Interesting.. but then you get into the whole "language dictates or enables thought" thing, how much the words you have available make it possible to concieve of things, so if your language lacked a concept of time and past and present and tenses for same, how meaningful would or could a story about a time machine be? And if you borrow or create words or grammatical constructs for same from another language, that is changing the source language and making the whole question moot anyways.
I think Hopi is the best known of the languages lacking a time concept in words, but I unremember whether the idea of "he did this morning" and "he is doing now" were just very fluid, or whether other things like context or phrasing carried the meaning across despite the lack of tenses..
<--- is language geek
Man, your shower thoughts are deep and meaningful, I'm lucky if mine get past the "ug, where shower gel.. ow ow, stuff in eyes, where towel?!" stage :>
"[...] the whole 'language dictates or enables thought' thing"
Yeah, I'm treading awfully close to Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis territory here, though in this case I was thinking more about ease of expression than ease of conceptualization.
But I was amused to discover, when I clicked through to the Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_Hypothesis) for the SWH while checking the spelling of Whorf's name, that the very discussion that reminded to write about this (flammable/inflammable) was actually something Whorf himself had a hand in!
A good example of the SWH in action comes from Whorf's own work. Whorf was a chemist by training and worked in the insurance industry as a fire prevention engineer. It was on the basis of the SWH he made the historic shift of labeling things likely to ignite as 'flammable' rather than 'inflammable' since his research showed that most people incorrectly understood 'inflammable' to mean 'incapable of catching on fire' rather than 'capable of having flames come into it.' This resulted in fewer fires as people treated flammable objects with caution rather than assuming that they would not catch fire.
(I also found it interesting -- and useful -- to learn on that same page that someone has coined a phrase to describe something unrelated to this discussion, that I've babbled about in various fora in the past: "the euphemism treadmill".)
My shower thoughts aren't always deep. Sometimes they're all wet. Frequently they're along the lines of, "What interesting modifications can I make to the tune that's stuck in my head?" or "How would I phrase a motivational speech to a particular collection of fictional characters?" And the ever-popular, "Damn, I got distracted by that train of thought and now I'm running out of hot water," and, "A little more hot water on that spot there and maybe this muscle will unkink a little."
(no subject)
I think Hopi is the best known of the languages lacking a time concept in words, but I unremember whether the idea of "he did this morning" and "he is doing now" were just very fluid, or whether other things like context or phrasing carried the meaning across despite the lack of tenses..
<--- is language geek
Man, your shower thoughts are deep and meaningful, I'm lucky if mine get past the "ug, where shower gel.. ow ow, stuff in eyes, where towel?!" stage :>
(no subject)
Yeah, I'm treading awfully close to Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis territory here, though in this case I was thinking more about ease of expression than ease of conceptualization.
But I was amused to discover, when I clicked through to the Wikipedia entry (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_Hypothesis) for the SWH while checking the spelling of Whorf's name, that the very discussion that reminded to write about this (flammable/inflammable) was actually something Whorf himself had a hand in!
(I also found it interesting -- and useful -- to learn on that same page that someone has coined a phrase to describe something unrelated to this discussion, that I've babbled about in various fora in the past: "the euphemism treadmill".)
My shower thoughts aren't always deep. Sometimes they're all wet. Frequently they're along the lines of, "What interesting modifications can I make to the tune that's stuck in my head?" or "How would I phrase a motivational speech to a particular collection of fictional characters?" And the ever-popular, "Damn, I got distracted by that train of thought and now I'm running out of hot water," and, "A little more hot water on that spot there and maybe this muscle will unkink a little."