If You're Fat, Broke, and Smoking, Blame Language 297
First time accepted submitter derekmead writes "A Yale researcher says that culture differences how much money we save, how well we take care of ourselves, and other behavior indicative of taking the long view, are all based on language. His study argues that the way a language's syntax refers to the future (PDF) affects how its speakers perceive the future. For example, English and Greek make strong distinctions between the present and the future, while German doesn't, while English and Greek speakers are statistically poorer and in worse health than Germans. (The study includes a broader swath of languages/nationalities, but that's a start.)"
I wrote about this once myself (Score:2, Interesting)
Unpublished of course, but I wrote a thesis in college about the role of language in the perception of time. Other than determining that an African language, Wolof, was particularly suited to discussing the particulars of time travel (it has some interesting tenses regarding subjective and relative time), I happened to come across a particularly fascinating report by a psychologist doing research for an advertising journal. He described various cultures' attitudes towards time that then influenced what they believed was important -- for example, Spanish-speaking cultures view time as cyclical, which made the present less important, or Native Americans, who don't exactly have a cultural perception of time at all, and tend to view time in consideration to the task at hand instead.
There are some interesting papers out there if you're really interested in this stuff.
Take some responsibility... (Score:4, Interesting)
Take my word for it or don't but compare me to my brother and you'll see taking simple responsibility for oneself is literally the difference between not only fat, smoking, and broke...but educated, healthy, and prosperous as well...
Re:So, it's true... (Score:5, Interesting)
I know, funny. But...
Give it 30 years. You'll find that the Japanese are following the trend of Americans. It's really the diet, hell if you've been to Okinawa in the last 10 years you can see it. Little chubby ass kids(and teens) running around all over the place. As they've turned their backs on the more traditional japanese staples.
Re:So, it's true... (Score:2, Interesting)
On the other hand, the French eat a lot of fat and also suffer fewer heart attacks than the British or the Americans.
Myth, for what it's worth (and I know it was a joke). It turned out to be due to under-reporting of heart attacks by French doctors.
Re:I'd love to see some numbers on this... (Score:5, Interesting)
Dubious linguistic claims (Score:5, Interesting)
"Morgen regnet es" --German, literally "it rains tomorrow", with no future tense marker
"It will rain tomorrow" -- English, with the future tense marker
He argues that the explicit future tense marking causes speakers to treat future events differently and thus damages savings or whatever. The statistical analysis in this paper looks pretty good to me, though I'm not familiar with the way economics people report linear regressions so it'll take more time to evaluate that. But the statistical analysis is no good if the linguistic analysis it's based on is wrong. Garbage in, garbage out.
The problem is that languages don't exclusively use or neglect to use future tense markers. For instance in German, you could use a future tense marker, as in "es wird regnen" (literally, it will rain). BUT you drop the future tense marker if you have a word like "tomorrow" that makes it obvious that the event is in the future, like "morgen regnet es" (tomorrow it rains). All languages make use of a variety of different patterns to mark future tense.
In English there is a similar pattern to German, for instance. People will very frequently say things like "I'm teaching tomorrow" or "I'm grabbing donuts with my friend tomorrow morning." The author ignores this, although it is very common in English usage, and even though it is a direct counterexample to his purported classification of English. He claims that English MUST mark future explicitly by pointing out that we don't say things like "I listen to a lecture"--but the problem with that sentence is NOT that it doesn't mark future; the problem is that we use the progressive in English contexts, and we could very easily say "I'm listening to a lecture tomorrow, so I won't be able to come to your party" or similar.
It turns out English and German have pretty much the same pattern of future tense marking. Maybe English speakers use explicit tense marking more than German speakers do, but that's a quantitative difference, which is ignored in this paper in favor of arbitrary categorizations.
If this fellow is so ignorant about the language he's writing in, how much can we trust his judgments about other languages? Or rather, how much can we trust him to be sufficiently critical of the linguistic categorizations that he's looking at, or to know what they really mean? Yes, his data was based on "expert" linguistic sources, but linguists are also prone to this kind of miscategorization, and are very often more driven by a need to make languages conform to certain modern theories than by a desire to make a legitimate description; furthermore the people writing about these languages are all operating according to DIFFERENT DEFINITIONS and different theoretical frameworks, a problem I have to deal with just about every day in my work.
tl;dr It looks like the author has given almost no thought to the lack of soundness in the linguistic categorizations he uses, even though his system breaks down in the very examples he cites. I don't think he knows what he's talking about.
Asian perspectives (Score:4, Interesting)
Interesting observations. Using some examples from my neck of the woods, I'd say it could be mixed up with agriculture and migration patterns.
Vietnamese is very strongly future-typed. No tenses but an auxiliary verb 'se' = 'will' which appears in front of the verb. It is used even when the word 'tomorrow' or 'this evening' appears in the sentence. Vietnamese are famous for their over-indulgence in alcohol and coffee, although culturally they're savers (in the form of gold or ornaments). Oh, and they're atrocious drivers. (And there's a Catholic influence - sin now, confess later.)
Thai is even more strongly future-typed, in that their word for 'will' ('ja') takes even more precedence in the sentence - eg "ja mai pai Pantip" - "I will not go to Pantip". Thais are known for their moderation in most areas and they're characterized as undisciplined when it comes to wealth/savings. But they do drive well. Talk about Thai attitudes and most foreign observers will sum up with "mai pen rai" ("no worries").
Both the Thais and Vietnamese are rice-growing societies who recently migrated (the Thais much more recently) from China, where they're very loose with future markers.
Contrast with the Malays. Spoken Malay has no future typing - they rely on words like 'tomorrow'. Their society is characterized by its indifference to planning and saving, feasting today, forget tomorrow. Not very organized agriculturally. They're also an island race - perhaps best not to think too much about the future when you're getting into that boat and you can see nothing on the horizon (but a full belly will help).
Re:jetzt (Score:4, Interesting)
Standard Japanese makes no distinction between future and habitual tense. "Niku wo taberu" could be taken as "I will eat meat" or "I eat meat".
It's generally pretty clear in its distinction between progressive and future though. "Niku wo tabeteiru" meaning "I am eating (the) meat" is unambiguous in its tense and can't be replaced with the future form "niku wo taberu".
If you add an adverb though the distinction can become unclear and future and progressive can be mixed. However the same phenomenon also occurs in English. E.g: "ashita, oyakodon taberu" (I'll eat oyakodon tomorrow) vs "ashita, oyakodon tabeteru" (I'm eating oyakodon tomorrow").
Interestingly, both English and Japanese tend to mix the progressive and habitual tenses as well. "Gengogaku ni tsuite no kougi ni sanka shiteiru" and "Gengogaku ni tsuite no kougi ni sanka suru" meaning "I'm participating in lectures about linguistics" and "I participate in lectures about linguistics", without an adverb, both interchangeably mean the same thing in English and Japanese.
This article is about grammatically encoding distinctions between the present and future, which Japanese doesn't seem to significantly differ from English in.