User Comments - denswei

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denswei

Posted on: Chinese for Trekkies
September 07, 2009, 09:55 PM

I agree, any connections between genetics and people groups should be viewed with suspicion of deeper agendas.  However, the article I saw was straightforward statistical correlations of genetics and language features (it was in Science or Nature, I forget which.  Absolutely nothing judgemental or prejudicial about it. Also, it was about people groups, not individuals:  both alleles are present in all people groups, but the ones associated with tonality are more frequent where people speak tonal languages, and vica versa.

Score one for the school of thought that all languages were originally tonal: the alleles associated with non-tonal languages are a more recent mutation.

A Western child raised in a Chinese family may well already have the gene alleles associated with tonal languages (and the family might not)!  Even if not, individual differences in ability--and the family environment--will have a larger effect than the genes.  Some people ignore the obvious, but the bottom line message from genetics is that we are more alike than different. 

I'm not too surprised by the closeness of concepts between Chinese & European cultures.  After all, you can walk from Portugal to Korea (all you need is visas & VISA ;-)  )!  (great ideas spread).  There would be much more differences in cultural concepts between the pre-columbian Americas than either Europe or Asia because of geographic barriers.

Posted on: Chinese for Trekkies
September 07, 2009, 07:08 PM

Disbarring time travel, reincarnation, and parallel (but connected) universes, I think it is safe to say that Lt.Whorf and Dr.Whorf are not related..... (Benjamin died in 1941).  Interestingly the inventor of Klingon (Marc Okrand) and Dr.Whorf both studied Native American languages, and elements thereof are part of Klingon (perhaps there are indeed academic connections)

I have read some research that native chinese speakers pay much more attention to details than Westerners (who go for the 'big picture'), which might be as close as you can get to the Sapir-Whorf concept.  There is also some genetic variations (in 2 genes) associated with people groups who speak tonal languages vs non-tonal, but that is irrelevant.

Perhaps someday someone will think of some clever psycholinguist test of the hypothesis, but I think that culture and language are too intertwined to separate cause & effect, and any affect that there is, is likely to be dwarfed by individual variations between people.  (There is probably a genetic component as well, like the gene-tonal language link, in that people with some genetic variations are better able to grasp some concepts, which would also be confounded with the Sapir-Whorf effect).

Of course, the whole topic of synthetic languages is a lot of fun in itself (I'm partial to Lojban/Loglan, and I just saw the wikipedia article on Solresol--very intriguing, very odd!)

Posted on: Chinese for Trekkies
September 07, 2009, 01:44 PM

One cannot mention Whorf on a language site without bringing up his work in linguistics, eh?   From Wikipedia....

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis) is the idea that the varying cultural concepts and categories inherent in different languages affect the cognitive classification of the experienced world in such a way that speakers of different languages think and behave differently because of it.

Which is a good topic for discussion here anyway.  What has been other peoples experience with this?  I think it would be almost impossible to distinguish linguistic effects on behavior (as above) from cultural effects.

Posted on: Xīnkǔ 辛苦
April 23, 2008, 12:22 PM

你好, Light487 我在办公室里有同一的难题, 所以我用这个网站: http://userwww.service.emory.edu/~zxie3/ime.html Since they don't allow non-essential software at work, I use this website to type Chinese on a windows office computer. One nice thing about this website is that you can do a "save as" to your computer and use it off line. (however, I can still read Chinese on my work computer) But I home, I use a Macintosh, which has about 8 Chinese entry systems built in!

Posted on: Before Noon, After Noon
January 02, 2008, 02:20 PM

To distinguish 上 and 下, I think of a calendar. Looking at a calendar, 上星期 (last week) is above 这个星期, and 下星期 (next week) is below. Hence 上 refers to earlier things, 下 refers to later things. You can also think of "falling" through time (thanks to gravity, this is the natural progression through time) I had a much harder time with 前 (qian2, forward or earlier) and 后 (hou4, behind or later), since in the West, the future is in front of use, and the past is behind us. Apparently in Chinese, they walk 'backward' through time, which is logical. We know the past, because it already occurred, so obviously it must be in front of us where we can see it. We cannot know the future, because it has not occurred, so obviously it is behind us where we cannot see it. A good analogy for life as well!