Language, Culture, and Thought
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- Опубліковано 9 тра 2024
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More on Arrival: • Writing Endings | Arri...
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SOURCES:
Rafael E. Núñez and Eve Sweetser, 2005. With the Future Behind Them: Convergent Evidence From Aymara Language and Gesture in the Crosslinguistic Comparison of Spatial Construals of Time. Cognitive Science 30 (2006) 401-450
Brown P. Time and space in tzeltal: is the future uphill?. Front Psychol. 2012;3:212. Published 2012 Jul 9. doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2012.00212
O'Gorman, Catherine. “Conceptual metaphor and spatial representations of time : the role of affect.” (2017).
Dilkina, K., McClelland, J. L, & Boroditsky, L. (2007). How Language Affects Thought in a Connectionist Model. Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, 29. Retrieved from escholarship.org/uc/item/7q47...
Fuhrman, O. and Boroditsky, L. (2010), Cross‐Cultural Differences in Mental Representations of Time: Evidence From an Implicit Nonlinguistic Task. Cognitive Science, 34: 1430-1451. doi.org/10.1111/j.1551-6709.2...
0:00 Intro
1:06 Linguistic Determinism
3:05 Arrival (spoilers)
5:36 Reality
7:10 Conceptual metaphors
9:12 Lexical Considerations - Наука та технологія
Did anyone else notice how he causally dropped Oqolaawak in as an example?
Subtle flex
I didn't realize the first time I watched it
@@aro4cinglife fellow based dude rewatching biblaridion
I almost missed it lol
He flexs his Refugium.
Hey, small correction regarding the Icelandic word for banana ("bjúgaldin") shown at 0:20. It does not, in fact, mean "sausage fruit", but rather something like "bent fruit" or "curved fruit". "Bjúg-" is derived from "boginn" which means "bent" (cognate with "bow" I would guess without looking it up), "bjúga" is a type of salty horse-meat/mutton sausage (not sausages in general) derived from the same root. Secondly, it's not a word that is actually used colloquially, we just say "banani".
i always find it interesting to see cognates just in case you do too: the German word for bow is Bogen
Makkara perkele
:)
i would venture to guess that you are correct about "boginn" being cognate with "bow," as the dutch word for it is "boog"
@@Jerald_Fitzjerald Yes he is. All of them come from Proto-Germanic *bugô.
8:13 I find it funny that happiness is associated with the cold in a language generally spoken in really hot parts of the world
I think that makes a lot of sense. Intense heat can be harsh, so cold is refreshing.
Imagine almost never having experienced cold that could actually harm you in any way, but experiencing extreme heat nearly every day. I expect someone from the ancient Middle East could scarcely imagine snow, let alone frostbite or hypothermia. Maybe in some parts they've seen it atop very tall mountains, but that's a very different experience from being buried in snow during a harsh Northern European winter, struggling to keep a fire going and find enough food.
The Arabian desert gets awfully chilly at night, but it won't kill you as fast as the daytime sun.
As someone who grew up in the Southwest USA, and developed a deep and personal relationship with the cold drinks aisle in every grocery store, I must say “cold” is definitely “happy”.
I'm brazilian and I can relate lmao
Imagine a culture that can express ideas they have no specific words for because they have no word for "Sapir-Worf Hypothesis"
*slow clap*
Fabulous.
lol
Then instantly lose the ability to do so when their version of Whorf comes around.
glad to find out that knowing time goes down in chinese would pay off someday when i first saw that thumbnail
interestingly, i kinda came up with this independently. i'm working on mahjongg-tile designs based on the old chinese small seal script and i was thinking of how to illustrate the cardinal directions. i used wedges showing a certain direction, but i didn't want to copy the "north is up" system, at least not without a good reason. and han-period maps apparently didn't use it. instead i combined the path of the sun in a day with the writing direction (top-to-down) and came up with "east is up". i didn't know the writing direction also reflects the terms for time 😅.
@@sofia.eris.bauhaus "east is up"
is that an unintentional reference to Nico and the Niners, a Twenty Øne Pilots song?
@@masicbemester if it is, i'm unaware of it. ;)
@@sofia.eris.bauhaus conclusion: unintentional
@@sofia.eris.bauhaus "East is up"
Look up the etymology of orientate
2:52 The way I was taught was that the past was in front because you could see it, whereas the future was behind you because you didn't know it.
Like the Discworld trolls
That makes a weird kind of sense. We stumble blindly into the future with our focus on the past. Possibly a superior metaphor.
@@volcryndarkstar3283 Yes, I think it could speak to the European romanticism of exploration and conquest that in the English conception of time we think of ourselves as facing the unknown future and walking boldly into it. Language is so fun
the other way around then would be
future: infront, since that is where we are going, and you want to face the direction you go
past: behind, since it is where we come from.
@@yowtfputthemaskbackon9202 Yeah, that's the "normal" European/Westernish way of looking at it, which is why the inverse sounds strange to all of us.
6:10 I think my favorite thing people try to do to portray another language as mysterious an exotic is "X language has Y term that cannot be translated into English. It means [perfectly adequate English translation]."
In fairness, the English translation often does not have the same cultural or linguistic weight.
It's partially true though. One of the biggest misconception most people have about language is that you just get the same meaning of a word 1 to 1 into another language. That's almost never the case. For example there are languages that have no word for "sound". They don't say that sounds good. They would discribe the same thing in a completely different way. And that's in my opinion the interesting thing. The thought comes first, then then the thought gets shaped by the language you're thinking in. So it's the same thought you have but in one language: the music "sounds good" and in the other one: the music "comes good to the ear". In one language you "are balding" in the other one you don't have a verb for it and say something like: you are "getting a bald head" it is kinda the same meaning but discribed differntly
I love the body metaphor for cars in Navajo. It’s like they were envisioning Transformers
Conceptual metaphors is one of my favourite parts of conlanging, but it’s also extremely tedious and confusing to separate yourself from your own language. Thank you for keeping on making videos!
God fucking tell me about it man, it's probably the most time consuming part of conlanging for me
As my roommate often puts it: "All language is metaphor."
Take, for example, the related words "Black," "Blue," and "Blonde" in English. They all come from the same PIE root, but are words for contrasting colors. Why is that? Because the PIE root describes ash after a fire, which can be dark and charred or bright and white, so the varying associations became different words. The original word and the ash connotations have been lost, but they still have that linguistic DNA.
Ha didn't know that. But i do know that there apparently is some confusion if the old Norse word blár means blue or black (a raven would be described as blár, although it is mostly translated as blue). So that fits nicely.
@@carlstein9278 Colour terms are very fluid in language.
The same root word can easily develop into different colours between languages (italian 'verde' is green, but albanian 'verdhë' is yellow).
Similarly, one root word can split in meaning depending on the context (serbo-croatian 'plav' means blonde for hair, but blue for everything else).
@@carlstein9278 people used to think of blue as a different shade of black. Just as how we think of red and pink as very distinct but in fact they're just different shades of the same color. People in the past would think of pink as light red but even with a gradient between the two modern humans can clearly pick out a boundary on the gradient where red stops and pink begins.
Damn, are you roommates with Ludwig Wittgenstein 😳😳
I'd read that "black" and "blank" were cognates, with "blank" being closer to the original meaning (and that the same original root now means white in many other European languages). This is the first I've heard of it meaning ash.
I just looked it up on Wiktionary (so this information may not be completely accurate, and like all reconstructions is only theoretical to begin with), and apparently both are mostly true, but the history goes back much further than I thought, with the original root (all the way back in PIE) being *bʰleyǵ-, meaning "to shine", which split in Proto-Germanic into *blakaz and *blankaz, meaning burnt/black and bright/shining/white/blinding, respectively. (In other languages like Ancient Greek and Latin that particular split didn't happen.)
"Blue" in fact split off even earlier, as PIE *bʰleh₁- (though there is no description of how this evolved, and it seems to disagree with the *bʰleh₁- page itself, which doesn't acknowledge any color meaning), from PIE *bʰel- 'white, shiny' (which is also the source of *bʰleyǵ-), becoming *blēwaz 'blue' in Proto-Germanic (but in Latin the cognate 'flāvus' meant "yellow"). *blakaz seems to have mostly just become "black", and doesn't have any other notable descendants in English. *bʰel- is also the root of the Latin and Ancient Greek words for "to burn" (flagro and φλέγω (phlégō), respectively), as well as English 'blaze'.
Through Old and Middle English, *blankaz became "blanc" meaning "white, grey", which fell out of use after "blank" and several other cognates were borrowed from Old French, (such as "blind" and "blanch") and at some point "white" took its place ("white" comes from Proto-Germanic *hwītaz, from the PIE root *ḱweyt-, also meaning "to shine", and seems to have just kept the meaning "white" completely unchanged all the way from Proto-Germanic to Modern English, with no other descendants). "Blink" is also derived from *blankaz through Old English. The English words "bleak" and "bleach" come from *blaikaz, a Proto-Germanic synonym of *blankaz also derived from the same root *bʰleyǵ-.
"Blond(e)" however comes through Old French from a distinct PIE root *bʰlendʰ-, meaning "to blend, to mix up", "to make cloudy or murky", or (this sense is noted to be contested) "blond, red-haired, ruddy". It seems that if the meaning doesn't come directly from PIE, it comes from Frankish *blund "a mixed color between golden and light-brown". It's cognate with 'blend', which comes via Old English, but is not cognate with any of the others mentioned above.
8:12 No guessing why Arabic would happiness would be described as being cold
Desert
Or like Norse hell is cold, rather than hot.
Something I remember from the late anthropologist David Graebers writings was that he said Malagasy would switch to French when demanding and imperative because it was the language that the French colonists of Madagascar spoke, mixed with the fact that Malagasy culture focused around making decisions by consensus rather than command. I always thought that was interesting.
@Bryson Sanger I found where I got it from if you look up "Beyond Power/Knowledge
an exploration of the relation of power, ignorance and stupidity" there should be a pdf and he starts talking about it at the end of page 5 if you were interested on reading it in a bit more detail.
A correction on Aymara and similar Andean languages: the person doesn't walk backwards into the future. Rather, time moves forward through the person, so that the future moves into the front (i.e. becomes the past) as time goes on.
It's a subtle distinction, but these sorts of differences in conceptions of time are really interesting. Speakers interviewed of languages with these sorts of conceptions (which interestingly, also includes Mandarin Chinese speakers) will typically intuitively explain this placement as the future being behind and thus unseeable, while the past is in front and thus seeable. The person is not journeying through time, but rather time is a set of events moving into the person's view.
The time moving instead of the person is probadly more logical for most languages, like for example in Polish where the time is moving ''approaching'' you as in the word for the future ''przyszłość'', meaning ''something coming, something that is gonna visit you''.
oh that's neat.
That metaphor actually makes a lot more sense to me than time moving forwards, I think I might try to incorporate that into my next conlang
You sir are one of the best content creators on the internet
In german you would say in the internet
@@mikagerbendorf75 did anyone ask you, german?
Dude if any of my language teachers made things this interessting and captivating, many would have straight A’s.
This content is Amazing.
To be fair, language learning and linguistics/conlanging are two very different things
@@Mercure250 Yeah but it'd be nice if the Spanish teacher explained anything to us about language instead of just having us memorize nouns. Took months for him to mention that adjectives are after, not before.
@@40watt53 Oh, I do agree language classes are bullshit. That's why I prefer to learn languages by myself, now. Language teaching is kind of broken. Actually, I'd say teaching in general, in at least most Western countries, is kinda broken.
@@Mercure250 I'd say the single biggest problem is how late it is, we're required 7th and 8th and you can optionally take it multiple times. (Only Spanish). So even if you have a bad teacher at least you'd learn a lot more if you were like 8 at the time.
Or like at our elementary school y'know most of the day was with one teacher but there were "specials" where it was whatever unique class once or twice a week, P.E. or art for example. They should just toss Spanish in there and it'd be so much better and easier.
@@40watt53 Well, it's more complicated than that I think. It is true that children have a better time grasping things like pronunciation at their age, but it's not like teens and adults can't learn languages very effectively, if not better in certain aspects. I think the issue is with how the classes are structured. I mean, in the first place, the best way to learn is through immersion, and that's often very lackluster.
Plus, if it took so long to learn adjectives come after the noun, that's an obvious problem as well. Like, there's something really wrong with the class to begin with, there.
The time discussion reminds me of my Pure Malay experiment. When all loanwords are ditched, and thus loaned concepts too, I've found out that Malay doesn't have a word for "time". The concept of "time" doesn't have its own root vocab, but instead expressed by other means.
Malay's vocabs show that time is moving; _hari yang akan datang,_ "the coming day"; _hari yang telah lalu,_ "the day that passed". It's also worth noting that the word for day, _hari,_ is also used to refer to the sun, which moves (based on our perspective), instead of us.
The word for "tomorrow", _ésok_ and _bésok,_ have cognates that mean "morning" in neighboring languages; suggesting Malay views "morning" as "future", and that the next day-and by extension, days in general-begins in the morning. The word for "yesterday", fittingly, is _semalam,_ formed from the root _malam,_ "night"; suggesting it views "night" as "past".
Other vocabs for "tomorrow" are _belakang hari_ (the day behind) and _kemudian hari,_ the latter having cognates with other langs meaning "behind" or "rear". On the other hand, the word _dahulu_ and _dulu_ not only refer to the past, but also to the concept of "going ahead" or "first", suggesting that Malay views us as facing the past, with the future behind us.
Some other vocabs used to express time makes it as if it's a space of some sort; _mengosongkan_ (to empty) can be used with time to mean "to spare".
So, we face the past, the future behind us, and the day moves. Yet this view is challenged when loans are taken into account, with words like _masa depan_ (the time in the front) used to express the future, contradicting the previously established concept that we face the past instead of the future.
I've came to the conclusion that Malay views time as moving, the future in the back and the past in the front, and we're "contained" in the space of time. This experiment was really interesting to see (a fabricated version, at the very least) how Malay worked before loans from foreign languages and cultures came.
Never really thought about it that way
tak faham
Another interesting element of cultural metaphors is that they allow you to come up with words that have no direct equivalent in your native language.
For example, Japanese has kuchisabishii (lit. "lonely mouth"), which means eating out of boredom or stress rather than hunger; and tachiyomi (lit. "stand-read"), reading books in the store aisle without buying them.
In Indonesian, when turning the lights off, you use ‘mati’ which is kill
WAKE UP BIBLARIDION POSTED
7:03 *Hebrew in the right direction in an Adobe CC platform? It's a miracle!*
7:56 the Zulu phrase there expresses strife and not just run of the mill trouble, it's interesting they weight some words carry among different languages.
Wait, the Icelandic word for banana means "sausage fruit"? That's a great fact to start with!
aardappel is the Afrikaans word for potato, don't now why it isn't similar to the English word since both are germanic languages.
Wiktionary says "bjúgaldin" is very rare. The usual term is "banani", which is borrowed, just like "tómatur".
@@pierreabbat6157 think words for most none native things will be borrowed to be fair.
@@bri1085 It's because potatoes come from the Americas, so the Germanic languages had to come up with a word for it recently. Some borrowed Spanish "patata" from a Native American language, some calqued French "pomme de terre" meaning "earth-apple", and some borrowed Italian "tartufolo" (originally meaning "truffel") with a modification of the initial "t" to a "k", i.e. German "Kartoffel".
@@pierreabbat6157 That's what my Icelandic friends have told me, and same for "flatbaka", which has largely given way to "pizza" (or "pítsa", which fits Icelandic orthography better). They were attempts at coining "native" translations for certain things, but they gave way to borrowed terms instead. Tölva ("computer") and sími ("telephone") have stuck around though, and my friends don't think those words are going anywhere fast, so that's cool (although, interestingly, I have seen "kompjútar" from time to time to mean "to compute", almost always in the phrase "does not compute")
sry, i just had to point it out: at 6:55 , you wrote Brucke, while Brücke would be correct.
Umlauts matter.
I think this is a must-watch for any world-builder (especially 7:09 and on!). Even if you're not a conlanger, but have all your characters (even from different language places) speak the same language. Just having them describe a panda as bear-cat; or a walrus as a sea-elephant can already start giving so much top-iceberg!
Hippopotamus is the name the ancient Greeks gave the animal. It literally means river-horse, so this is an excellent idea.
@@WASDLeftClick We (Dutch) call it Nile-horse, we took a few centuries longer, but at least we were slightly more specific in our weird and vague description. We also call "tortoises" & "turtles": "land shield toads" & "water shield toads"; and "gloves" we call "handshoes". We're weirdly practical and visually descriptive in how we name things, I think.
@@daddyleon Ah that's fascinating! I don't know Dutch but I do know a little German. One thing I found interesting about the language is that it doesn't seem to have special words for the meat of an animal you intend to eat. In English, we call the animal a pig and the meat pork, but Germans just say schwein and schweinfleisch, "pig-meat" in English. You could even call it pig-flesh since the words share roots, but in English you usually say flesh when you refer to meat you don't intend to eat, especially if it's still attached to a living animal. Seems to be a pretty similar thing to Dutch in that regard.
But you have to be careful and make sure their alternate words makes sense and is based on their history. "Sea-elephant" as a term for walrus makes perfect sense for people from Eurasia whose cultures knew about elephants long before they ever saw a walrus. It would make zero sense for one of the indigenous languages of North America to use the term since they wouldn't have one for "elephant", nor a culture from Scandanavia who would have encountered walrus long before they did elephants.
@@WASDLeftClick Yes, I know I found that curious too! Though Dutch doesn't have it in the same way as English. We call we give chicken the same name, but where you buy differs. Most would say butcher but some would say "poulier" (from French). Some other classy words are French too, while cool words are from (American) English. But they often double up, like, we have two words for curbstone: a classy French one and a more 'down to earth' one that's clearly Dutch.
There are two lovely videos about the English part:
ua-cam.com/video/8WTvp_IKXPE/v-deo.html
ua-cam.com/video/wA2xRVMOThc/v-deo.html
I’m a simple man. I see a new Biblaridion video, I like it.
Small correction, 周 shown at 2:40 should be zhōu instead of gè
It's interesting that, as a native Russian speak who knows English fairly well, I still find myself messing up the pronounce when thinking about objects. Not as often as before, of course, and barely when writing, but this still happens. Plus, even if I write a perfectly gender-neutral sentence in English, some part of my brain still feels verbs as if they are gender specific, and sometimes I need to pause and re-read what was written to understand, if I used a word that really indicates gender or is it just the feeling of how it would work in Russian.
8:26 it's interesting the ideas that have come to be attached to animals. I was genuinely shocked to find out owls are actually daft because how I learned to attack wisdom and intelligence to them from consuming a lot of western media.
I honestly just love the way mandarin sometimes describes animals they don’t have words for. Lobster equals dragon shrimp
As a first-generation Chinese-American, I wish I'd realized that when younger. Knowing that would have helped me remember how to say lobster so much more easily. (Though I guess it's more relevant that lobster didn't come up in conversation much; I remember "computer" without issue, and only later realized it meant "electric brain".)
Owl = Cat Bird
is my favorite one
@@LimeyLassen it is actually cat-headed bird which sounds much more fun
@@Duiker36 In Turkish "Computer" is "Knowledge Counter"
@@gokbay3057 in Mandarin it is electric brain
Question: have you thought about the cultures and languages of the people who lived in the central regions before the arrival of the Thirēans?
10:04 "the metal that thinks" sounds so... metal.
I really felt enlightened when the turn on open/turn off close part came. In Turkish we also use open/closed. When you give this as an example I thought: "Why does using opening/closing feel bizarre? Off just means 'closed' and on means 'open/opened'. So instead of saying 'turn *off*' one can simply say 'close'. Right?" Then I realized I thought 'off' means 'closed' because I thought in MY LANGUAGE'S LOGIC. In English 'on/off' has nothing to do with 'open/close' so it doesn't make any sense for you English speakers.
In Malaysia it is also common to say "open/close an electrical appliance".
The native tongues of the major races in Malaysia (Malays and Chinese) use open/close to say turn on/off.
I guess this is the case in cultures which have had electrical devices introduced to them from outside rather than actually inventing those devices themselves?
anyone who is interested in looking into metaphors and how theyre in literally everything we say and speak, check out the book "metaphors we live by" written by george lakoff and mark johnson. as far as academic books go, its fairly lay-person friendly and an easy read. its wild how integral metaphorical concepts are to communication!
As Mark Rosenfelder noted in the Language Construction Kit, human language is basically impossible to use without employing metaphor. Some of our most basic concepts are metaphorical extensions of other ideas, built on top of one another like layers of sediment. Without referring to other paradigms, we can do very little to convey our thoughts through language, it seems.
I feel like it makes a lot of sense for anger to be described as heat, since when someone is angry blood rushes to their face and causes them to have hotter cheeks. Anyone who’s been angry has probably experienced that, so it would make sense that several languages would link the two
When you said that happiness was associated with coldness, I thought it was really weird and I wondered where it came from. Then I thought about it.
So in some way or another, every language derives their contextual roots in meaning from a culturally accepted base, which they then expand or construct the new meanings around.
Similarly, time is construed by the direction it is "perceived", whereby its description is then linguistically shaped as such. A really solid way to denote what your conlang culture values or is heavily influenced by.
It's important to note that no language is perfect, and as such it always makes do when there is no grammatical case or word for a particular object, mood, or any expression of nuance. In the English language's case, there is no grammatical case for the future tense. So, we simply use the infinitive verb and precede it with the word "will" which is rooted in the Proto-Germanic word meaning "to want."
@Bryson Sanger I was referring to the theory that language influences thought. My point was that just because a language does not inherently convey a particular thought, it does not mean that the speakers themselves are deficient in any way, rather they just use whatever is within their linguistic capabilities to convey that thought. In the case of the English language, just because it does not have a future verbal conjugation, does not mean we cannot envision the future; rather we just have a different way of conveying it. That was the point I was trying to make.
By the way, from my understanding of mandarin chinese, time doesn't always go up to down, for example, the word for prior to is 之前(zhi qian) and after is 之后(zhi hou) , meaning "of front", and "of rear" respectively. 上(shang), meaning up, and 下(xia), meaning down, can sometimes be used to mean the next and the previous, for example, 上个月(shang ge yue) meaning last month, literally "up thing month", 下个月(xia ge yue) meaning next month, literally "down thing month".
Here at Brasil "to kick the bucket" means "give up", "lose the cool or calm", my grandmother tells me a version that is because milk was expansive if you waste some, probably would have to flee otherwise would must work a lot days for free to pay (on slavery time they would be hardly punish). In english I know it is related to death, but i don't know why.
'Kick the bucket' means 'to die' because it references hanging: a person stands on a stool/bucket to put the noose on, then you kick the bucket from under them and they hang/die.
I think the most intense form of linguistic relativity I ever ran into during my anthropology studies was color-based. Essentially that colors in a language can impact both identification of colors and recall of colors - though it's nowhere near so dramatic as the "ancient Greeks couldn't see the color blue" thing that went around a few years ago. The best example of this I know was from a people in the Congo who had something like 16 different words for shades of green - makes good sense if you life in a tropical rainforest. Researchers ran some tests, showing sets of green blocks of different shades and asking people to both identify which ones were the same shade and to recollect what shades they had seen afterwards. The results were that, not too surprisingly, the people with 16 different shades of green in their language were able to more *way* quickly and marginally more accurately identify similar shades, and absolutely wipe the floor with recollection. People speaking other languages could almost always say "yes, this is a different shade of green" but getting much more specific was fairly tricky.
I think the takeaway on it is that language can give a cognitive framework for working with things. It doesn't seem to effect perception all that strongly, no more so than something like practice might - ie, I expect an proficient artist would have zero problem with those shades of green, more suggesting their daily lives (reinforced by language) just resulted in far more practice picking those out. It does however seem to very strongly impact how we recall things, which I think actually says way more about memory than it does about language. It also lines up with much of the newer research on memory which describes it as more akin to a conceptual reconstruction based upon known information than any kind of mental photograph.
Regardless, it's an interesting case study that's always stuck with me. Language definitely effects how we understand our world and what we see, but it doesn't determine anything even remotely - it seems that experience (or perhaps more accurately "practice") does that far more so.
I love your conlang and linguistics videos! They are an inspiration to me. Keep up the good work!
10:51 In some dialects of Lithuanian (Especially the ones in America) photos are "pulled" (nutraukti), tho now most people say photografed (nufotografuoti). (The "nu-" prefix means that the werb is completed.)
@Kadir Garip didn't really old cameras have a thing you pull to take the picture? Like the chain on a ceiling fan or something. I swear I've seen that somewhere.
@@voodoolilium They still do..Such cameras are still sold
The Chinese one isn't accurate either. A photo is 照片 or 'shine-piece' and you 拍 or 'clap' a photo. Unless a different variety of Chinese is used, which would be very interesting
Damn this is actually really inspiring. Ive just started my own world building project and the culture aspects of it are what ive been getting stuck on, so this was very interesting and helped alot!
I swear this man never misses on a video. Always fascinating, well-sourced, and helpful.
One interesting conceptual metaphor for time in a conlang I've heard of is from the game Grey Goo: the aliens' language expresses time as though it were a river, so things like time running out or moving slowly would be "stagnant" or moving on or enduring something would be "wading" through time.
That moment when you think you came up with something that is at least somewhat original, but it's obviously used before you. Nothing new. Not going to scratch the idea, I still like it xd
@@alsy6813 Eh, I've learned that when that happens, to just go "Cool, my idea actually has merit!". We all stand on the shoulders of giants.
@@KnTenshi2 sure, I'm gonna go the same :)
Don't worry about being novel, worry about being a ripoff. An idea is cheap, and is likely not original if it models reality well. Take your ideas and do something interesting and different with them; that's the heart of creativity.
I liked how Weta handled the Beta view of their greatest enemy, the Silent Ones in their language. Thing is, the Beta view god as being a storyteller and every species as having some sort of tale to tell... except the Silent Ones, whose name gets to the Beta view of them as eldritch and utterly alien. It's a nice detail, and I wish the game had done better, if only for the in-depth lore.
Always a good day when Biblaridion uploads!
Another brilliant video. Glad I found this channel!
I'm thinking about making a conlang and I find your videos very helpful and informative! Keep up the great work~
Mandarin user here: I don't think differentiated linguistics norms could cause drastically different conceptualizations of physical world
But from my personal experience a lot of native Mandarin(or users from other tenseless languages as well I could imagine) speakers do have troubles learning germanic languages simply because of the "existence" of different tenses of a word
And as someone learning a romantic language from an English base, I sometimes struggle with gendered nouns, since neither language of instruction nor my home language have them.
And as someone learning a romantic language from an English base, I sometimes struggle with gendered nouns, since neither language of instruction nor my home language have them.
@@bri1085 yeah I took an entry level german course during college and it was not a joyful ride
It's just like, everything English, but more complicated!
@@aleverettes2789 German sounds rough, won't lie. and also get your point about verbs a little better. Verbs having to agree with the subject can also be tough.
@@bri1085 I'm struggling the other way around. I already have a conception of gender for objects because of my native language, but they don't always match up with the language I'm learning.
Imagine someone who's not really familiar with Biblaridion's content and languages in general seeing "Oqolaawak", thinking it's a natural language; if I were in their situation, I'd honestly believe it too.
Hey bib, can you please teach nekāchti? We will all gladly learn it.
You madman, you actually did it.
@@beatricepalmer2785 oh man, I hope he will do it some day
Very good, yes, thank you. I agree.
What I've surmised from everything I've read, is that mostly language can make you pay more or less attention to things at most, but that the thing that truly transforms how you view the world is you culture, and that culture in turn affects your language.
A nomadic culture could treat time and location the same. They may never return to a location, just how they cannoy travel to the past. And the future is a place they will travel to.
Dud, this video is sooooo cool. Like, it literally expanded my brain by a small amount.
2:51 When I hear that the past is considered to be "in front" and the future "behind" I don't think of it as walking backwards. I see it as something like a queue: the person in front of you reaches the destination first, you come afterwards, and the person behind you will come in the future. (the O'Gorman 2017 diagram at 2:19 puts it more elegantly, but still, it's a weird oversight)
That makes a lot more sense, so it's around the idea of following.
As a speaker of a language that puts time in front of a speaker and future behind, I always thought that past can be considered to be in front and future behind, because you can "see" it, (a. k. a. to know it more or less certainely), while the future is "behind" because you cannot "see" it, it is currently unknown.
Chinchillas being called "dragon cats" is ridiculously adorable.
I have spent so long trying to find scholarly articles on how folktales and story structure gets affected by language and grammar and sentence structure. This is the next best thing.
We must protect this channel at all cost.
HE'S BACK
I read Benjamin Lee Whorfs book "Language, Thought, Reality" a couple of years ago. Recently, I finished "Through the Language Glass" by Guy Deutscher, which I recommend. He critisises Whorfs because his studies and interpretations of Hopi were very bad (in fact, there is time in Hopi); he argues that language has no borders, one can think about sth without having a word for it. Nevertheless, we are influenced by the categories our language forces us to express, like time in English, gender in German, aspect in Russian etc.
One of the better examples is schadenfreude. There is no single word in English that means "to take pleasure in the misfortune of others", but say that phrase to explain what schadenfreude means, and people will nod sagely and often say something like "Huh, I didn't know there was a word for that"; which means they certainly knew what "that" was already, or at least instantly understood what it was. Just like if I told someone that the Inuktitut word _allu_ means "hole in the ice where seals come up to breathe".
@@keith6706 Exactly
like usual, DROPPIN BOMBS of insight every few seconds.
I saw someone saying "the only thing we defenetly know, is that if you have a term for something in your language, you'll remember it a little better, because you already know how to distinct the 2.But, other theories are not confirmed at all".
Also, bilinguals this would make a little sense. At least I saw that people in russia, germany, america think the same. Moreover, there's more difference between uk and us, than between germany and russia. Which kinda shows that geography matters more for culture, than the language.
Also, if learning another language gives you the abilites of the language, does it mean that india sees the world in 8 flavors on average?
(all below may seem dumb, and a little political, so dont take it too seriously)
I remember how someone said that how languages treat gender, shows how they treat people of certain gender. Which is not smart, because, if having gender system in your language makes you more tolerant, then poland is more tolerant than the us or england. If it's the other way around, then afghanistan is more tolerant to woman, than uk or us.
Very nice video! I don't have any funny joke, just genuinely appreciative, good work!
Nice informative video. Thank you!
Outstanding video!
Speaking as bilingual. I agree with this notion. The way we think about our social structure affects our language to describe it. And as it is constantly described, the thought process is more deeply ingrained. For example, the word "brother" in english cannot be translated to Thai without knowing a little bit extra info. As in, we need to know the relative age of the "brother" in order to describe him in our language. Vice versa, "Phi" in thai can be translated to "older sibling", which, in English doesn't sound very natural. (unless non-binary individual), So, extra info must be added in order to describe well in English language, namely, the gender of "phi".
This I feel is originated from the importance of society roles that we assign to the people of our respective culture. Here, gender isn't as important as relative age. Over there, relative age doesn't matter as much as gender.
Society is constantly moving forward, the world becomes smaller as everyone is affected by everyone else's influences. Our ideas of society changes for better or worse but you can't deny that there are remnants of how we used to think in our languages that we speak.
Thank you for this good video!
new biblaridion video Babay
The part I loved most is finding out "Chinchilla" is literally translated from Chinese as "Dragon-cat".
When Biblaridion uses one of his own conlangs as a linguistic example
I think a very strong explanation of the cold = happiness semantic in Arabic is simply, as their civilisation has mostly been in or near deserts of unrelenting heat, the experience of cold is truly a moment of bliss.
Now if they found settlement somewhere in the cruel North of bitter winters, they would change their tune very quickly...
Very good video, as always.
Great video as always!
Fascinating stuff
Now that I've watched this video, I got some ideas for my languages!
In my world, the people who live in the Summersalt Seas region along with Virindian see time as the movement of the sun and moon through out the sky.
So, they would see time more as east to west. This can also represent cycles (connecting to my world's ouroboros). In my world, people see a full day/night cycle as having two "days" within one cycle: Day of the east (being the moon and night), and day of the west (being the sun and day).
Combined, they turn into a full cycle of east to west - representing the passing of days and the concept of cycles.
Fun fact: This would coin the idiom "Chase the horizons" to talk about an endless and/or vain pursuit, or too unrealistic of a goal. In different contexts, this could also relate to death or trying to run away from death by reaching the horizon and "outrunning" the sun (the sun god also being the god of death). But it's a reminder one cannot outrun the sun/death in a race to reach the horizons.
HOLY SANCTUS!!! This is an actual eye opener for me! now I finally know why the conlangs I make are dull and uninteresting to me!!!!
This was a good one. I love the SW hypothesis
New Biblaridion video, let's fucking go
2:54 I've heard it explained that rather than "walking backward" it's that they are essentially stationary and that time "flows into view" somewhat like a river.
Hebrew is another language where the past is in front of us. For example, the root "qdm" is used to mean east (this meaning is now archaic), forward, before, and ancient.
Very nice vid, as always
Very nice philosophical video
Linguistic determinism also implies it’s impossible for speakers of languages without certain concepts to learn new concepts.
Eating something can also have negative connotations as a turn of phrase in English
I wouldn’t say it’s impossible, just difficult to learn. Language is something anyone can experience and also share, I mean the whole point is that we share concepts. As an English speaker it may seem weird that Chinese describes time as moving up to down, but spend some time thinking about it and it might start to make sense, you spiral down the flow of time as if you’re going down a river or waterfall.
Edit: didn’t watch the entire video when I commented so I understand what you’re saying lol
@@captainch6182 You said you get it now, but to clarify further, linguistic determinism turned up to 11 states people's thoughts are entirely limited by the language they speak and therefore it's impossible for them to learn anything new without learning a new language.
New video! Yay!
As an M.Sc. in Psychology I'm pretty happy that he took the time to a) mention that there are several different subforums of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and b) that the "strong" version lacks any empirical basis. There seem to be alot of people who just assume it to be as a proven fact ^^
I've seen Arrival, but didn't really understand it until your explanation.
Here in Lombardy we use to close and to open the light too, only when speaking italian (We use completely separate and unintelligible words in Lombard language). Interesting
10:20 that older phrase does still exist to a certain degree in English with "brand spanking new" conveying extra emphasis over "brand new," where "spanking" is not used for emphasis in any other context.
Aw yeah, Biblaridion uploaded.
"here's how things went down" proves we also think of time vertically
Just a random thought, maybe time goes up and down or forward and backwards depending on how you write. So because mandarin is written from top to bottom, the future basically goes down
Chinese also uses forward/backward time though. xd
The closest thing I know with this in mind is the fact that ancient greek along with ancient chinese cultures had no distinction between green and blue in their language and as such saw them as the same color or something along that line
Same reason why the color orange was just called red previously, as with red cats, red foxes and red pandas
Раньше в казахском языке тоже было такое.
Не различались синий и зелёный цвета
In hebrew we also open and close devices, it's possible that it makes talking about electrical curcuits (on = close, off = open) a bit less intuitive.
10:47 in indonesia we do a similar thing, turning something on is normal, but turning something off is making it 'dead' or dead-ifying it
Loved this video! Question, what software do you use to create your own writing systems for your languages and turning them into fonts?
Interesting example would be, in japanese to say where an object is in correlation to the subject, you say "in subjects (front/side/behind) there is object" denoting that everything that uses it has a area around them that is theirs. which is part of the japanese politeness (respecting personal bubbles) and the countries religious belief where every object has a life force
10:08 it's funny how in danish it's sprit ny meaning hand sanitizer new, I have no idea why
I've always liked open and close for turning lights off and on. It's the same in Japanese. It's so much more descriptive: you close the circuit to turn the lights on, and open the circuit to turn them off.
But most languages do the opposite, where an "open" light is on, while a "closed" light is off.
@@CM-ss5pe Woah, really?
@@voodoolilium I guess it depends on what you're looking at, are you opening the circuit (turning the light off) or opening the light (turning the light on)? In every variety of Chinese I know it is the latter
@@eugeneng7064 huh, that's interesting. And potentially very confusing haha
@@voodoolilium I mean, does Japanese really talk about the circuit that way? To me it's weird because you're not directly talking about the light. It makes sense but yeah, it can be confusing if the other languages you speak do the opposite
In Hungarian, lights are turned "up" instead of "on", and "down" instead of "off". Correspondingly, light switches are wired to turn the lights on when flipped up and off when flipped down.
In Scotland, they're wired the other way around, which confused me at first. The language not implying a clear direction for the action might explain the difference, although I can't say for sure, having done no research.
Very thought provoking
Are you planning on having a new q&a anytime soon?