BBC Magazine profiles an interesting study from Yale University’s department of Sociology on the potential connection between the confines of grammar and financial readiness, with likely bonds among the cultural gradients in the spectrum of mores, like hierarchy, collectivism versus individualism, gender equality, etc.
The lead researcher groups all the world’s languages into two classes, one group, which includes English, is marked by a strong shifting of tenses to express action, intentions and wishes that are to take place in the future, covering both the mundane and the inspired, and the other group of languages whose rules of grammar do not make a big distinction between present and future. The difference does not fall strictly among family lines—for example, while in English one must say, “It will snow tomorrow,” auf Deutsch, a close relative, one can say, “Morgen scheint es” with no ambiguity. European on balance languages seem to have the most formal ways of differentiating time. After large-scale studies on the future-oriented habits of speakers of these different lingual classes, mostly involving savings and retirement but also habits, like exercise and preventative health, that defer rewards for present action, the researcher found a strong correlation between shoring up for one’s future, whether one’s Golden Years or something more immediate though not instantly gratified, among those speakers whose tongue did not really have a separate future tense.
Saturday 23 February 2013
future-perfect or jam to-morrow
exchequer
catagories: ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐, economic policy, labour
existential event
The very fine and peripatetic blog Kottke directs to an interview from The Atlantic with Oxford philosophy professor Nick Bostrom about humanity’s penchant to attribute its destruction to something external, like a collapsing environment, meteor impact or seismic event rather than culprits of its own making.
catagories: ⚛️, ๐ฌ๐ง, ๐ช️, ๐, ๐ก, ๐ญ, environment, philosophy
Friday 22 February 2013
mental note or zettelchen
We all have certain internal monologues, which are sometimes broadcast in other venues, but others, possible more rare since so much is shared, with varying degrees of self-censorship and editing, are meant for our consumption alone. German public radio had an excellent vignette about one such surreptitious collector of those private streams-of-thought (leidiglich, nicht entweder auf Deutsch), intended for the author’s eyes only, and compiled her findings and reflections into a book on the ephemeral phenomena of the shopping-list.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐บ, ๐ง , food and drink, language
Thursday 21 February 2013
norange and copasetic
Mental Floss has a neat little article on the origin and mutation of English words garbled by mishearing them and shifting grammar conventions.
I never thought about elision being behind differentiation from foreign sources, like Apron and Napkin from the same root—though Napron transformed into “an apron,” same with Umpire, from the French for nonpareil (nonper) or the n- became incorporated with nickname. I can think of some examples of slurring peculiar to English that has given rise to perfectly respectable words, like the injection Zounds! from Christ’s Wounds or the happy affirmation of Copasetic, a signal used by bootleggers during Prohibition to indicate that the coast was clear—that the cop is on the settee, dozing. No, there was never a norange in the English language but it seems a likely candidate—as the native Asiatic fruit came to the West via Persia and Spain as narang and nananja and came to be known in other Germanic languages as a Chinese Apple (Apfelsine) but in England, via France, as an apple from Orange, un pomme d’orenge, for the port city on the Mediterranean.
catagories: ๐ฉ๐ช, ๐ซ๐ท, ๐ฌ๐ง, food and drink, language