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 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.
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.
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 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?!
Sky blue and navy blue are completely different colors in Slavic languages. Westerners are surprised by Chinese and others having same word for blue and green historically while ignoring they STILL use one word for two of the rainbow colors. Istead of three like it would be in Ancient China.
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!
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"
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
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.
@@languagejones 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.
@@languagejones-- Is that the same group that supposedly couldn't do exponents but if you set up a sequence with pebbles (as markers) and said 'fill in the next three blanks' nearly every adult was able to do it just fine?
@@sophigenitorpiraha were able to count before trading with communities with larger number systems. They just had no need for that kind of precision above 10 or so. People and animals as a whole are really bad at conceptualizing numbers past a certain point, and we tend to just make broad guesses. Like, if you handed me 15 bananas and 16 to someone else, I likely wouldn't notice the difference unless I got to look at them side by side. The words for the wider number system were likely helpful for being more precise at a larger scale, but that is distinct from being unable to count at all.
1:35 We Ukrainians sometimes write mock articles describing Western countries in same language and terms they describe us (i.e. calling England "a post-Roman state", describing WW2 as "the Polish war", saying British "naturally lean to monarchy", or declaring how "English speakers" in America "want to reunite with UK"). We absolutely get the "noble savage" treatment, and it is extremely aggravating how the West refuses to LISTEN TO US, and even use the same words for us they would for themselves, using patterns like you did in the first minute instead. Worst part? They DO treat guys who invade us as more westerne and "higher culture", as they relate to colonists more than the colonized, so you'd have spaces talking about Ukraine without a single Ukrainian invited BUT with some "moscow-born expert" who then proceed to describe us same way Conquistadors described Aztecs. P.S. Oh, I also thought you were talking about English at the start. Even tho am a coffee not tea drinker. BTW, we have Left-bank and Right-bank (upside down on typical map) geographic distinction too.
I'm not sure if it's because I used to work with a lot of Ukrainians or if it's because I'm an anti imperialist, or if its because one of my favourite bands has a song about their Ukrainian best friend, but as a Brit (admittedly not living in the UK) I consider Ukraine as culturally equal (or better). And I know I shouldn't but because of recent activities I am biased against Russia, considering it culturally barbaric. I know some wonderful Russian people and know I shouldn't judge its people by its insane leadership. But anyway, don't let idiot media make you think that we all think less of you 🇺🇦✊️
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.
The same was done when the danish Realm started to support minority languages. In the past everything that was not basic like trade, law, science was conducted in danish so the local languages didn't have words for a lot of stuff, so they created these words or began using archaic words again.
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 UA-camr who has quite a few videos debunking these ideas, but he basically gets death threats from the proponents of these "theories"
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).
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.
I imagine the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis also was influential on the Pravic language of Ursula K. LeGuin's book "The Dispossessed." My favorite demonstration of this is the scene where Shevek's daughter says "you can share the handkerchief I use" - illustrating that this language of anarchists has no possessive form. I didn't know the name of the idea, but it was so deeply ingrained in me as a kid that it's very difficult for me to imagine things any other way. Not that language stops people from seeing colors, but that it creates bias. Like, if I try to remember a blue thing I saw a year ago, it might be easier to recall the exact shade if I spoke Russian? Or if somebody suggested I paint my bicycle blue, the language they used might influence the shade that I chose? Is that the weak form or something else?
"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. 😆
@@DawnDavidson I don't know enough about language model AI to say. Going purely from memory here: Dryden's Aeneid begins "Arms and the man I sing, who, forc'd by fate / and haughty Juno's unrelenting hate"
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.
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.
I'm pretty advanced in Chinese but I've gotta admit that the up-down model (rather than english's forward-backward) does actually catch me out a lot in casual speech, I often have to double check/second guess myself when saying if something was 上周 or will be 下週. Contrarily 以前 and 以後 are completely intuitive to me because they follow the forward-backward model that I've internalised through my native language. They're not fundamentally different perceptions of time or anything, but the way out native language frames something can definitely impact how we build our basic mental models for it
@@elizakeating8415 The trick I used to remember it in the beginning was to think of a timetable or one of those wall calendars where all the days of the month are one big column. On those, the next day or other unit of time is always below the current one and the previous one is above :)
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.
Aymara, spoken in western South America, has a great system of past tense that includes past tense personal knowledge, so I would use one form to say I went to the store (I know to be true) vs John went to work (he left with his hat and briefcase but I don’t actually know where he went).
@@revangerang of course the concept can be expressed in any language, but when a feature like this is built into the grammar of a language it can have a lot of useful properties that affect the language as a whole. for example it would make pronoun dropping a lot easier/feasible because it restricts the number of pronouns that would make sense to go along with the verb. If you say "xyz seemed to be heading to work" you're almost always going to be talking about someone else outside of the conversation, since you wouldn't have doubt about whether you yourself went to work, and the person you're talking to would also know whether they went to work. So you must be talking about some third person, so the only pronoun that fits is he/she/they and with that context the sentence is clear even if you omit the pronoun. idk if this is the case in Aymara or not, but many languages work like this (unlike english)
@@bobboberson8297 True! Tho in English we can leave some things out that languages like Japanese can’t or don’t. (That’s the only language I’m proficient enough in to use as an example, but I’m sure they all have tendencies towards more or less specificity in varying contexts).
@ But they also add in a lot of kureru, ageru, saseru, etc. And for yes or no questions, they don’t just reply yes or no, they reply with a phrase or sentence related to the question. Same with asking if they want to do something or not, you have to ask “do you want to do (blank) or do you want to not do (blank).” So it probably about evens out in the end
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).
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
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.
I had a GIANT argument with an English/Philosophy professor about the whole ‘language shapes thought’ think when we read 1984. He was adamant throughout the unit that the thing they do in the book to restrict thoughts by removing words from existence would work in real life, and seemingly got really mad when I brought up that not having the words to describe something can’t stop you from knowing it exists, and that that’s where new words come from.
While that's true.. it's also a lot harder to describe a feeling you have no word for. I'm non-binary and while I knew from a very young age that I wasn't the sex I was asigned at birth, I also didn't feel like the opposite sex. Not knowing that there was another option, I was feeling miserable because I didn't know what to do with myself. It might not be as easy as 1984 wants us to believe, but having words matters. It's how we form society and convey ourself to others.
A culture so deeply conditioned against independent thought that words can be rendered meaningless through political propaganda likely would not have the agency to come up with a new word on their own. You're right that the lack of a word tends to incentivize the creation of a new word, but that relies on the assumption that people are capable of creating new words in the first place. An assumption that doesn't hold much water in the story.
So awesome that you brought up the word "before" and the weirdess of it meaning "in front of" and "a previous time". German and Japanese do it too! It's been making me a little crazy since I noticed it.
Thinking a bit about it, I’ve come to the conclusion that I probably prefer past=before to a past=behind view - in that you are always moving into the future with the past in view - you can see the past in memory in a way that you cannot see the future. It’s like walking backwards, or rowing - you can guess what might come next, but only through the contours of what you can see in front of you, which is the past; it may be useful to predict the future, but will never provide a certainty. You see the past before you, and you step blindly backwards into the future.
Dr. Jones, you are a perfect example of why if anyone with a PhD is willing to talk to me about the topic in which they are an expert, I will listen with rapt attention. Please keep doing this; I am so happy to have discovered your channel!
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.
One could do a whole vid on direction and location in Manhattan. Have you ever tried to explain to a person in California why '23rd & 8th' is very specific but 'Penn Station' is very vague?
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
The word "inuit" means "human", so anyone not fron their population is, by their language, not a human. Therefore calling them "Inuit" is the highest form of racism towards all other people.
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!
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.
It's interesting how nonsense just gets accepted like swallowing spiders in your sleep, there's a whole thing about biblically accurate angels being wheels of eyes and stuff it just which is just rubbish but it got totally believed.
@@apersonlikeanyother6895 You might want to consider Ezekiel 1:15-18, Ezekiel 10:10-12, both of those being NIV. It's hard to say that they are just rubbish when "... each was like a wheel intersecting a wheel. .... Their entire bodies, including their backs, their hands and their wings, were completely full of eyes, as were their four wheels." With descriptions like that, I would think it's easy to understand where the "biblically accurate angels" being wheels of eyes comes from, and believed.
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
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.
@@gcewingnow I’m imagining the feud between Anish Kapoor and Stuart Semple as a Greek epic “And thus, the tyrant Kapoor dipped his middle finger in the forbidden ichor, defying the will of the gods”
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.
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
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'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" 😛)
That sounds very like my understanding of English. I learned a few basic terms very early on in school, but then schools just stopped teaching grammar (here in Australia). I almost always know what's correct, in writing or speech, but I cannot for the life of me say why. It just 'feels' right or looks right - or wrong. But throw a bunch of grammatical terms at me (beyond noun, verb, adjective, etc) and it's so much gibberish.
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?
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.
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."
Great video! I was a linguistics major, and I even took linguistic anthropology, but I was very happy to listen to this video as refresher. I’m looking forward to your next video on the subjunctive! May I ask: do comments help you financially as much as liking and subscribing? Is that what you mean by comments helping the algorithm? And if so, do any comments work magic, even wordless emoji-filled (😂❤🎉 etc) comments?
The algorithm is notoriously opaque, but my understanding is that subscriber count helps with convincing external sponsors, to a certain extent, and that commenting actually drives views (because it's "engagement") which in turn drives ad revenue from the ads UA-cam is going to show you either way.
1:32 I have spent nearly my entire life in the Chicago area, and we say that East is “toward the lake“. Which leads to interesting mental calculations because you can drive around to the other side of Lake Michigan, and say go to Benton Harbor or Grand Rapids, and then when you think that East is wait… That doesn’t work on this side of the lake. Something I’ve always wondered is do we like keep mental track in our head of where the lake is when we do stuff like this?
When I moved from Virginia to California, I discovered that I'd been thinking of East as "towards the ocean" when I started getting the words confused. Odd, since in Virginia I lived 300 miles from the ocean, but apparently yes, I do keep mental track in my head of which way is oceanward. Or at least which way the rivers go. Also here in the area between San Francisco and San Jose, "east" is towards the bay, "north" is towards San Francisco, and "south" is towards San Jose -- even though by the compass, San Jose is east of here and the bay is due north. This gets really fun if you take I-280 South towards San Jose and keep going, because the highway is U-shaped and although it's the same road at some point in the middle of San Jose the signs will start telling you that you're on I-680 North going towards Oakland.
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.
That was a succinct description of why I stopped listening as well: passing off edge case trivia as something profound. That and their stylized sound editing which became insufferable. Unfortunately it seems like _Hidden Brain_ is heading down that path as well.
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.
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.
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.
The comparison of 'siniy' and 'goloboy' with 'red' and 'pink' is interesting, because to me of course pink is a distinct colour, and to think of it as 'light red' is very hard, although I certainly in early childhood already understood that I just had to add some white to red paint to get pink (like with that submarine in that Cary Grant movie). So there is a hint of something there, some difference in perceiving things that the language effects, if minor; though not, of course, that it's anything about what either of us can or cannot see, but just about our comfort with how we name and categorise it. Similar to how brown is just dark orange, or orange is light brown.
That's the thing, in Ukraine, we constantly confuse the two blues, our flag is synio-zhovtyi, as in the Constitution, BUT a lot of people say zhovto-blakytnyi, because it KINDA looks like the sky, but NOPE.
I haven’t gotten to learning the subjunctive in French yet, but every time I hear someone mention it they always make it sound daunting to learn and understand. I’m not sure it could possibly be anywhere near as bad as people make it out to be though. I’ve already gotten to the point where it’s just easier to think of French as being more abstract and almost poetic as it becomes more complex anyway. I’ve found I’m a lot less phased by it all how it works that way.
Ever been to Black sea? It was called Pondos Euxinos by Greeks, but we in Ukraine call it "black" because it is WAY darker than Mediterranean, or, say, ocean. it's actually bottle green color... you know those beer glass bottles? It's because of a lot of dark green seaweed. We still call it black. Not dark-green. Same here. White and Red sea stories are similar.
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
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.
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
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🖤
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.
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".
Adjectives and modifiers are exactly why the 100 words for snow myth started..because the languages in question aren't synthetic, unlike English. The modifiers just change/modify/extend the root, so it looks like "one" (different) word. Silly indeed.
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".
My memory of the actual radiolab episode (from 15 years ago) was that they didn't claim people couldn't conceive of blue; rather they claimed people just thought of blue objects as "their own color" because there was no way of replicating it with pigment yet. I'm not sure if saying this is just making the same mistake. I am glad my guess about the origin of the Inuit snow thing was right!
It's been so awesome to see your growth since I started watching your content in 2023. Seeing informative, accurate, and engaging content from someone who knows what they're talking about is always refreshing nowadays. Keep it up, the new stuff has been great!
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
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 ye, i was thinking "ye it makes sense for them to have 50 words for snow, there's lots of different kinds and having words for that if you're surrounded at all times seems logical"
@@Mercure250 I appreciated the Canadian in the comments here talking about all the words they have for snow; your language just reflects your environment
6:32 in Ukraine "synyi" is the darker blue, "goluboy" is just slang for homosexuality, but the lighter blue is "blakytny", and we CONSTANTLY confuse the two, for example, a lot of us grew up believing our FLAG is zhovto-blakytnyi, but it's actually synio-zhovtyi, meaning WE COULDN'T TELL THESE TWO COLORS APART ON OUR OWN NATIONAL SYMBOLS. And we call "purple" as "fiolet", while "purpurny" is closer to deep red. Magenta is not a thing, and word for "pink" would be "rose", USUALLY meaning the lighter shade. Hot pink is called "malinovy", literally "raspberry", and it's the color of Cossack flag and our armed forces insignia. So again, we even mess up naming colors that are legally important to define.
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
@@Winspur1982 Yea, that's the word for hail. So not a word for snow imo. These are the words I disagree with as being about snow: - puder ("powder", used as prefix in pudersnö for very fine snow) - hagel (see above) - tö (means "stuff is melting" basically) - mjäll (dandruff in modern Swedish) - platina (a metal) - manchester (the city, and also the Swedish word for corduroy for some reason)
Whenever people exoticize certain languages I generally point out that the gender system of the Romance languages would be considered highly unusual and exotic if the people writing the linguistics studies were from New Guinea.
"Eskimos have a hundred words for snow" is one of a large number of factoids that I've only heard about because they are so frequently debunked. I'm sure German has a word for that phenomenon...
*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
Waiting for the subjunctive video, seriously. Also, appreciate the word play on Worf, especially that ST has brought us the example of Wittgenstein's lion theory in episode Darmok :D
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...
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
This kind of reminds me on that one occasion when in a conversation with a native and mostly mono-lingual English speaker (no, not from North America) I mentioned that German has no present progressive... that whole "yeah, we just use present and if not clear from context we add something like 'right now' to indicate '-ing'" completely blew their mind. They absolutely could not wrap their head around the fact that a language can live without a progressive form. 😀
Regarding the subjunctive video: I learn Portuguese and I just don't understand why sometimes people use the subjunctive in relative clauses, especially when it's the future or present subjunctive. It drives me crazy and I just can't seem to find an answer
Irish has more than 70 words for adverbs of direction. Without going into details, I can provide a few tidbits of interest… Cardinal directions seem to be based on the perspective of the speaker facing the rising sun. The words pertaining to East can also mean ‘forward’. The words pertaining to West can also mean ‘back/behind’. The colloquial usage of words equivalent to ‘down’ can also mean North, and words equivalent to ‘up’ can also mean South (which is the opposite to English). When you consider the changing position of the rising Sun throughout the year (in the Northern hemisphere), it seems logical. And - in a sinister comparison to the Romans - the Irish word for ‘left-handed’ can also mean clumsy or awkward.
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.
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!'
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".
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.
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...
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).
Sky blue and navy blue are completely different colors in Slavic languages. Westerners are surprised by Chinese and others having same word for blue and green historically while ignoring they STILL use one word for two of the rainbow colors. Istead of three like it would be in Ancient China.
@Tome_Wyrm And that led and lead are pronounced the same but led is the past tense version of the lead it sounds like.
That island analogy was perfect lol
Thank you! It was admittedly inspired by that classic paper assigned to undergrads about the nacirema people 😂
@@languagejones 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!
@@languagejonesI received the Nacerima lecture as a junior in high school (1998)
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!
@@languagejones 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!”
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
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
@@languagejones 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.
@@languagejones-- Is that the same group that supposedly couldn't do exponents but if you set up a sequence with pebbles (as markers) and said 'fill in the next three blanks' nearly every adult was able to do it just fine?
@@sophigenitor Maybe not "impossible"; I'd think at most "less intuitive"
@@sophigenitorpiraha were able to count before trading with communities with larger number systems. They just had no need for that kind of precision above 10 or so. People and animals as a whole are really bad at conceptualizing numbers past a certain point, and we tend to just make broad guesses.
Like, if you handed me 15 bananas and 16 to someone else, I likely wouldn't notice the difference unless I got to look at them side by side.
The words for the wider number system were likely helpful for being more precise at a larger scale, but that is distinct from being unable to count at all.
1:35 We Ukrainians sometimes write mock articles describing Western countries in same language and terms they describe us (i.e. calling England "a post-Roman state", describing WW2 as "the Polish war", saying British "naturally lean to monarchy", or declaring how "English speakers" in America "want to reunite with UK"). We absolutely get the "noble savage" treatment, and it is extremely aggravating how the West refuses to LISTEN TO US, and even use the same words for us they would for themselves, using patterns like you did in the first minute instead. Worst part? They DO treat guys who invade us as more westerne and "higher culture", as they relate to colonists more than the colonized, so you'd have spaces talking about Ukraine without a single Ukrainian invited BUT with some "moscow-born expert" who then proceed to describe us same way Conquistadors described Aztecs.
P.S. Oh, I also thought you were talking about English at the start. Even tho am a coffee not tea drinker. BTW, we have Left-bank and Right-bank (upside down on typical map) geographic distinction too.
I'm not sure if it's because I used to work with a lot of Ukrainians or if it's because I'm an anti imperialist, or if its because one of my favourite bands has a song about their Ukrainian best friend, but as a Brit (admittedly not living in the UK) I consider Ukraine as culturally equal (or better). And I know I shouldn't but because of recent activities I am biased against Russia, considering it culturally barbaric. I know some wonderful Russian people and know I shouldn't judge its people by its insane leadership. But anyway, don't let idiot media make you think that we all think less of you 🇺🇦✊️
Least patriotic Ukrainian gamer. It is truly a shame that you get the "noble savage" treatment.
“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!”
Good answer. Next time I hear Ukraine being called a "post-Soviet state" i'm gonna explain people what their "post-drone body" would look like.
So...Irish are good at math.
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.
The same was done when the danish Realm started to support minority languages. In the past everything that was not basic like trade, law, science was conducted in danish so the local languages didn't have words for a lot of stuff, so they created these words or began using archaic words again.
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 UA-camr 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).
That opening was very fun. Cool stuff!
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.
I imagine the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis also was influential on the Pravic language of Ursula K. LeGuin's book "The Dispossessed." My favorite demonstration of this is the scene where Shevek's daughter says "you can share the handkerchief I use" - illustrating that this language of anarchists has no possessive form.
I didn't know the name of the idea, but it was so deeply ingrained in me as a kid that it's very difficult for me to imagine things any other way. Not that language stops people from seeing colors, but that it creates bias. Like, if I try to remember a blue thing I saw a year ago, it might be easier to recall the exact shade if I spoke Russian? Or if somebody suggested I paint my bicycle blue, the language they used might influence the shade that I chose? Is that the weak form or something else?
I loved the linguistical part of the movie, hated the "alien language rewires your brain" part
I think the title is "The Story of Your Life", because I remember the collection is called "The Story of Your Life and Others"
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
@@languagejones 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!
"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. 😆
This sounds oddly like some of John Dryden's translations of classical poetry (for example his Aeneid).
@@Winspur1982well, given how the Large Language Models are trained, perhaps that is no coincidence?
@@DawnDavidson I don't know enough about language model AI to say. Going purely from memory here: Dryden's Aeneid begins "Arms and the man I sing, who, forc'd by fate / and haughty Juno's unrelenting hate"
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.
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 don't know Chinese but in Japanese 先 means previous, as in "last week", but can also mean future in some contexts and it still confuses me.
I'm pretty advanced in Chinese but I've gotta admit that the up-down model (rather than english's forward-backward) does actually catch me out a lot in casual speech, I often have to double check/second guess myself when saying if something was 上周 or will be 下週. Contrarily 以前 and 以後 are completely intuitive to me because they follow the forward-backward model that I've internalised through my native language.
They're not fundamentally different perceptions of time or anything, but the way out native language frames something can definitely impact how we build our basic mental models for it
@@elizakeating8415 I know very little Chinese, but it fascinates me that one of those "before / after" pairs uses the character for the Zhou Dynasty.
@@elizakeating8415 The trick I used to remember it in the beginning was to think of a timetable or one of those wall calendars where all the days of the month are one big column. On those, the next day or other unit of time is always below the current one and the previous one is above :)
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.
Aymara, spoken in western South America, has a great system of past tense that includes past tense personal knowledge, so I would use one form to say I went to the store (I know to be true) vs John went to work (he left with his hat and briefcase but I don’t actually know where he went).
"John seemed to be heading to work"
@@revangerang of course the concept can be expressed in any language, but when a feature like this is built into the grammar of a language it can have a lot of useful properties that affect the language as a whole. for example it would make pronoun dropping a lot easier/feasible because it restricts the number of pronouns that would make sense to go along with the verb. If you say "xyz seemed to be heading to work" you're almost always going to be talking about someone else outside of the conversation, since you wouldn't have doubt about whether you yourself went to work, and the person you're talking to would also know whether they went to work. So you must be talking about some third person, so the only pronoun that fits is he/she/they and with that context the sentence is clear even if you omit the pronoun. idk if this is the case in Aymara or not, but many languages work like this (unlike english)
@@bobboberson8297 True! Tho in English we can leave some things out that languages like Japanese can’t or don’t. (That’s the only language I’m proficient enough in to use as an example, but I’m sure they all have tendencies towards more or less specificity in varying contexts).
@@revangerang japanese drops way more stuff than english, not really a good example
@ But they also add in a lot of kureru, ageru, saseru, etc. And for yes or no questions, they don’t just reply yes or no, they reply with a phrase or sentence related to the question. Same with asking if they want to do something or not, you have to ask “do you want to do (blank) or do you want to not do (blank).” So it probably about evens out in the end
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).
Upper Egypt vs Lower Egypt and Left bank and Right bank Ukraine, would need you to upside-down the map or just start thinking in river flow.
My undergrad was in Anthropology. That intro reminded me of the "Body Ritual Among the Nacirema."
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!
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.
Made me think of "chicken-fried steak"!
I had a GIANT argument with an English/Philosophy professor about the whole ‘language shapes thought’ think when we read 1984. He was adamant throughout the unit that the thing they do in the book to restrict thoughts by removing words from existence would work in real life, and seemingly got really mad when I brought up that not having the words to describe something can’t stop you from knowing it exists, and that that’s where new words come from.
While that's true.. it's also a lot harder to describe a feeling you have no word for.
I'm non-binary and while I knew from a very young age that I wasn't the sex I was asigned at birth, I also didn't feel like the opposite sex. Not knowing that there was another option, I was feeling miserable because I didn't know what to do with myself.
It might not be as easy as 1984 wants us to believe, but having words matters. It's how we form society and convey ourself to others.
A culture so deeply conditioned against independent thought that words can be rendered meaningless through political propaganda likely would not have the agency to come up with a new word on their own.
You're right that the lack of a word tends to incentivize the creation of a new word, but that relies on the assumption that people are capable of creating new words in the first place. An assumption that doesn't hold much water in the story.
@@plesleronbrother where do you think the words came from
So awesome that you brought up the word "before" and the weirdess of it meaning "in front of" and "a previous time".
German and Japanese do it too!
It's been making me a little crazy since I noticed it.
Thinking a bit about it, I’ve come to the conclusion that I probably prefer past=before to a past=behind view - in that you are always moving into the future with the past in view - you can see the past in memory in a way that you cannot see the future. It’s like walking backwards, or rowing - you can guess what might come next, but only through the contours of what you can see in front of you, which is the past; it may be useful to predict the future, but will never provide a certainty. You see the past before you, and you step blindly backwards into the future.
@@victoriab8186 It definitely makes sense.
Dr. Jones, you are a perfect example of why if anyone with a PhD is willing to talk to me about the topic in which they are an expert, I will listen with rapt attention. Please keep doing this; I am so happy to have discovered your channel!
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_UA-cam arguable snowflake and snowpack doesn't count since they're compounds, and if you include that, well you have infinite.
Knew instantly you were talking about coffee haha... I live in NYC and recognized myself :)
Like all good anthropology!
One could do a whole vid on direction and location in Manhattan.
Have you ever tried to explain to a person in California why '23rd & 8th' is very specific but 'Penn Station' is very vague?
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
As far as I know many Inuits/Yupiks in Canada happily call themselves Eskimos in English, and have no problem with others calling them Eskimos.
The word "inuit" means "human", so anyone not fron their population is, by their language, not a human. Therefore calling them "Inuit" is the highest form of racism towards all other people.
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!
I'm Alaskan.
We discuss snow in different ways than people who don't have so much.
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.
It's interesting how nonsense just gets accepted like swallowing spiders in your sleep, there's a whole thing about biblically accurate angels being wheels of eyes and stuff it just which is just rubbish but it got totally believed.
@@apersonlikeanyother6895 Yes, the spiders story was debunked as it was Spiders Georg all along.
@@apersonlikeanyother6895 You might want to consider Ezekiel 1:15-18, Ezekiel 10:10-12, both of those being NIV. It's hard to say that they are just rubbish when "... each was like a wheel intersecting a wheel. .... Their entire bodies, including their backs, their hands and their wings, were completely full of eyes, as were their four wheels." With descriptions like that, I would think it's easy to understand where the "biblically accurate angels" being wheels of eyes comes from, and believed.
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
@@魏志啊
“I were” is *usually* incorrect, but “if I were” is correct, as an example.
Most native English speakers are monolingual so it’s not difficult to confuse them about their own language!
@@marcmorgan8606--- Underrated comment.
Yorkshire English speakers still say "I were" for the indicative, altho I think this may be dying out.
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
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 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 😂
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.
@@gcewingnow I’m imagining the feud between Anish Kapoor and Stuart Semple as a Greek epic
“And thus, the tyrant Kapoor dipped his middle finger in the forbidden ichor, defying the will of the gods”
I mean, technically nobody can see Vantablack, regardless of time period. That's kind of its whole Thing.
Just go into a deep cave. Perfect, unadulterated, 100% pitch black.
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.
I though more about it like you are standing in the queue and people in front of you will get to the target earlier, before you
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
@@languagejones Jesus and Darwin, too, meseems. Safer not to think! :-}
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'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" 😛)
That sounds very like my understanding of English. I learned a few basic terms very early on in school, but then schools just stopped teaching grammar (here in Australia). I almost always know what's correct, in writing or speech, but I cannot for the life of me say why. It just 'feels' right or looks right - or wrong. But throw a bunch of grammatical terms at me (beyond noun, verb, adjective, etc) and it's so much gibberish.
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?
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.
i thought it was because blue was just a SHADE OF GREEN??
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."
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.
I'm glad you finally made a video about this
Brilliant video!! I learned a lot -- as I almost always do from your videos!!
I love the subjunctive in Spanish! It's so useful in ways I didn't at all learn in class.
I totally agree!
Great video! I was a linguistics major, and I even took linguistic anthropology, but I was very happy to listen to this video as refresher.
I’m looking forward to your next video on the subjunctive!
May I ask: do comments help you financially as much as liking and subscribing? Is that what you mean by comments helping the algorithm? And if so, do any comments work magic, even wordless emoji-filled (😂❤🎉 etc) comments?
The algorithm is notoriously opaque, but my understanding is that subscriber count helps with convincing external sponsors, to a certain extent, and that commenting actually drives views (because it's "engagement") which in turn drives ad revenue from the ads UA-cam is going to show you either way.
1:32 I have spent nearly my entire life in the Chicago area, and we say that East is “toward the lake“. Which leads to interesting mental calculations because you can drive around to the other side of Lake Michigan, and say go to Benton Harbor or Grand Rapids, and then when you think that East is wait… That doesn’t work on this side of the lake. Something I’ve always wondered is do we like keep mental track in our head of where the lake is when we do stuff like this?
When I moved from Virginia to California, I discovered that I'd been thinking of East as "towards the ocean" when I started getting the words confused. Odd, since in Virginia I lived 300 miles from the ocean, but apparently yes, I do keep mental track in my head of which way is oceanward. Or at least which way the rivers go.
Also here in the area between San Francisco and San Jose, "east" is towards the bay, "north" is towards San Francisco, and "south" is towards San Jose -- even though by the compass, San Jose is east of here and the bay is due north. This gets really fun if you take I-280 South towards San Jose and keep going, because the highway is U-shaped and although it's the same road at some point in the middle of San Jose the signs will start telling you that you're on I-680 North going towards Oakland.
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.
I used to love NPR’s “clever”shows like RadioLab, then I ran out of patience. You nailed it.
That was a succinct description of why I stopped listening as well: passing off edge case trivia as something profound. That and their stylized sound editing which became insufferable. Unfortunately it seems like _Hidden Brain_ is heading down that path as well.
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.
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.
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.
The comparison of 'siniy' and 'goloboy' with 'red' and 'pink' is interesting, because to me of course pink is a distinct colour, and to think of it as 'light red' is very hard, although I certainly in early childhood already understood that I just had to add some white to red paint to get pink (like with that submarine in that Cary Grant movie). So there is a hint of something there, some difference in perceiving things that the language effects, if minor; though not, of course, that it's anything about what either of us can or cannot see, but just about our comfort with how we name and categorise it. Similar to how brown is just dark orange, or orange is light brown.
Technology Connections has an excellent video about the color brown if you're curious!
That's the thing, in Ukraine, we constantly confuse the two blues, our flag is synio-zhovtyi, as in the Constitution, BUT a lot of people say zhovto-blakytnyi, because it KINDA looks like the sky, but NOPE.
Pink isn’t literally light red, though, it can also be closer to magenta.
I actually do distinguish between "light red/pastel red" and "pink," though they could overlap in some contexts.
I haven’t gotten to learning the subjunctive in French yet, but every time I hear someone mention it they always make it sound daunting to learn and understand. I’m not sure it could possibly be anywhere near as bad as people make it out to be though. I’ve already gotten to the point where it’s just easier to think of French as being more abstract and almost poetic as it becomes more complex anyway. I’ve found I’m a lot less phased by it all how it works that way.
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.
Ever been to Black sea? It was called Pondos Euxinos by Greeks, but we in Ukraine call it "black" because it is WAY darker than Mediterranean, or, say, ocean. it's actually bottle green color... you know those beer glass bottles? It's because of a lot of dark green seaweed. We still call it black. Not dark-green. Same here. White and Red sea stories are similar.
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.
Man you talked so calm in the ad read I didn't even realise I was watching the ad after a while
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
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🖤
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.
Excellent video and the analogy in the intro was the cherry on top!
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".
Adjectives and modifiers are exactly why the 100 words for snow myth started..because the languages in question aren't synthetic, unlike English. The modifiers just change/modify/extend the root, so it looks like "one" (different) word. Silly indeed.
I'm excited to see your upcoming video on the subjunctive in Romance languages! :-)
OK, you got me with the island trick. Well played!
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".
My memory of the actual radiolab episode (from 15 years ago) was that they didn't claim people couldn't conceive of blue; rather they claimed people just thought of blue objects as "their own color" because there was no way of replicating it with pigment yet.
I'm not sure if saying this is just making the same mistake.
I am glad my guess about the origin of the Inuit snow thing was right!
It's been so awesome to see your growth since I started watching your content in 2023. Seeing informative, accurate, and engaging content from someone who knows what they're talking about is always refreshing nowadays. Keep it up, the new stuff has been great!
I actually knew immediately that he's talking about Manhattan lol
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
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 😠
@@TetrapodsOfLaniakea did they also treat you with contempt by sending back your messenger empty-handed through enemy territory?
Thanks!
Thank you!
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
@@ArchangelTenshi ye, i was thinking "ye it makes sense for them to have 50 words for snow, there's lots of different kinds and having words for that if you're surrounded at all times seems logical"
@@Mercure250 I appreciated the Canadian in the comments here talking about all the words they have for snow; your language just reflects your environment
6:32 in Ukraine "synyi" is the darker blue, "goluboy" is just slang for homosexuality, but the lighter blue is "blakytny", and we CONSTANTLY confuse the two, for example, a lot of us grew up believing our FLAG is zhovto-blakytnyi, but it's actually synio-zhovtyi, meaning WE COULDN'T TELL THESE TWO COLORS APART ON OUR OWN NATIONAL SYMBOLS. And we call "purple" as "fiolet", while "purpurny" is closer to deep red. Magenta is not a thing, and word for "pink" would be "rose", USUALLY meaning the lighter shade. Hot pink is called "malinovy", literally "raspberry", and it's the color of Cossack flag and our armed forces insignia. So again, we even mess up naming colors that are legally important to define.
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.
"hagel" makes me think hail. But I know pieces or clumps of falling snow can get rather big.
@@Winspur1982 Yea, that's the word for hail. So not a word for snow imo.
These are the words I disagree with as being about snow:
- puder ("powder", used as prefix in pudersnö for very fine snow)
- hagel (see above)
- tö (means "stuff is melting" basically)
- mjäll (dandruff in modern Swedish)
- platina (a metal)
- manchester (the city, and also the Swedish word for corduroy for some reason)
This is the best language channel on UA-cam. Thank you for being awesome
Whenever people exoticize certain languages I generally point out that the gender system of the Romance languages would be considered highly unusual and exotic if the people writing the linguistics studies were from New Guinea.
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!! :)
"Eskimos have a hundred words for snow" is one of a large number of factoids that I've only heard about because they are so frequently debunked. I'm sure German has a word for that phenomenon...
"Irrglaube" would be the closest word to that
*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
0:57 gave away that you are talking about a New Yorker.
Waiting for the subjunctive video, seriously.
Also, appreciate the word play on Worf, especially that ST has brought us the example of Wittgenstein's lion theory in episode Darmok :D
1:05 not knowing where this goes, but are we talking about Whisky?
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...
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
This kind of reminds me on that one occasion when in a conversation with a native and mostly mono-lingual English speaker (no, not from North America) I mentioned that German has no present progressive... that whole "yeah, we just use present and if not clear from context we add something like 'right now' to indicate '-ing'" completely blew their mind. They absolutely could not wrap their head around the fact that a language can live without a progressive form. 😀
The opening really illustrates the difference in respect and reverence in the way academics generally speak of POC versus Whites. Powerful.
I've been studying the subjunctive for some time now and i feel like i haven't made all that much progress in understanding it
I've got you!
Regarding the subjunctive video: I learn Portuguese and I just don't understand why sometimes people use the subjunctive in relative clauses, especially when it's the future or present subjunctive. It drives me crazy and I just can't seem to find an answer
Irish has more than 70 words for adverbs of direction. Without going into details, I can provide a few tidbits of interest…
Cardinal directions seem to be based on the perspective of the speaker facing the rising sun. The words pertaining to East can also mean ‘forward’. The words pertaining to West can also mean ‘back/behind’. The colloquial usage of words equivalent to ‘down’ can also mean North, and words equivalent to ‘up’ can also mean South (which is the opposite to English). When you consider the changing position of the rising Sun throughout the year (in the Northern hemisphere), it seems logical.
And - in a sinister comparison to the Romans - the Irish word for ‘left-handed’ can also mean clumsy or awkward.
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.
Thank you: your videos are always precious!
Very much looking forward to the video about the subjunctive!
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.
Thanks!
Thank you!
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!'
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".