctive triggers like 'il faut que'
Lately I was blown away reading a book in Spanish (Harry Potter to be exact, which is a great example of the kind of shenanigans mentioned in the video where Cho Chang who is supposed to be Chinese has two Korean surnames in place of name and surname - ‘Dear JK Rowling, from Cho Chang’ really worth it both from cultural and linguistic points of view) back on track - noun vaivén which means alternating/fluctuating/oscillating movement and according to RAE origins from “ir” and “venir” so essentially go and come 🤯
I couldn’t stop myself from pairing the before mentioned vaivén with wave and waving.
You seem to think these two are dark videos, but for me they're breath of fresh air videos, actually addressing the world as it exists, not our preferences for how it might be.
A language video that starts with “so there’s this island, and the people on the island…” leaves me with Lori Anderson stuck in my head.
Language, it’s a virus, ooh!
I am excited for next week’s video. The use of the Subjunctive in Spanish sentences has been quite hard for me to learn😢
Hopefully this makes it a lot easier!
For my brain, the name is one of the hardest thingsabout the subjunctive! Without a mental connection of the name to the meaning it makes it very hard to remember what it is.
Also, contrary to some other commenters I find Arrival to be kinda annoying because people are always telling me 'this could really happen! Have you heard of the sapir worf hypothesis? It proves it!'
Oh! And I am just now getting to the subjunctive in French! Great timing!
8:59 Yes, exactly this. One of my biggest pet peeves. “Did you know that ….”
Wine dark sea is my favorite description of the ocean. i should try reading some homer to see if there's any other bangers in there.
Took me about 30 seconds in to recognize my native homeland of Manhattan. I had a friend from Harlem who, when asked, said he came from a small island in the Atlantic.
Note that not everything you said applies to the rest of the city. Brooklyn and Queens are regions of Long Island, which has separate cardinal directions, as Long Island East is only a little further east than Manhattan North. Staten Island is also a separate island, but it doesn't use that cardinal language. And the Bronx is not an island and also doesn't use that language.
*So* many of these misconceptions have been floating around for decades, even, as in your Inuit example, centuries. When I was getting into languages during high school, people really annoyed me by saying, "I took French because it's the LANGUAGE of ROMANCE! 😍😍😍" When I tried to explain the actual facts about that, I often got this: 😳😭 I really wasn't trying to yuck anyone's yum 🤷♂️
I am glad to see that we seem to have more awareness of many things. I just hope this knowledge is used correctly
Really nice, the Manhattan story... When reading about tribes describing orientation with east-west instead of left-right, I had always thought that a true Parisian always knows where the Seine river is. I lived in Paris most of my life (except when I lived in Manhattan !), and for instance when I lived in the 15th "district" (arrondissement), I knew very well that the Seine was 15 minutes in front of me (walking) and also 40 minutes on my right (because the river bends!) So, like the tribes, I also could use an "absolute" way of describing where places were (in relation with the Seine river) instead of a relative one like left and right.
The thing that fascinated me when I moved from the east side of the U.S. to the west side, it took me years to not get "west" and "east" mixed up verbally. Despite living in the mountains 300 miles from the ocean, I had apparently filed "east" in my mind as "towards the ocean", and when I moved to a place where the ocean was to the west, I tended to call that direction "east" sometimes or think that was the direction other people meant when they said "east".
Hear hear! I love it when you kick Sapir-Whorf. Regards from a fellow linguist in Sweden (who is working on Lule Saami dialectology)
By the way, since I learned Lule Saami, I can't just see lichen growing somewhere. Instead, I immediately categorize it as "gadna" (when it grows as a crust, typically on stones and twigs), "visste" (when it is in the form of minute little "bushes", typically on the ground), and "slahppo" (when it's hanging like "beards" on branches, cliff walls etc.). There is no common term for 'lichen' in Lule Saami. So, the weak version of Sapir-Whorf seams to have some truth to it though. Some languages seem to force people to become aware of greater detail when it comes to certain things.
As a former French teacher, I would love an explanation of the subjective that makes sense.
I think I learned about Sapir-Whorf about the same time as I was working through a Ph.D. in fluid mechanics, which means that as I learn more about it I become more and more disappointed that it wasn't at all about what I personally experienced with words determining my thought and quite directly enabling me to think things I couldn't have without the words.
The relevant thing about fluid mechanics here is that the theory we use to understand it is deeply abstract and complicated, which means that explaining it using only common English words in their common English meanings would be very difficult. You could trace the development of the theory quite accurately by tracing the development of the jargon that is used to describe it; the theory mostly amounts to identifying an abstraction that is useful, precisely defining it, and incidentally coming up with a word for it. And on a personal level, as I was developing a new piece of theory, I found that there were thoughts I was working through where it took me a long time to work through them, and then I learned a new word and all the mental energy I was spending on capturing that idea every time my thoughts touched it could now be spent on building on top of it instead. It wasn't just that the new word allowed me to do the same work faster; it meant that I actually could have thoughts that simply wouldn't have fit in my mental "thinking capacity" before I had the word.
So, yeah. I am disappointed that instead of taking this idea about words being liked to how people think, and using it to explain things like why jargon is essential to understanding new things and actually do some useful digging into how that works (and maybe figure out how to make it work better), people instead use it to argue about whether non-modern-Western people could/can tell that the color of the sky and the color of the grass are different.
Also it seems to me that the studies of speed of color recognition are completely looking at things at the wrong level and entirely missing a much more interesting point. The way English-speaking culture simplifies paint technology into three "primary" colors and three "secondary" colors (and the fact that we use red, yellow, and blue for the three primary colors, not cyan, magenta, and yellow) seems to be quite a bit shaped by the six "main" words we have for colors. Yes, we are obviously technologically capable of understanding that CMYK inks are better than red, yellow, and blue ones. But if we didn't have separate words for green and blue, would we perhaps have used cyan as the third color much sooner and do so more often? What about how our idea of the "color wheel" affects what hues go together -- is that determined by the set of color-words we have?
Yes, please...the subjunctive in German. I didn't hear about such a thing until I was in a 400-level German class at uni. After spending a day on it, my reaction was "umm... looks like it's pretty much the same as in English. That was a letdown."
Oh, and btw, regarding colors. I recently got a new car, in the marketeering color of "cinnabar red". (Never heard that word before.) I asked my 4-year-old color maven granddaughter what she would call the color. (It's basically almost-black-with-a-hint-of-purple.) She thought for about 2 seconds and announced "superhero purple". So that's what I tell people.
Your videos make me keep adding to my reading list, and I do not need that /s - also, I have not yet attempted the Spanish subjunctive, but it's built up to be such a problem it makes me nervous
Interesting example you bring about Uptown/Downtown New York. I used to live in a town called Nyon in Switzerland, which lies on Lake Geneva. Nearby, and running parallel to the lake, is the Jura hill range. Further to the east along the lakeshore is the city of Lausanne, and at the western end of the lake is Geneva. So people in Nyon will navigate not by north, east, south and west, but by lake, jura, Lausanne and Geneva. As in “can you move that table a bit more lakewards, please!”
I love the subjunctive in Spanish! It's so useful in ways I didn't at all learn in class.
I totally agree!
YAY! NEW LANGUAGEJONES VIDEO!
I think common languages being non-monogrammar has a big effect on how people think.
The most trivial reason is it gives them a headache when first learning a monogrammar language.
Gonna leave a comment about a recent Mandarin mistake I made, because I can never seem to remember them for those kinds of videos! This recent one isn't that funny, but I mixed up 演講 (speech) and 講座 (lecture) when talking with my partner last night. Don't think I'll make that mistake again~
“Is it true that the Irish have over 100 words for drunk?” - “No, but we do have 100 words for what your face is going to look like in 10 seconds!”
I’m excited about the subjunctives video! Learning subjunctive cases in German was a challenge for me, and I’m trying to wrap my head around the Russian subjunctive now, too.
If there wasn't a word for pink my granddaughter would have invented one.
Hahaha I live in NYC and while you were describing this unnamed island, I was thinking "wow we also say 'it's on the West Side', we do the same thing." And I thought about the fact that Manhattan isn't perfectly north-south aligned, so we also pretend west is the western-most side of the island. You got me on the coffee though, that was good
The area between San Francisco and San Jose is also a lot like that; we've got "north" and "south" that near San Jose are actually more west and east by the compass. Basically the roads between the two cities make approximately a backwards-J shape, and going in the direction of the nearby roads towards San Francisco is "north" and towards San Jose is "south". And then towards the Bay is "east" (even though it may be north by the compass) and towards the ocean is "west".