"you will see that Italians or Russians speek much more emotionally than Americans"

Rather, you will (assuming this ethnic restaurant scenario for the sake of argument) see Italians or Russians speak in a way that Anglo-Americans take to be more emotional than the way they themselves speak in the same circumstances.

A very good point. This difference in emotionalities affect cultural evolutions of people speaking different languages over hundreds of years.

Also the cues to emotions (that is, how we evidence our emotions to others), the emotional repertoire, and the (discursive) functions of emotions within that repertoire are specific to each languaculture. So my observations in that ethnic restaurant are just that--my observations, my construction, my experience of those people on my terms, and not the emotional experience of the people themselves. In short, our cross-languacultural perception of emotions is misleading to one degree or another, and often highly misleading.

You can translate anything from one language to another somehow. You can certainly explain "privacy" to a Russian; however, the words won't have the same feelings and attitudes that they evoke in the language you're translating. In my blog, http://smarhotoldlady.com, there is a post on German "Schadenfreude" vs. Yiddish "Kvellen" which teaches children as they are learning their language, what emotions are desirable or accepted. Wierzbicka has written a brilliant book "Understanding Cultures Through Their Key Words." It is a must read. One more thing, if you are bilingual, you may find it more natural and satisfying to speak each language on different occasions. Words of endearment or ordinary speaking to babies may call for one to use his or her native tongues, for instance.

You get the feeling that Italians or Russians are more emotional because in those cultures, one's normal speech volume is higher than in British English, for instance. Also, every language has its own intonation patterns and British English has relatively flat intonation compared to Russian or Italian. My mother was trilingual speaker of English, Yiddish, and southern Italian, and her intonation varied greatly acording to which she was speaking. I find people whose languages are normally spoken iwith a level intonation and a soft voice unapproachable. I always feel that they'rre not interested in what I'm saying and they are stand-offish. This is a common problem Read Deborah Tannen's brilliant study of High and Low involvement culture. I quote it in my "Language the Social Mirror, 4th ed.) --soon to be updated as a Vook, an eBook with video and audio clips embedded in it.

Dear Gregory,

How well people understand emotions in a foreighn language and culture is not just a matter of opinion, it is an established scientific question.

But this is not the essence of what is discussed, a restaurant example is just that: an example.

The main point is that different languages and cultures have different levels of emotionality. You youself use this argument to argue against the restaurant example. This is a well established scientific fact. You can look into the paper:

Perlovsky, L.I. (2009). Language and Emotions: Emotional Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Neural Networks, 22(5-6); 518-526. doi:10.1016/j.neunet.2009.06.034

There are theoretical considerations and references to experimental results.

Elaine,

Is everything translatable among languages ? There is a romantic idea that yes it does. But this idea is wrong. If you read any serious poet you would know that poetry is not translatable.

There are cultures and languages in which airplanes are built, and there are others in which airplanes are not built. The question is NOT only what is possible to translate from one language to another. More important which thoughts are invented in which languages.

"You get the feeling that Italians or Russians are more emotional because in those cultures, one's normal speech volume is higher than in British English, for instance" -

it is too important question to decide it by what you may think today or tomorrow - "for instance." There are a lot of scientific data on this topic, for instance you can look into this paper:

Perlovsky, L.I. (2009). Language and Emotions: Emotional Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Neural Networks, 22(5-6); 518-526. doi:10.1016/j.neunet.2009.06.034

It contains several dozens of references, theoretical and experimental, about different emotionalities in different languages and cultures.

Emotionalities in languages are carried in their sounds, like in songs. If sounds of a language is conserved for centuries, sounds and emotions are strongly connected with the meanings. But if sounds are changed fast, then emotions are loosing connections with meanings. But meanings without emotions do not exist. Meanings are moving people. If emotionalities are severed from meanings, people are not moved by the language autonomously, people have to understand the meaning by thinking.

Some languages, like contemporary English, do not move people autonomously by their sounds. It is a great advantage for scientists and engineers because autonomous emotions do not distract thinking processes. This is also the reason why democracy has been given to the world in English language, this language does not have ITS OWN values, existing for hundreds of years.

But this also means that people who do not think on their own are losing cultural values that have emerged in the culture over hundreds of years. How many people do think on their own?

Maimonides explained that Adam was expelled from paradise because he disobeyed God. God demanded that Adam think on his own. But thinking on your own is difficult, and Adam did not want to. Today psychology explains this by cognitive dissonance - thinking is stressfull, and people avoid this stress.

Returning to Adam, Maimonides explained that the apple from the tree of knowledge was knowledge contained in languages spoken by people of surrounding cultures (I put it here in my words). Using language instead of thinking on your own is much better that to be like animals, language contains millennial knowledge, but this knowledge was invented by other people for other purposes, see:

Levine, D.S., Perlovsky, L.I. (2008). Neuroscientific Insights on Biblical Myths: Simplifying Heuristics versus Careful Thinking: Scientific Analysis of Millennial Spiritual Issues. Zygon, Journal of Science and Religion, 43(4), 797-821.

This paper combines the above thoughts with Tversky and Kahneman theory (2002 Nobel Prize) and explains that here is the source of human irrationality. Maimonodes explained that people cannot think on their own, therefore God gave us Ten Commandements so that we can survive without thinking. Still God's highest demand is that people think on their own.

Highly emotional languages keep millenial values and move people along millennial tracks. Low emotional languages free mind for thinking on your own. It is good for science and engineering, But it is dangerous for people who do not think.

Please turn on TV, say CNN, and see if privacy, freedom, freedom of religion, equality, piece, human rights are equally understood in every language. Many people for some reason believe that languages have nothing to do with it, that it is just cultural differences (as if cultures can be inherited from generation to generation with languages). Other people think that it is a matter for science to study.

Of course poetry is untranslatable, because its form depends on what words a language has that can give the meaning the poet intends, but the sounds in the words and the syntax (which is often stretched in poetry), means you can't take a word from another language & use it to translate the word in the language of the poem itself. You can, however, tell someone what the poem is "about' and what the poet seems to be feeling about it. Even within a language, you can't paraphrase a poem. The minute you do it, it ceases to be a poem.

I spent many years studying poetry, schizophrenic speech, "normal" innovative language vs. deviant. My book "Understanding Psychotic Speech: Beyond Freud and Chomsky" discusses these matters.

I agree with you that people learn attitudes and beliefs when they learn the lexicons of their language. Instead of writing a 5th edition of 'Language the Social Mirror, 4th ed," I will be writing an Enhanced Edition ebook called, 'Language Reflects Society," but that means that society must be a reflection of society. You are right when you say that cultural transmission is language based. If you read any of my stuff or my blogs, you'll see that I make this point in many ways.

Dear Elaine,

Very interesting. I'll start reading your books and blog.

Dear Leonid,

Sorry, I'm a bit late with my comments. Your remark about rather high Russian emotionality in speech is opposite to my personal impression. I always considered English speakers (especially American) to be much more demonstratively emotional in speech than the Russians. I am Russian, and my normal intonation has no such "lows" and "rises", it is rather flat. It is considered not appropriate to express emotions in public.

But surely I know emotional people, or have heard emotional (and highly emotional) Russian speech. It differs within one society, one language. Maybe it's a matter of education, of personal (or family) culture. Our level of culture and education determines our language, but hardly vice versa.

About 'privacy' in Russian language. I think it is quite translatable by 'private, personal' in neuter gender ("lichnoye", личное). There's no such one notion, but 'private space', 'private time', 'private property' we can easily understand.

And last one - poems. They are translatable, most are translated. One cannot reproduce word order or exact meaning of a phrase, but what a good interpreter can is to reproduce emotions the poem should excite. The means would be language and culture-specific, but the result (emotions) should be universal.

Your question is very interesting to discuss, but I feel I must read your paper and Elaine's book before going on.

Dmitry,

Thank you for your interesting note. It is interesting to compare opposite views on the same subjects. Of course my short notes and examples here are aimed at people of a specific culture and backgroud. You can find more scientific arguments in my paper(s). An example with restaurants requires actual experience. I do ot know about American tourists in Russia, I am talking about real Americans in America and real Russians leaving in America (or in Russia, or anywhere). In my lectures I explain to students that a higher emotionality of my lectures is due to my Russian background, even if I speak in English, noone ever objected.

"Our level of culture and education determines our language, but hardly vice versa" - please Dmitry, think again. Surely culture and education affect us mostly through the use of language. How culture and education can affect us without using language?

"About 'privacy' in Russian language" - of course it could be translated in Russian. Anyone who lived in Russia and knows Russian history, can appreciate that the notion of privacy has little affect on Russian culture. Russian culture throughout history is much more affected by the notion os community, togertherness. It was true when Knyaz (Prince) Vladimir divided Russia among his many sons, so that everybody would rule the country together. It was certainly a dominating idea during communistic decades (you surely know the proverb "I is the last letter in the alphabet" - this is literally true in Russian language and in culture, but to explain it in English would take 10 books of Russian novels. And it is still true today, when Russia is a capitalistic society.

But my main point is not just about which words and notion are culturally available. It is an interesting and under-researched topic. But my main interest is emotionality of languages, which act subconsciously and effect cultures no less strongly than meanings of words.

Are poems translatable? Shakespire translated by Pasternack or Marshak are good Russian verses, but they have little to do with Shakespire poetry in English. Eugene Onegin has been translated perfectly into Eglish, but English language readers do not understand why Pushkin is considered a great poet. Brodsky poetry is translated into English by the best contemporary American and English poets, his friends, and Brodsky himself took a signifiant part in these translations. Often the meanings, rhymes, rhythms are rendered perfectly. But an American reader still does not get an impression similar to a Russian reader. The reason: in Russian language sounds carry emotions. In English emotions in language are not important. - Just read comtemporary English language poetry. I am not saying that Americans have less emotions than Russians, just these emotions are not significant in English language. They are important in other aspects of life.

May be this is the reason why most popular songs in the world are written in English. English language does not satsfy people's emotional needs.

But English is much better for science and for democracy - the emotionality of language does not automatically carry people's thoughts before one has thought.

I know that even the most lauded translations of Rilke are a poor approximation of the German. I don't know Russian, unfortunately, as my family spoke it only when they didn't want the children to understand

However, I suspect that all humans experience the same emotions, & in all groups, there are some highly emotional and some unemotional individuals. How would you prove otherwise? To me, this is a scientific question, not a philosophical one. I am very data oriented in all my interests

When you speak of emotions in Russian, are you referring to words or to intonations, volume, timbre & other non-linguistic features of utterances? Are you aware of Deborah Tannen's theory of high and low involvement cultures? My students all claimed that, for them, it was a matter of high and low involvement occasions. They self-reported themselves as being ethnically affected by Irish, Italian, Armenian, Polish, Ukranian, Greek, English , Hispanic, and other cultures.

I once gave a paper at the University of the Negev & at the dinner afterwards, I was delighted by the loudness, the interrupting of utterances, the wide range of intonation contours, all features of HI cultures, according to Tannen's. It was like revisiting dinner at home when I was a child. As I got older, in the predominantly Christian Anglo-Saxon culture in Rhode Island, I had to learn to tone down my conversing, but, when I lecture I revert to my roots

Elaine,

Excellent comment, thank you.

Please tell me more about Deborah Tannen's theory. And please also comment on the following:

what are cultural mechanisms that transfer cultural features from generation to generation without language?

Of course the way your mome washed dishes might be transferred without language, but is this a large part of culture, compared to what is transferred with language?

About Negev: semitic languages are highly emotional, and anybody could see it with a 'naked eye' in jewish and arabic people. This follows from their fusion inflections (I discussed it in several papers - some available openly on the web).

Thanks for the interesting discussion. The point I completely agree with is that this is an under-researched topic, but my position here is more emotional than reasoned - I'm not a psychologist.

When I say "culture and education determine language" I mean linguistic features of our speech: which words, grammar structures or intonation we use depends on our level of education.

Of course, culture and education is transferred through language as an instrument. And I see here a metaphor, which I think corresponds to the problem of poetry translation: different languages are like different musical instruments. Some melody can be reproduced by almost any (or definitely any) instrument, but the impression from violin or drum performance (or balalaika :)) would be apparently different. (Just for example, I imagined the "God Father" theme in drums, or Joe Dassin's songs in German. They are possible, but would they have become international hits? Like Onegin in English - NO.)

The point I cannot completely accept is the relation between language and democracy or science. Yes, there is a relation now, but is it dependence? Is English making me think more democratically or logically? I can't comprehend this. Couple centuries ago English was not democratic nor scientific language, while linguistically it was rather close to the contemporary version. French, German, Italian - or Mongolian and Chinese earlier - were scientifically and culturally dominating languages at some periods. I don't think any language to be the cause of evolution in minds. It is still an instrument, and it's evolving after our minds.

Dmitry, I like your metaphor comparying different languages and different musical instruments.

You are right in emphasizing that it is difficult to imagine that language might change the way you think. Although the idea is almost 2,000 years old and was discussed - in terms of contents of ideas - by several great minds. My papers are easy to find on the web in open journals or webpages. In terms of different emotionalities - apparently it is even more difficult to imagin.

But your psychological difficulty might be easier if you first think not about your own easiness or difficulty about TRANSLATING various ideas from different languages, but about which ideas could APPEAR in which languages.

Also, It is a FACT that science was born in English (by Newton, - in my paper I discuss why at the same time another great mind - Leibnitz has had difficulty creating science in German). Democracy has been born in English, it is a fact. Many people when meeting with strange facts dismiss them as just random coincidences. But such important things as science and democracy are not results of random coincidences - a different way of cultural thinking is needed.

About democracy and Russian you surprised me. Didn't you hear a proverb "I is the last letter in the alphabet" ? This Russian proverb explains why there is no democracy in Russia. Although I think that emotionality of the language is

a more interesting and more deep reason.

Russian language emotionality gives tremendous advantage to Russian culture. Noy in science and politics, but in more important areas: in ponderings the meaning of life. Dostoevsky wrote in Russian. Russian grammar preserves just right level of emotionality. More emotional languages, say Arabic, are too emotional and Arabic cannot evolve. Some Arabic people take it as a great advantage and ready to die for sounds of their beautiful language.

Another example: Germans are considered in Russia as very orderly people. Let me tell you that Germans think that the best regional laws they have are in Rineland. This part of country was occupied by Napoleon for long enough to establish laws there. Note, international standards of measures of length, weight, etc (meter, kg) have been established by French. People who know well several European languages consider French the best for exactness. I do not know French and the history of its grammar well enough to explain why. I know enough about Russian and English. But more interesting is a general realtion that I discuss in my papers (they are easy to find on the web).

It is a great topic!

Yes, Leonid, the topic is great, and I find a lot of reasonable in your words.

Probably, our language affects our way of thinking. Reading your notes, I'm starting to believe that "tag questions" in English grammar may lead to "tag thinking". Maybe this way of thinking is good for science - it makes the complex world easier.

As for the Russian proverb "I is the last letter in the alphabet" - what's wrong with it? What relation does it have to democracy? It means: don't always say "I, I, I...", be more modest, don't brag. It is related with Christian modesty and obedience, which, yes, is not fully compatible with democracy. Somebody may use it to say "social (communal) prior personal", and somebody did it in Soviet history, but it is not a matter of language.

Democracy came from Greece, it's a Greek word. There was nothing democratic in English when Great Britain had its colonies or the USA had slavery in XIX century.

Newton is great, but is he a science founder? He developed ideas of Galileo Galilei (Italian) who thought over Aristotle (Greek) views. Generally, what should we mean by science? Every Russian knows that science started from Mihailo Lomonosov, every English speaker knows the same about Isaak Newton. Let's ask people from India or China - they'll also name somebody. China in IX century had its printed paper - "Emperor's bulletin" or something like this. They invented paper, compass, gunpowder much earlier than Western science became able to reproduce them.

I'm afraid, thoughts of one nation's exclusiveness in something (science and democracy, for example) are very dangerous. Isn't it a straight way to nationalism? Germans of last century also believed to be an exclusive nation.

Again, I agree with most your thoughts, they seem interesting and reasonable. But for the role of language for science and democracy :)

Dmitry,

Everyone of your thoughts deserve a 10-book long discussion. And there have been these discussions for long time. I only can try to activate an interest.

Russian communal culture is great, but it is opposite of democracy. I am not daying better or worse, but it is different.

Democracy is an idea, one should not compare Great Britain of 100 years ago with ideal romantic standards of today. I am not sure, but I suspect that British colonies 100 years ago had more democracy than Russian gubernias today - this is really a question that requires a lot of historical studies, good enough for Ph.D. dissertation. Most of these colonies had more democracy than they have today as independent countries. Look at India, they got their democratic tradition from GB. Is China more democratic?

Lomnosov achieved a lot, but don't succumb to nationalistic slogans - it is not good for one's mind.

China got behind in culture and thinking because of their language. Few Chinese professors here in US invited me for joint research on this topic. There is

There is a specific reason for the current China boom. I discuss it in my papers. It will be difficult to sustain because of language.

Leonid, you are right. There are too many disputable questions in this topic to be solved in a short discussion like ours. I'd better read your papers and other literature first.

It's not good that our discussion was getting too close to politics and rather far from science. I'll read and try not to "succumb to nationalistic slogans" - and you, please, try not to create them. World is different :)

Thanks for the discussion.

Jean-Mark,

If you ask Aneta, she will tell you that differences among languages are cultural. Even so it is impossible to explain how cultures are transmitted through generations without language.

If you dig into minuscule detail, ANY human concept (and the words languages use for them) may elicit different emotions in the minds of people (belonging to the same or different cultures). The question of emotionality is a question of scale and defintion with two many difficult-to-define variables (language, emotion, culture). Whereas it is possible to claim that even individual phonemes may elicit different emotions in different speakers, it is rather unreasonable to claim that ALL our thoughts are biased by our cultural and linguistic roots. Some are and some aren't. Some are more biased than others. If you look closely, everything is, if you look at the day-to-day practical effectiveness of communication, linguistically coded emotional differences very often do but most often do not hamper communication.

Robert,

a good comment, and miniscule details are not needed, of course many concepts and words have emotional connotations, and some could be strong. I see your point: it might be unbelievable that the entire languages and cultures have different emotionalities. Nevertheless it is a fact, it is experimentally confirmed, and it is based on a lot of theory. You could look into my (open) paper

http://www.j-psy.org/paperInfo.aspx?ID=46

I am discussing not emotionalities of individual words, but emotions that we hear in language sounds - prosody. Language is emotional, like song. English is a least emotional language on earth, may this makes difficult to hear language emotionality for English-speaking people. But some languages are more emotional than Gaga.

Just turn on TV, CNN, world news and you will see crowds with emotions, which may seem foreighn to English-speaking people. And they are.

If you suggest that Palestinian-Israeli relations are not hampered by misunderstanding due to emotionalities, think again.

The reason I have started this question is that this topic is tremendously important, yet it has received relatively little attention in scientific community. And the reason is exactly as you argued: it is difficult to believe.

Here are some great relativist papers!

http://www-psych.stanford.edu/~lera/papers/

And I apologize in advance for typos and poor writing quality; I'm quite sleep-deprived. :)

Grammatical gender is one of the more noticeable examples of how language can influence thought. For example, one study found people tend to describe things that have a feminine gender as delicate, pretty, light, etc. and things of a masculine gender as rough, towering, mighty, etc., even when talking about the same thing (the study I'm thinking of did Spanish vs. German). You're also very likely to personify a feminine word as a female and a masculine word as a male. Most art in which a person is depicting an abstract concept has the person match the gender of the abstract concept (I know it's morbid, but if you search for "death" (the study used this word in an example, so it's the first one I think of to showcase this) in Spanish and in Russian on an image search, the Spanish ones are virtually all of males and the Russian ones of females). Speakers of languages with grammatical gender that is aligned with their society's gender roles are also more aware of gender role differences and understand them better at a younger age than speakers of languages like Finnish, which are mostly lacking of any gendered language.

As cool as this effect is, it also means it'll be even harder to break the gender binary in society. :\

There are plenty others, too! Spanish and Greek speakers are better at spatial perception than English and Indonesian speakers, who are better at linear perception (due to the much time vs long time preference).

Metaphors and agenticity dramatically change the way you think about things. Spanish and Japanese speakers are less able to remember who did an accidental action than English speakers (due to agenticity; Spanish and Japanese don't usually include the agent in accidental events, which means that they are less able to remember it due to their not having encoded it linguistically), and describing crime as a virus or as a war each cause people to interpret the same statistics quite differently.

Russian speakers can pick out differences between light and dark blue faster than English speakers because it's lexicalized the two shades into separate words.

Speakers of Guugu Yimithirr and Kuuk Thayorre have near-perfect compasses in their heads (they don't use left vs. right etc.; they only use North, South, East, West, etc.).

The Pirahan are, well, it's complicated. They're very fascinating. Go read Everett's stuff; the book's on Amazon and the research is only a search away. :)

And, yeah. There's more, too, but this should contribute to the conversation enough. :)

And one of the main reasons why relativism isn't as well explored as other areas (although it's getting there nowadays) is because in the heyday of Universalism, Relativism was quite taboo. Lenneberg in I believe the 1950's wrote out against Whorf's ideas (which, as flawed as they were, were quite popular for the couple decades after his article was published in the 1920's), and that pretty much killed it until the 80's and 90's. Pinker still rails on Whorf with ridiculous concepts like "Mentalese".

But I think most modern linguists are at a point of considering relativism like anything else in linguistics. Eskimos may not have 200 words for snow and the Hopis may have a much better sense of time than Whorf realized, but there is some truth to this idea of relativism. It's often quite subtle, but it is there. I'm going through a lot of research on the subject as I further develop my conlang. Fascinating area of study.

Now, if only someone would explore phonosemantics. :)

I read "China got behind in culture and thinking because of their language." First of all, there are and always were several Chinese languages, and today Chinese is a language of science (and all sciences are done in Chinese): this implies that large technical fields do indeed have their technical terms, people have scientific discussions and write papers and books covering all sciences in Chinese. The whole thing is online in a huge database, unfortunately it is not open to all for free. Why should I not think that you replicate stereotypes with such an English sentence as the one quoted above?

If I remember correctly, there was one study that showed Mandarin's number terms to be more ergonomic than English's.

Anyways, yeah. Although languages can and do exert many influences on the thoughts of their speakers, these effects aren't generally so drastic as to ruin an entire people as has here been suggested. Let's try to avoid making this into an uneducated stereotyping affair.

Miles,

An excellent review. Some people thing that "all languages are equal". I wonder if this is Chomsky's influence due to his idea that language and cognition are separate?

What is conlang?

Phonosemantics used to be called "sound symbolism" by Jackobson, Kurilovich, and the company. They spent a lot of effort, but I do not think they found much interesting.

I think emotionality of languages (prosody, like songs) is no less important than conceptual content (word meanings, grammar). I published few theoretical papers (why it should be so, and how it acts), there are some experimental data. But few people study this. I wonder why - this is among most interesting topics.

Rudolf,

2500 hundreds years ago China was in the forefront of the world culture. Confucius and Lao Tse were discussing deep philosophical issues similar to what was discussed at the time in Greece and Israel ("know thyself," "be conscious of your urges"). What happened next? Why for more than 2000 years China lost world cultural leadership?

If you do not know answer, why do you dismiss the importance of language before even studying the question?

Chinese grammar (in all Chinese languages) was similar to contemporary English grammar (few inflections). This has led to reduced emotionality. When it happened in English in the 15-16 century it resulted in flourishing of scientific thinking. What was different in Chinese languages and cultures 2000 years ago?

Languages with many inflections maintain strong emotional ties between sounds and meanings (the essence of language). This helps art, and it helps to feel strong identity. But it interferes with science. Languages with few inflections lose emotional ties between sounds and meanings. It is OK for scientists (those of them who really think), but it interferes with understanding cultural values by the rest of people (majority is led in their thinking by language), and the culture begins disintegrating. If you think that our culture moves "up" along straight line (or better) you have nothing to worry about. But those who think that our culture might be facing difficulties, could think about the role of language(s).

Similar processes influence other languages and cultures. Arabic culture flourished in 7-11 centuries. What happened next? Did language play a role?

If these questions are of interest - I published few papers researching this topic (they are openly available, and easy to find).

Miles,

prof. Boroditsky does interesting research indeed.

Dear Leonid

I happen to study quite a few of the things which "happened next" in Chinese history, including issues of consciousness, and emotion, as well as language history. But it would never occur me to say something like "China lost world cultural leadership" "for more than 2000 years". Why? Because this is not an accurate description, sir!

Furthermore you write stuff like: "Also, It is a FACT that science was born in English (by Newton, - in my paper I discuss why at the same time another great mind - Leibnitz has had difficulty creating science in German). Democracy has been born in English, it is a fact."

Leibniz wrote books in Latin, French and German, and he was eager to find out more about China. So if indeed he would have had any difficulty "creating science in German", he easily could have used any other language in which he was fluent. And in fact he developed new mathematical language. The Prussian Academy of Sciences was founded by him.

You see, I have a problem with what you are saying, because it seems not to describe the historical developments with accuracy and beauty. Therefore I ask back.

However distracted I am by such statements, it does not mean that I "dismiss" anything without further consideration, but I have not yet found time to read your papers. Be patient!

I began to read this Perlovsky thread first, which comes up with plain language statements, but leaves out the fine points which I would think would be necessary to make such sweeping generalisations. And also, the generalisations you made about "China" I heard them before, and had thought that people would have forgotten them by now. Old wine in old broken bottles? Why not taking into account all the historical research which has been made into Chinese knowledge cultures?

If you indeed can bring forward evidences and proof for some of your views, this would be considered. But I doubt, that such sweeping conclusions as presented in this thread can be drawn from your research. Indeed, I do doubt.

And I agree we have not said a word yet, about what seems to interest you most, the role of languages in all this. Please be patient again.

Kind regards

rodo

Quote: "Newborns have been shown to discriminate between stress-timed and syllable-timed languages (French-Russian and English-Italian: Mehler et al., 1988; EnglishSpanish: Moon, Cooper & Fifer, 1993) and between stress-timed and moratimed languages (English-Japanese: Nazzi et al., 1998; Dutch-Japanese: Ramus et al., 2000). However, the only attempt to assess within-class discrimination

has yielded a negative result (English-Dutch: Nazzi et al., 1998). Moreover,

newborns also discriminated between a set of English and Dutch (stress-timed)

sentences and a set of Spanish and Italian (syllable-timed) sentences, but failed

when the two sets (English and Italian versus Dutch and Spanish) did not

reflect two types of rhythm (Nazzi et al., 1998). Thus, they seem to be able to

discriminate between sets of languages, if and only if these sets are congruent

with different rhythm classes."

http://www.lscp.net/persons/ramus/docs/newborns01.pdf

If new borns make these differences then their brains get wired differently in very early development stages.

Within a language, different social classes use the language very differently as far as emotions are concerned. A speaker of French which has almost no literacy use the language very differently on an emotional level as someone with a good level of literacy. People that have little literacy lived in an oral culture. Literacy re-wire the brain and not only in a positive sense, it has a tendency to make us less close to our emotion and less poetic. The historical periods where literacy was introduced. In Greece it correspond to the passage of a mythological culture to a philosophical culture. In Europe at the time of the invention of the printing press, it correspond to the reformation. In both case we see the emergence of an rational culture that do not like image representations, neglect the emotional side. Romatism will be a reaction to this rationalistic literacy culture.

Leonid Perlovsky, You have to be careful stating that a particular change in language caused a particular change in culture; as Daniel Everett has noted, the two are constantly at work on each other. It could just as easily have been the scientific advances that caused the change in language, as the change in language that caused the scientific advances. It could also be that there's little correlation between the two. I imagine it's some mixture of all three, leaning primarily toward the latter.

Also, I would remind you that around the same time that China was at the forefront of the world, Rome was too. It's now dead and gone. If we are to attribute societal success primarily to language, we have to ignore that Latin-speakers went from subjugation under Etruscan kings to republicanism to dictatorship to ruin in less than a thousand years despite having a fairly stable language throughout that time, and the once Roman people only came out of ruin once the Latin language was dead and the languages that came from Latin were many and divided, and even then it took quite awhile. The successes of nations generally seems to have more to do with non-linguistic factors.

And a "conlang" is a constructed language. I'm making one based on what I've learned studying linguistic relativism, among other things. It's more exactly classed by its sub-type, "engelang", or "engineered language".

Leonid, thank you for launching this extremely interesting topic. I have been researching and writing in psycholinguistics and prosody so I am really intrigued.

I just wanted to add that a radical version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis implied that we have a personal epistemology (partially based on a tribal epistemology) based on the way our language partitions a reality continuum. We might even say that our reality is a projection of our language. The debate started by Wittgenstein's assertions on private language is also to be considered. The way this might have affected science should probably take into account that there is a universal technical language for science: mathematics and related sub-languages. We might also consider that the scientific community in Western countries has had its lingua franca: Latin...now English. So, probably the answer is complex, but certainly there are interactions between language (as langue and parole, a la De Saussure), emotional expressions, social behavior and knowledge.

Franco

Dear Rudolf

"I happen to study quite a few of the things which "happened next" in Chinese history"

Excellent! You are exactly a kind of scientist I am looking for working together. My My statements are based on a lot history from around the world, but alone, I cannot

do it all. I need experts in every domain.

If you think that China led the world culture until 20th century, please give examples of few areas: music, visual art, science? I would like to know more about general ideas, not individual discoveries, like powder.

"Leibniz wrote books in Latin, French and German... he easily could have used any other language in which he was fluent."

Leibniz was a great mind, exactly because of this it interesting to see limitations due to language. It is not sufficient to be "fluent" in language. It takes several generations to speak any language AS A FIRST LANGUAGE before it affects consciousness and thinking. Just look at English change from Mid to modern, and the recent cultural effects.

However distracted I am by such statements, it does not mean that I "dismiss" anything without further consideration, but I have not yet found time to read your papers. Be patient!

" Why not taking into account all the historical research which has been made into Chinese knowledge cultures?"

Rudolf, let us do it.

Sorry, I don't have enough time to ask all the questions.

Let us continue later.

We have got to a very interesting discussion.

Franco, You are right, emotionality is very important. because of this only limited aspects of language can be learned when ignoring emotions.

Michael, constructed languages if without emotions, losing the main function of language: connect sound and meaning. If a word does not sound emotionally, it has no meaning (except for a very cultured person.

Louis,

may be you can help with French. I can trace historical changes in English grammar to cultural events (at least to some extent). But I cannot do it in French.

Today French writing is disconnected from sounds (like in English). When did it start?

My paper indicates some directions, which I cannot pursue myself.

Rudolf,

I'll wait until you read my paper, because it discusses where I need help.

Very interesting!

Miles, (sorry for calling you Michael 5 minutes ago, I meant you).

When discussing effects of culture on language - try to identify, how culture is transitioned to the next generation, if not through language? Of course we can learn how mother makes eggs without language. But it is not much. Abstract ideas cannot be transmitted without language (they do not exist without language - for most people). Without language we are not much different from animals, and this would be the limit for the culture.

A conscious understanding of the difference between emotions and concepts is a milestone in human evolution. It is very recent in the west. When did it happen in Chinese culture?

Pitch changes in most western languages is used for emotional contents. In Chinese for both emotional and conceptual. How does it affect evolution of language and culture?

Rudolf,

A singular idea in the west is monotheism - in plain English it means that the creative source resides with human. And that your daily work is not separated from your most precious (meaning of life and infinite soul).

Significant part of Chinese culture is affected by dualism: everyday behavior (Confucianism) is separate from the mystery of life (Lao-Tse). Please correct me if I am wrong. or if you think it is not important for cultural evolution.

Dear Leonid,

Here is a short resume of the history of the French Language:

Old French (800 – 1300)

Middle French (1300-1500) and the Renaissance (1500-1600)

Modern French (1600-today)

Enlightenment

French Revolution (1789-1870)

Contemporary French

From a linguistic point of view, the collapse of the Western Roman Empire accelerated the fragmentation of vulgar Latin that had begun in the second century. By the seventh century, the linguistic situation had become extremely complex in the former Roman Empire.. Latin was used only in writing. The people had replaced former vulgar Latin with a new language—Romanic languages.

In the particular case of Gaul, the languages descended from Latin underwent greater change than elsewhere (Italy and Spain) due to frequent contact with Germanic languages, notably Frankish, which became the vehicular language of the Frankish aristocracy.

The Romance languages gradually diverged from one another and became distinct while preserving numerous common elements.

What we call Old French corresponds to a certain number of essentially oral linguistic varieties that were geographically heterogeneous but not standardized or codified, as was the case for English.

In 987, Hugues Capet was elected and crowned King of France. He was the first sovereign to speak only a vernacular Romanic language or "French." The Capetian dynasty succeeded in reinforcing royal authority and undertook the task of extending its realm. But it was not until 1119 that Louis VI (r. 1108 to 1137) proclaimed in a letter to Pope Calistuss II that he was.was the "King of France"—no longer the "King of the Franks"—and "the faithful son of the Roman Church." It was the first text in which reference was made to France, from which the word français is derived.

History of French Part 2.

the French of Île-de-France in the 13th century—was not yet very widespread and was spoken only in this small region around Paris It was a common form of Old French that was distinct from the Latin that clerks used and the dialects of French speakers at that time.

It is not until Louis IX (1226-1270) that the dominance of French was achieved in the aristocracy, clerks, jurists, and the middle class ; It was the prestigious language of the Kind. It was the mother tongue of only the region around Paris and it was a second language for the rest of the kingdom, it was the admistrative tongue of the Kingdom. Educated people had to resort to Latin as a second language: it was the international vehicular language of the Catholic world. The vast majority of the population of the kingdom did not read nor write and only spoke one of the hundread local patois.

The period of 1300 to 1500 was a period of war and anarchy (the 100 Years' War with England, civil wars, plagues, famines, and other disasters).

From the time of Philippe le Bel (1268–1314), French started being used for official documents, in regional parliaments, and in the royal chancery. From 1300 on, it was a written administrative and legal language that was already competing with Latin. Roman jurists and Greek philosophers were henceforth translated into French, while a literature emerged that was more suitable for a less educated public. Academics, clerks, and other scholars continued to Latinize their French without Frenchifying their Latin.

From 1200, the scholarly Latin began appearing in French. By the end of the 14th century, Latin borrowings had become so numerous that French terms appeared trapped under the mass of Latinisms.

The influence of the educated and powerful state scribes and clerks in this period of the French language and the economic life of the nation must be examined. These individuals, who were immersed in Latin and enthralled with the masterpieces of Antiquity, were dismissive of the resources that French put at their disposal and sought instead to bring the spoken language (of the "ignorant") into closer alignment with the vast cultural heritage of the past (Latin. The actions of the Latinizers distanced French from the language of the people. This was the beginning of the separation of the written and spoken language. French lost its prerogative to develop freely, becoming the domain of scholars, poets, and grammarians. If the French king had 15 million subjects, it can be supposed that some 40,000 knew how to write and that one-third of this small number (almost all clerks) found the occasion to read the texts we now have in hand. It is estimated that no more than 2% of the population could write this type of French. The people spoke patois, a term that appeared in the Middle Ages to indicate "an incomprehensible language," "the language of animals," or "coarse" behaviour, without referring to any particular regional dialect.

The 16th century was marked by Italy's dominance in almost all areas on account of its economic wealth, military power, technological and scientific advances, and cultural supremacy. So it comes as little surprise that the French were fascinated with this country and in the thralls of Italomania, which today's language still reflects. Many Italians pursued careers in the court of the French king, and diplomatic marriages (such as that of Catherine de' Medici to Henry II) brought thousands of Italian intellectuals, artists, and scientists to the court. As the Queen Regent of France for close to 20 years, Catherine de' Medici ruled with an iron fist and supported the development of the arts—Italian arts. But this Italianization would bring refinement to the French court.

Inevitably, this cultural influence was reflected in the French language. Thousands of Italian words entered French, notably terms relating to war, finance, morals , painting , and, as well as clothing, food, horseback riding, music, etc. In all, some 8,000 words invaded the language, about 10% of which are still used today.

In the 17th century, France was the greatest demographic and military power in Europe, and was governed with authority by strong figures: Henry IV, Cardinal Richelieu, then Cardinal de Mazrin and Louis XIV.

Richelieu endeavoured to restore royal authority through heightened centralization, reorganization of the army and navy, and the creation of a pervasive police presence. Richelieu also created the Académie française in 1635 with the mission of preparing a dictionary, grammar, rhetoric, and poetics and keeping watch over the French language. Louis XIV became the ruler of France in 1661.

At the time, French, although an official language, was still little used, even in France. It was the language of the court, the aristocracy and middle class, literature, and academia, but was spoken by fewer than one million out of the 20 million inhabitants of France, or 5% of the population. Given that nobles numbered only about 4,000 at the court, it was the middle class and merchants who, in absolute numbers, spoke French the most.

During this authoritative and centralized century, the grammarians shaped the language to their liking. For grammarians, French had reached the "peak of perfection." The use of a select and elegant vocabulary was to be desired. Grammarians remained very preoccupied with purifying the language out of fear of future corruption, and banned Italianisms, archaisms, provincialisms, technical and learned terms—all the words considered "low." The Académie française continued to monitor the "purity" of the language and published the first edition of its dictionary in 1694. Like the subjects of Louis XIV, words were grouped into classes. Vocabulary included only words permitted to an "honest man" and was based on Vaugelas' "proper usage."

Placed in the hands of those who frequented salons and the court of Louis XIV, the literary language was used by elegant and cultivated people, or 1% of the population. Its vocabulary, depleted through excessive purism (undue concern for the purity of the language),

The French spoken by the elite was ever so slow to filter down to the people, who knew nothing of the rules of order, purity, elegance, and harmony. At the time, illiteracy was around 99% in France, as it was in the rest of Europe. The people were kept in total ignorance. Education remained rooted in religion, which was generally conducted in the local "patois" and sometimes even Latin.

Another transition period began upon the death of Louis XIV in 1715 and ended with the onset of the French Revolution in 1789).

The French state was not yet concerned with making the kingdom French. The newly acquired provinces and overseas colonies (Canada, Louisiana, West Indies, etc.) required no special linguistic policy. Leaders were more concerned with religious unity and the absence of conflict; there was no actual need for the people to speak French.

It is estimated that fewer than 3 million people could speak and understand French at the time out of a total population of 25 million, or 12%. The people did not speak the "King's language," but rather a popular, non-standard form of French peppered with provincialisms and slang. Only the provinces of Île-de-France, Champagne, Beauce, Maine, Anjou, Touraine, and Berry were relatively French-speaking. Most of the people who lived in Normandy, Lorraine, Poitou, and Burgundy, on the other hand, spoke half-patois. They practised a form of bilingualism, speaking "patois" (derived from Latin, like French) among themselves, but being able to understand French.

French did, however, make progress during the 18th century—notably in the langue d'oïl region—due, among other things, to the outstanding quality of France's road network at the time. The language benefited from this accessibility—factories attracted thousands of workers from the countryside to the cities, where they learned French; merchants and traders travelled easily from city to city, which brought their local dialects into closer alignment with French; and a peddler system developed that resulted in French books and newspapers periodically making their way to the furthest reaches of the countryside.

Paradoxically, schools remained the major obstacle to spreading French. The state and Church contended that educating the people was not only pointless, but also dangerous.

From the point of view of vocabulary, there was a veritable explosion of new words—notably learned, technical terms taken freely from Greek and Latin. There was also a surge of foreign influences in France. The language added Italian, Spanish, and German words, but nothing compared to the craze for all things English. Politics, institutions, fashion, cooking, business, and sport provided the largest contingent of anglicisms. Curiously, purists of the day only challenged provincialisms and vernacular words that entered French. They believed that language become tainted when it came into contact with the masses.

The period 1789–1870 was one of restlessness and regime change, but also marked a transition to contemporary French. It also marked the triumph of the middle classes, which now wielded power. Following the dictatorship of Napoleon, monarchical rule was restored, but on a constitutional basis. Then came the Second Republic, followed by another dictatorship headed by Napoleon III. The proclamation of the Third Republic in 1870 finally stabilized France.

The revolutionary period stirred national sentiment, including with regard to language. For the first time, language was associated with nation. Language was a matter of state, for the state had to equip the "united and indivisible Republic" with a national language and raise the people up through education and knowledge of French. The very idea of a "united and indivisible Republic" whose motto was "Fraternité, Liberté, Egalité" (Fraternity, Freedom, Equality) was irreconcilable with linguistic fragmentation and differences between the former provinces of the monarchy. The revolutionary middle classes saw such fragmentation as an obstacle to the spread of their ideas, and declared war on the dialects.

The term language began to be used exclusively in reference to French, "our language." Everything that was not French was called a patois or feudal idiom, Consequently, a need was felt to impose French via stringent decrees throughout France,

Napoleon Bonaparte sought to put an end to anarchy and economic chaos. Napoleon was a Corsican of the lower nobility and took a conservative approach to language. A native speaker of Corsican (an Italian language), he put an end to all efforts aimed at promoting French. For the sake of economy, he left schools to the Church, which re-established its anachronistic Latin. Several initiatives were taken to promote the teaching of French, but the overall picture remained grim. There still weren't enough schools, and the lack of qualified teachers hindered the teaching of French. Overall, the use of French in schools actually declined. In southern France, for example, there were more teachers of Latin than French!

As during the Grand Siècle, the state created a number of conservative-minded organizations to keep watch over the language. This signalled a return to Louis XIV classicism. French had to be cast permanently in stone. Simplicity and distinction were once more the order of the day. The language of science was held in suspicion and incurred the wrath of purists, while technical vocabulary was deemed common. Suspended for a time on account of the Revolution, the Académie française was re-established and Napoleon had academicians dress in flamboyant garb like that of his generals.

Such conditions obviously prevented the language from evolving quickly. Apart from vocabulary, not many linguistic changes occurred during this time.

. The creation of a national elementary education system (non-mandatory) in 1830 was a liberal idea, because it applied to everyone and called for the use of manuals in French (and no longer in Latin). In contrast, the curriculum remained essentially conservative, because all teaching of French was based on the orthography of the Académie française and the grammar codified by François Noël (General Inspector of the University) and Jean-Pierre Chapsal (professor of general grammar), or the famous Grammaire française [French Grammar]published in 1823 and adopted by the Royal Council of Public Education fluctuations in the everyday language and whose many overnice exceptions formed the basis of grammar teaching. "Proper orthography" became a mark of class or social distinction. Naturally, middle class children did better than working class children, who were less willing to base pronunciations on spellings.

The numerous reforms aimed at simplifying spelling failed one after the other. Standard modern French gradually became established around 1850. The pronunciation of the Parisian middle class spread throughout France with the help of centralization and the development of communications (railroad, newspapers).

Thank you Louis

Dear Jean-Marc

Thank you for mentioning Aneta Pavlenko work. For some reason that she did not explain, she thinks that culture affects language (by unknown means), but language does not affect culture (although it obviously does). May be she changed her views?

Dear Elaine

I appreciate your comment that poetry is untranslatable, "Even within a language."

I'd like to add that emotions in language prosody cannot be described adequately by words at all. E.g. English has about 150 emotional words, of which only 5 or 7 are really different ("basic emotions" mostly studied by psychologists, see Petrov, S., Fontanari, F., & Perlovsky, L.I. (2012). Subjective emotions vs. verbalizable emotions in web texts. International Journal of Psychology and Behavioral Sciences, 2 (5), 173-184. http://arxiv.org/abs/1203.2293). But there are near infinite number of emotions in language prosody. And these emotions are different in different languages. They are as little translatable as music.

Dear Franco,

Thank you for the excellent comment. I would also add that emotionality of the first language is what really counts (usually). Academically learned language, like medieval Latin may have no emotional effect.

Dear Miles,

An excellent comment:

"Latin-speakers went from subjugation under Etruscan kings to republicanism to dictatorship to ruin in less than a thousand years despite having a fairly stable language throughout that time"

I do not know enough about Latin history. If you know, it would be an excellent research topic. You listed 4 changes, about 200-300 years per change, a bit fast for a highly inflected language. But how many people spoke Latin and when? How many different languages we are talking about?

No language can be stable, every language-culture is an evolving system. Stability of a language means cultural near death. Some people are hypnotized by Chinese, real scientific analysis is often lucking.

If you look into my paper you might find several topics of interest for yourself to research even within 800 years of Latin (I cannot do it all myself). Of course following bitten paths, like words for colors, would not get much news. But if you look at emotionality of a language and its evolution - there is a lot of new staff.

"The successes of nations generally seems to have more to do with non-linguistic factors. "

This is the question. So it is interesting to separate various factors. If you think how culture is transmitted through generations, you conclude that there are not many non-linguistic factors.

"once Roman people only came out of ruin once the Latin language was dead and the languages that came from Latin were many and divided, and even then it took quite awhile. "

This is another 25 Ph.D. theses.

Great question,

There are several ways we can try to answer - one way is through history and the persistence of heritage.

I don't know incidentally why people keep focusing on 'Latin', which was derived straight from indo-European and as such is very closely related to the other languages in the IE family, including Sanskrit and Germanic (far more closely so than would seem at first blush)

(Incidentally, Louis, a historical note: the only reason why the modern French speak a romance language is because the battle of Alesia against Caesar was lost - the natural original two languages of Gaul were Gaulish - a Celtic language akin to Breton and Cornish, and Frankish, a Germanic tongue whose closest living relative today is Dutch. Latin was a foreign language to France, a language of Italian origin. Samewise, Germany itself would have started speaking a Romance language if they had lost the battle of Kalkriese against Caesar, which they however won, and which marked the end of Caesar's bid to do in Germany what he did in Gaul - overrun the place)

Back to historical differences: as an interesting case in point, the selfsame old Indo European word consistently gives rise in Latin to an objective word, whereas in Germanic the same stemword gives rise to a self-reflective, subjective word: e.g. the IE word (s)mire, to look at, to see a wonderful event, gives rise to miracle and (ad)mire in Latin (i.e., the objective act of looking at something) whereas in Saxon it yields smile - the self-reflective act of looking at oneself looking at something admirable. Same, e.g., with the IE word smord(*) which gives mordere in latin (to bite: objectively the animal is biting your ankle) whereas in Saxon it yields up 'to smart' meaning to hurt (you are hurting when your ankle is being bitten), and so on.

Do those historical differences, whereby the Latins were more coldly rationally objective than their Saxon brethren, still abide ? probably not, so that the persistence of language-intermediated mindsets seems moot.

The other way around seems to work better: mindsets become embedded in language, rather than the other way around. For instance:

in Japanese, there is a word for 'I' (watashi wa), but it's very seldom used, because Japanese culture is loath to put forward the individual.

This being said, i believe that we can only rue the fact that most languages keep being burdened by the weight of a partly primitive past, which hinders and slows up the advent of a more modern, neutral, approach to things. I am still shocked how gender-neutrality is an outright grammatical error in so many languages.

I wish we'd do away with all that, and stop speaking within the same grammatical constraints as our forebears from a prescientific, ignorant and sometimes embarrassing past.

Dear Chris,

Thank you for an excellent overview. This kind of knowledge and analysis of languages and cultures is amazingly interesting.

The difference between "the Latins were more coldly rationally objective than their Saxon brethren" - this still might affect cultural differences by persisting through languages. I wonder if rationality of Latin was not only due to existing words, but also due to its lower emotionality than the current Germanic languages?

Chris if you look at my open paper, just one page 8:

Perlovsky, L.I. (2012). Emotionality of Languages Affects Evolution of Cultures. Review of Psychology Frontier, 1(3), 1-13.

http://www.academicpub.org/rpf/paperInfo.aspx?ID=31

I compared there English and Arabic. This page indicates a kind of analysis possible when looking at relations between grammar, emotionality, and culture.

It could be applied to any language at various stages of its evolution. I would like to know your opinion. Language emotionality could be a significant step in expanding Sapir-Whorf ideas.

Dear Chris,

I appreciate your comment about desirability of a neutral language. I'd like to know your opinion about the following: a neutral language without grammatically-determined emotionality is good for science. But it might lead to a loss of culture due to the fact that most people are not ideal decision-makers, instead most people are guided by language.

Leonid,

I think that it would be helpful to find a correlation between the mode of evolution of the language and emotionality.

My first hypothesis is that languages which have mostly evolved under orality without too much constrainted by writing are more natural and emotional. Although all languages began in orality, the history of French and Latin showed that the evolution of these languages has been extremely constrainted by external writing codes controled by a small political elite.

My second hypothesis is that a sub-group of a given language that is illeterate (live in orality although that language has been forged by literality in history) for several generation will use a variant of the language that will become much more emotional than the literate part of the same population.

I read in Perlovsky, L.I. (2012). Emotionality of Languages Affects Evolution of Cultures: "A parallel study should address differences between Indo-European (IE) and Chinese languages. There are significant differences in several respects affecting connections between sounds and meanings. Future research should address how these differences might affect evolution of language and cultures. Inflections have disappeared in Chinese languages more than two millennia ago. Great achievements of classical Chinese culture might correspond to initial centuries of simplified language grammar (similar to cultural flourishing in England that followed initial centuries of Modern English). It is possible that in later centuries Chinese culture did not play the role of the world cultural leader because the language emotionality did not support effective balance between emotions and meanings. Old Chinese writing was pictographic; providing a direct connection between pictograms and meanings. Pictographic languages, however, are not convenient for expressing abstract concepts. Phonetic elements were added with time, and pictograms were simplified and became characters with less direct connections to their meanings. Chinese languages are tonal languages. Whereas in most IE languages tone of voice is used exclusively for emotional language content, tone of voice in Chinese may convey also semantic content. This mixes emotions and meanings, contrary to the fundamental development of languages toward separation of emotional and semantic contents."

No reference is given in this part of the text (!!!), but it contains incorrect, historically and thematically inaccurately described, or simply unstudied stuff, which should, however (in my opinion) clearly be declared as unknown.

This language you use here to present crude assumptions does not even attempt to differentiate between hypothesis and fact?

How can something be at the same time "the fundamental development of languages", when it does not include all families of languages, and does instead assume some "special giftedness" to the few Indo-European languages (at the example of English alone) which come up in the study? This falls behind even the 19th century studies, you seem to be fond of.

Aren't you aware that we have documentation for a Sinitic language (called Early Old Chinese) in the Shang Oracle bones, 3000 years old? That the development since then, as we assume in our reconstructions (yes, please be clear that these are reconstructions of language!), has lead to changes in all features of the language(s) we find in written Chinese (which was never pictographic in three thousand years, sir!)

How do you define "abstract"? Maybe already the Shang Oracle bone inscriptions dealing with divination (prognosis) can be called abstract?

After Chinese spoken languages (plural!) *became* tonal languages, the same characters were used as before in the period of change: how do you accomodate for such developments in your studies? (that seem to be concerned with linguistic changes of the last few hundred years only, as they deal with English, we give you one millenium?)

Absent is also all developments and changes in the knowledge cultures of the various political entities now called summarily "China" or "Chinese dynasties", "imperial China" etc. (Covering 2 millenia with written Chinese undergoing significant changes again in this long period, and an enourmous lanugage reform movement for about 100 years.)

Nothing could possibly happen says your crude stuff! Ignoring just about everything written since Joseph Needham's multi-volume work "Science and Civilisation in China"?

And reducing "classical China" (meaning writing of the Warring States Period in Old Chinese) to two philosophical texts only.

Please note: Archeologically found mansucripts of this period (4th BCE to about 1st c. CE.) add now to our knowledge of the intellectual and technical culture of the time: we find technical texts about mathematics, law, medicine, hemerology, etc., some of them illustrated with diagrams. We have now together with these new sources about 2500 years of documentation in such fields of human enquiry, running parallel with developments in other regions of Eurasia and Africa.

There is also a significant difference in literacy, and the value given to written culture in different languages/cultural spheres in Eurasia.

In all this documentation I do not see some prima facie evidence for your claims, made about materials you seem not to have studied so far.

How do you explain the time-lag of about 500 years between mass printing in Song China and beginning printing culture in middle European states? How do you explain the different consequences for larger cultural trends, paper and printing had in East Asia and Europe?

And you dare even to use in print the mis-characterization "Chinese culture did not play the role of the world cultural leader", repeated also in this thread, while simply ignoring most part of this culture, and especially of its technologic and scientific cultures (plural!)?

How come? Do you believe too much in the correctness of your own theories, developed on English?

Why not fine-tune first the terms used: "emotion" and "emotionality" are terms taken out of their context in your work, and create confusion, when it is not clear if you use them in a Perlovsky-specific technical sense or in a more everyday-language sense.

Why not find terms that are precise and clear, and then go about the research you propose with less dramatic assumptions?

It might well be that there are some kind of effects of prosody/sound/tone on the wordview of speakers (and writers?), but these could also be less strong than you seem to hypothesize so far, or these could be also different for written and spoken languages.

(Will have to delay further discussion of specifics until April due to other commitments. Pardon me.)

Kind regards

rodo

Some bibliography (no particular order):

BOLTZ William G.

1994 The origin and early development of the Chinese writing system.

(American Oriental Series, Volume 78)

New Haven, Connecticut: American Oriental Society. [pdf can be found online]

BRETELLE-ESTABLET Florence (ed.)

2010 Looking at it from Asia: The Process that Shaped the Sources of History and Science. (Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 265)

Dordrecht etc.: Springer. [xlvi+426p.; ISBN 978-90-481-3675-9.]

LIU Jerry & DENG Kent (eds.)

2009 Special Issue: Chinese Technological History: The Great Divergence.

in: History of Technology 29.

GOBLE Andrew Edmund, ROBINSON Kenneth R., Wakabayashi Haruko (eds.)

2009 Tools of Culture: Japan’s Cultural, Intellectual, Medical, and Technological Contacts in East Asia, 1000s to 1500s. (Asia Past & Present)

Ann Arbor, MA: Association for Asian Studies.

[xix+315p.; ISBN: 978-0924304-538; 28,00 $]

SELIN Helaine (ed.)

2008 Encyclopaedia of the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine in Non-Western Cultures (2 Volume Set) Berlin, etc.: Springer. [2416p.; Electronic publication under ISBN 978-1-4020-4425-0 and Print and electronic bundle under ISBN 978-1-4020-4960-6.]

YAN Hong-Sen

2007 Reconstruction designs of lost ancient Chinese machinery. (History of Mechanism and Machine Science 3) Dordrecht: Springer. [xii+308p.; ISBN 978-1-4020-6459-3 hb.]

BRAY Francesca, DOROFEEVA-LICHTMANN Vera & MÉTAILIÉ Georges (eds.)

2007 Graphics and Text in the Production of Technical Knowledge in China. The Warp and the Weft. (Sinica Leidensia, 79) Leiden: Brill. [772p.; ISBN 978 90 04 16063 7; EUR 149.00 US$ 199.00.]

BARRETT Timothy H.

1997 The Feng-tao k‘o and Printing on Paper in Seventh-Century China. in: Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 60.3: 538-540.

--1998 Images of printing in seventh century Chinese religious literature.

in: Chinese Science 15: 81-93.

--2001 Woodblock dyeing and printing technology in China, c. 700 A.D.: the innovations of Ms. Liu, and other evidence. in: Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 64.2: 240-247.

--2005 Religion and the first recorded print run: Luoyang, July, 855. in: Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 68.3: 455-461.

--2008a The Woman Who Discovered Printing. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. [176p.; ISBN-13: 978-0300127287.]

-- 2008b The Rise and Spread of Printing: A New Account of Religious Factors.

Np: Minnow Press.

CHERNIAK Susan

1994 Book culture and textual transmission in Sung China. in: Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 54.1: 5-125.

CHEMLA Karine (ed.)

2012 The History of Mathematical Proof in Ancient Traditions. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. [612p.; 93 b/w illus. 29 tables; ISBN: 9781107012219; 100 GBP.]

EBERHARD-BRÉARD Andrea, DAUBEN Joseph W., XU Yibao

2003 The History of Chinese Mathematics: The Past 25 Years. in: Llull 26: 429-474. [Abstract: This paper presents the major accomplishments of research over the past quarter century in the field of Chinese mathematics and its history. (...)]

The History of Mathematics from Antiquity to the Present: A Selective Annotated Bibliography, edited by Joseph W. DAUBEN: Revised Edition on CD-ROM 2001. ISBN-13 / EAN: 9780821808443.

CHEMLA Karine

1990 De l’algorithme comme liste d’opérations. in: Extrême-Orient – Extrême-Occident 12: 79-94. (L’art de la liste.)

/dt. 2004 Vom Algorithmus als Operationsliste. in: JULLIEN François (ed.) 2004: Die Kunst, Listen zu erstellen. Berlin: Merve Verlag, pp. 51-72.

-- 2003 Generality Above Abstraction. The General Expressed in Terms of the Paradigmatic in Ancient China’s Mathematics. in: Science in Context 16.3: 413-458.

--2005 Geometrical figures and generality in ancient China and beyond: Liu Hui and Zhao Shuang, Plato and Thabit ibn Qurra. in: Science in Context 18.1: 123-166.

[Argument / This paper argues that there was a shift in China in the nature, and use, of geometrical figures between around the beginning of the Common Era and the third century. Moreover, I suggest that the emphasis mathematicians in ancient China placed on generality as a guiding theoretical value may account for this shift. To make this point, I first give a new interpretation of a text often discussed, which is part of the opening section of The Gnomon of the Zhou (first century B.C.E. or C.E.). This interpretation suggests that the argument presented in this text for establishing the so-called “Pythagorean theorem” is based upon a certain kind of drawing. Secondly, I contrast this passage with Chinese texts from the third century on the same topic, but relying on a completely different type of drawing. What commands the difference in the kinds of drawing is that the latter drawings are “more general” than the former, in a sense to be made explicit. This paper hence aims at making a contribution to the study of geometrical figures in ancient China. / Commenting on one of the latter figures, one of the authors of the third century, Liu Hui, describes how various algorithms emerge out of the same transformation of one particular figure. His remarks provide grounds for commenting on the link between the general and the particular, in relation to figures and how algorithms rely on them, as the issue was perceived by the practitioners themselves. / The particular figure in question and its transformation are exactly what we find in the Meno, though in relation to a different mathematical issue. The link of that very figure to the one that is perceived as its “generalization” for several algorithms, including the so-called “Pythagorean theorem,” is made not only in Liu Hui, but also by Thabit ibn Qurra (ninth century C.E.), in a letter where he explicitly addresses the purpose of generalizing the reasoning of the Meno. This parallel offers an appropriate basis to highlight differences in terms of conception and use of figures.]

--2006 Documenting a Process of Abstraction in the Mathematics of Ancient China. in: ANDERL Christoph & EIFRING Halvor (eds.) °2006: Studies in Chinese

Language and Culture ― Festschrift in Honour of Christoph Harbsmeier on the Occasion of His 60th Birthday. Oslo: Hermes Academic Publishing, pp. 169-194.

--2010 A Chinese Canon in Mathematics and Its Two Layers of Commentaries: Reading a Collection of Texts as Shaped by Actors. in: BRETELLE-ESTABLET Florence (ed.) Looking at it from Asia: The Process that Shaped the Sources of History and Science.(Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science 265) Dordrecht etc.:Springer, pp. 169-210.

CULLEN Christopher

1996 Astronomy and Mathematics in Ancient China: The Zhou bi suan jing. (Needham Research Institute Studies 1) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

-- 2004 The Suan shu shu 筭數書 ‘Writings on Reckoning’. (Needham Research Institute Working Papers: 1, 2004) Cambridge: Needham Research Institute. [ISBN 0-9546771-0-2; 6+145p.] URL:

--2007The Suàn shù shū 筭數書, “Writings on reckoning”: Rewriting the history of early Chinese mathematics in the light of an excavated manuscript. in: Historia Mathematica 34: 10–44.

[Abstract: The Suàn shù shū is an ancient Chinese collection of writings on mathematics approximately 7000 characters in length, written on 190 bamboo strips, recovered from a tomb that appears to have been closed in 186 B.C. This anonymous collection is not a single coherent book, but is made up of approximately 69 independent sections of text, which appear to have been assembled from a variety of sources. Problems treated range from elementary calculations with fractions to applications of the Rule of False Position and finding the volumes of various solid shapes. The Suàn shù shū is now the earliest datable extensive Chinese material on mathematics. This paper discusses its relation to ancient works known through scribal transmission, such as the so-called “Nine Chapters,” Jiŭ zhāng suàn shù, which is first mentioned in connection with events around A.D. 100, but may have been compiled about a century earlier. It is proposed that the evolution of Chinese mathematical literature in the centuries that separate these two texts may be understood through comparison with what is known to have taken place during that time in another area of Chinese technical literature, that of medicine.]

Thanks for your kind comments Leonid,

I have read your paper which I find immensely interesting, I need to read it again before I can try and comment intelligently (I'm flat out at this time trying to meet my April 07 submission deadline on a pop science book I'm writing about Time - by the way - a point I make and I trust demonstrate in its WIP foreword posted here on RG is that absolutely *anyone* can understand relativity :-))) which kind of mildly gainsays something in your paper.)

On the balance of evidence I lean towards thinking that people, influenced by outside factors wholly unrelated to language such as climate, food habits - themselves largely conditioned by the local environment - and even average physical appearance which may have either a narrow or wide spread of traits within any given population (as relates to traits such as hair or eye color, etc.) - shape language rather than the other way around.

If we take the higher-level view, to wit that all languages may well ultimately stem from a same Ur-tongue that originated somewhere near the Rift Valley ( a point that is unproven but for which Merritt Ruhlen makes, IMHO, a pretty convincing case ) , then it seems that indeed local variations stemmed from how respective peoples interacted with and were influenced by their particular environments, rather than the other way around, i.e. from originally built-in differences in language influencing ways of thinking and mindsets - because the language was originally one and the same.

There are so very many instances of this phenomenon in IE languages that it would be rather natural to extrapolate it to all world languages (For instance: why do Northern Europeans call a bear a bear, rather than the old IE word ark? Because there were more bears in the North than the South of Europe, and hunting bears was a routine event in the North but not further South. Pronouncing the name of the animal during a hunt was a big no-no because it was thought to jinx the hunt, so the bear was referred to as 'the brown one' - bear, and bruin, and their close cognates in Scandinavian and German/Dutch, are words descended straight from the word 'brown'. The Latin and Greek words are still the original IE word, because there were fewer bear hunts. Ad infinitum .....)

Louis,

a very valid observation. I would add that language could only evolve after involuntary emotional control over voice was reduced (from animal to human state). All languages evolved from highly emotional to lower emotional states. But this evolution is not linear.

A highly emotional language prevents evolution of a culture: high emotions "nail" conceptual understandings to old ways. But a low emotional language is also 'dangerous' for culture: without emotions the meaning is lost.

Looking at TV today we can see what peoples with highly emotional languages do to themselves, to their neighbors, and sometimes to us. At the same time we can see what happens with our culture due to low-emotional languages: our culture is losing its meaning, and will disappear like Latin culture did.

Does it make sense (even if unpleasant to contemplate)?

Dear Rudolf,

Your comment illustrates why interdisciplinary research is difficult. I would suggest that you could make scientific comments-criticisms. Or even better, in the spirit of a real scientist you could read the paper, see the main ideas that are novel and fundamentally different from anything done in these areas, and see how to apply them in the area where you think you are an expert. I would be very glad to be a part of such joint research.

Instead you lash out in indignation against real or imaginary inaccuracies of secondary significance. I would note that all your criticism, valid or not, is directed at 1 paragraph of a long paper full with novel ideas. You did it without even paying attention to the main ideas of my paper.

Not being an expert in ancient Chinese languages I would like to assure you that I have shown this paragraph to several experts. I do not know if you are simply wrong, or if there are differences of opinions among experts in this area. I would add that terminological changes that you suggest would not change the main conclusions.

Many of your statements against my paper are simply wrong. I never wrote about "special giftedness" of some languages - is this your own idea? You even assume that you know which ideas I am "fond of." Please note, this paper as my other hundreds of papers is a scientific investigation, not a search for something to be fond of. On the opposite your highly emotional reaction ignoring facts indicates that you have some favorite or un-favorite ideas, which you like or dislike instead of studying scientific facts. We have enough of this on our TV, we do not need this in scientific discussions.

"How do you accommodate for such developments in your studies?" I'll be glad to give you references to my other papers where I discuss exactly this point, or just explain my ideas. And I would be very glad to continue this scientific discussion - but using polite language of science independently of which argument is right or wrong. This is the purpose of publishing papers.

"Developments and changes in the knowledge cultures of the various political entities now called summarily "China" or "Chinese dynasties", - this what makes research interesting, finding laws that remains despite many changes. Why does is it make you angry?

"It might well be that there are some kind of effects of prosody/sound/tone on the wordview of speakers (and writers?)"

I am glad that you consider my main ideas possible. And I would be even more happy if you consider a possibility of exchanging ideas and together pursuing a complex multi-disciplinary and a very interesting topic.

Dear Chris,

I am looking forward to continue this discussion. Does language influences culture, or culture influences language? There is no doubt the influence goes both ways and your example of the word "bear" is excellent. Yet let us consider how much of cultural knowledge can be transmitted to the next generation by ways of living (ways of hunting in the case of bear) without language. And how much of cultural knowledge can be transmitted to the next generation by language. This comparison could weigh toward language.

Of course this idea that languages transmit and influence cultures and not the other way around - this is not my idea (unfortunately). This idea is more than 600 years old and many great linguists contributed to its development. My contribution concerns emotionality of languages that previously have been ignored. I also advanced some hypotheses about mechanisms of evolution of language sounds-emotions, and how these mechanisms interact with language grammar.

Taking these ideas to languages around the world is fascinating, I am trying and preliminary results are interesting and encouraging. For example why Italian and Russian are more emotional than English? - this is one of several examples seemingly supporting my hypothesis. But of course it would take many scientists to explore such a vast topic.

Dear Leonid,

Reread your paper which I find absolutely excellent - I'll try to comment a fit more at length later on, it goes to show as well that there is still much to do in the study of languages. I like its new angles and perspectives.

Indeed, why are Italian and English more emotional than English ? All the explanations I could tentatively venture break down at some point.

I'd like to comment that the etymology of languages, unlike historians and/or politicians, does not lie: unbeknownst to most users, and irrespective of the spin that victors may give to History, languages carry the weight of past famines, wars, bad religions, epidemics, and so on.

There would be enough material for a thick book, of course, here are a couple of examples:

The words hunger and candidate are, astonishingly enough, one and the same (and feature the old IE h/c equivalence, found in so many other words): Because of the long barren winters, hunger was more prevalent in the North. The way to say you were hungry was to say that your stomach was burning (there are traces of that in modern Danish, where the word for 'hungry is sulten, directly related to the English words swelter, sultry, or swale, all derived from a word meaning to burn) When you were very hungry, you said that your stomach was 'white hot', or, for short, 'white' :(*)cund or (*) hund . Meanwhile in Rome, candidates to the Senate wore white togas: 'cand(id) ' togas ....

Here's a more frightening word: in German, to 'hallow' or 'consecrate' is 'weihen' (the word for Christmas: Weihnachten, literally means "hallowed nights".) The word 'weihen' comes from the same IE word that gave, in Latin, the word 'victim': the victim was the 'hallowed' one ... which seems to indicate that there might well have been human sacrifices in the European past .

Chris,

Amazing!

How much it would be possible to learn by combining disciplines!

Thank you for good words.

Chris,

So much history is bottled in words. Did you read Owen Barfeild?

I love this question, Leonid. I speak and read and write everyday in several European languages. I dream in different languages and think also in the same manner. It made me realize that no language is home to me. No language is home to anyone, in fact. I experience languages as imperfect, blunt instruments to say or to avoid saying something. I try to understand why we have invented languages in the beginning. My understanding is that language is not only one thing. Language as poetry is not the same as language used in court, which in its turn is not the same as technical language or the language of the political discourse. It's also understood that language is an instrument of socialisation, well it depends on the context, but I'd dare to claim that we use the language more on the contrary purpose to hide the genuine thought or feeling, or in many cases to reconstruct it in a more attractive form. We use language as a barrier, as a indicative of a special status, even the criminals need to operate a separation from the main body of language and built inside it a special space just for themselves. Language was supposed to unify and serve as means of communication, but I don't believe that this is true about us today.

Have you paid attention to the language used by young people today? Much more coding, much more abbreviation, much more import from English, many new words that appear and disappear very fast.... In many ways it's not a joy to follow their hieroglyphic conversation, but in a certain manner it's a cry for identity and sincere, direct communication. It's no big difference between different nations in this sense, because Internet generation (born after '92-'93) is not so much attached to some restrictive idea of nation, state or other political definitions.

I have studied Romance and Germanic languages and especially when one studies the etymology understands how much these languages have in common. Latin, Greek, French, German and recently English constitute the common reservoir of most of European languages. In continental Europe the big difference is not between different nations, but mostly between countryside and big city. The big city culture is similar and its homogeneity is only increasing generation by generation. English is spoken even by young people in traditionally francophone countries, to the detriment of French and German. The unity between culture and nation is a romantic concept. The differentiation will have a different nominator in the future. Many languages have disappeared in the past and it's very possible that some languages will also disappear in the future (not being used in the daily life implies disappearance). But there is also another form of 'disappearance' by use and broad spreading among non-native speakers. English is changed by this expansive use and the genuine English is threatened to disappear. French spoken by the non-French judges at the Court of Justice is not genuine French, first is technical, juridical, it implies use of a jargon and it is adaptable to a multilingual environment. The good news for the French people is that this language is not used outside the Court, so the impact is not so big as in the first example. Languages are like a mirror to me, they reflect the reality in an imperfect manner. Since the reality is changing, it's no surprise that languages also are amended, sometimes in a drastic manner. It's true that some people would prefer a Photo-shop image instead of a mirror image and propaganda during the Nazi and communist times was a type of Photo-shop manipulation. This type of manipulation has created a strong feeling of alienation (Herta Müller has written about this in e.g. The Hunger Angel)

Louis, actually no I had not heard of Owen Barfield

I studied Sanskrit & IE when I was learning other languages, and quickly became fascinated by how it hugely illuminated language - and slightly put off at discovering that all the differences that I had been taught existed between languages (Latin, Anglo-Saxon, etc.) were in fact illusory - not even skin deep - Scratch just a tiny bit below the upper layer of European languages, and they're one and the same - so that standard education in languages was, and is, misleading.

(e.g. : the English/German word for 'word' : Wort, or word - is the selfsame old word that gave the Latin "verb";

the German/Scandinavian/English word for hundred is two words meaning "number one hundred":: c/hund- & red, straight from the same IE words that gave respectively cent and ratio in Latin: hundred is literally cent-ratio;

speaking of which, thousand is also two words, meaning 'big hundred': thum-hend, with thum the same word as 'thumb' (big (finger)) but also as tumor and as tumescent (=swelling) etc. It's really ad infinitum.

It's not even limited to Latin/Germanic/Greek either - take Baltic, the names of the 2 countries where Baltic is spoken, Latvia and Lithuania, stem from an old word meaning 'where water and land meet', a word also found in the Baltic for 'rain': lietsu.

Looks different from what we've used to, right? Well, not at all: it's the same word as 'littoral' ... Ad infinitum. )

Emanuela, i agree with you, and I find it very sad that good English is getting lost. Good English is IMHO a fabulous tongue, bad English however is awful ...and is aided and abetted by economic interests, such as the International Herald Tribune apparently having two full-time editors on its staff solely tasked with removing 'difficult' words because they figured that 75% of the IHT readership are not native speakers: instead of lifting up the level (which I'm sure most foreign readers would love to), they dumb down the language in a thoroughly silly bid to cater to non native speakers. You should see the level of English that I routinely see coming from international institutions .. and then the selfsame folks who speak atrocious English put it down saying that it's an easy, primitive language. C'est à pleurer, or rather, es ist zum kotzen

By the way, I then studied Japanese ... and frankly, the similarities with IE are stunning ... which led me to believe that Merritt Ruhlen is right

"Languages today possess only the faintest traces of the one-time unity of sound and meaning. Those willing to look "may find, in the consonantal element in language, vestiges of those forces which brought into being the external structure of nature, including the body of man; and, in the original vowel-sounds, the expression of that inner life of feeling and memory which constitutes his soul." All this is consistent with the testimony of the ancients that the primordial Word was responsible for creation.

Still today, the invisible word is spoken with a physical gesture, even if that gesture has for the most part contracted into the small organs of speech. One can at least imagine how the gestures of speech were once made with the whole body. This was before man had become "detached from the rest of nature after the solid manner of today, when the body itself was spoken even while it was speaking." (Saving the Appearances, Owen Barfield)

Emanuela

"I love this question, Leonid. I speak and read and write everyday in several European languages..."

It is a very interesting note with many aspects. Let me comment on few aspects of it.

" I dream in different languages and think also in the same manner."

This is very interesting. For someone who carefully thinks, it is a great advantage. A sound of a particular language does not autonomously navigate you thinking. You are at the will (when you are).

"I try to understand why we have invented languages"

I am not sure we did. Possibly language invented us more than we invented language.

" I'd dare to claim that we use the language more on the contrary purpose to hide the genuine thought or feeling"

Certainly we use language this way, I'am not sure this is the essence of it. More often we just do not use it well.

"Have you paid attention to the language used by young people today? Much more coding, much more abbreviation, much more import from English..."

An excellent observation. My experience only touches Russians. I think that it might be temporary, because Russian grammar is very powerful, it might turn "Englicisms" eventually to the part of Russian.

Loosing one's own language has a dangerous side. Language prosody guides one's thought. I do not know if anybody's power of thinking can be more powerful than that of language.

"English is spoken even by young people in traditionally francophone countries" I was thinking about it - this might be a danger for European culture. Don't you think German grammar would reassert itself eventually?

"The unity between culture and nation is a romantic concept. The differentiation will have a different nominator in the future. "

Yes, we do not know what awaits us there, possibly culture so dear to us will disappear.

"there is also another form of 'disappearance' by use and broad spreading among non-native speakers. English is changed by this expansive use and the genuine English is threatened to disappear. "

I agree and fear for our future.

" some people would prefer a Photo-shop image instead of a mirror image and propaganda during the Nazi and communist times was a type of Photo-shop manipulation. This type of manipulation has created a strong feeling of alienation (Herta Müller has written about this in e.g. The Hunger Angel)"

It is true, propaganda distorted languages. I'll try to read this book

Leonid wrote: "Not being an expert in ancient Chinese languages I would like to assure you that I have shown this paragraph to several experts. I do not know if you are simply wrong, or if there are differences of opinions among experts in this area. I would add that terminological changes that you suggest would not change the main conclusions."

Well, dear Leonid, I reported what I consider common opinion, and I quoted references wherein you can consult yourself, independently of my assessment, what is doubtful or wrong in your paragraph on the history of Chinese languages and sciences.

However, it is common in scientific writing to mark personal communications as such, and to name the individual researchers or "experts" who made them.

I did not report on controversial issues and opinions of fringe people in the field.

Now what would you prefer me to do, when I find issues in your contributions that are errors of fact or mischaracterizations, which I would have to point out to beginners in the field? Be silent or point your attention to informed contributions?

As you propose in the paragraph under discussion "a parallel study" that addresses the "differences between Indo-European (IE) and Chinese languages", I thought it worthwhile to correct some statements already before the start of such.

I feel differences in people because their language. For example, in a language with words with many meaning (like English for me), I look more frivolity or lightweight, swift, agile. Less rigid.

In a language whose have a different word for every different kind of situation of the word, this different word for each thing, make more rigid the expression. More detailed, and more subtle, but more immovable too. (Like German, Spanish a little, I don't know if Chinese). This make a more detailed compression for every way and rich expression, but more rigid, (and with feeling of dominate the others, I think).

An interesting extension of this discussion could be related to emotional intelligence and empathy.

How much linguistic structures influence the above.

There are some measures for this, related to prosody, the musical component of language.

Brain imaging and brain evoked potentials could be considered, as mirror neurons are involved in emotion recognition processes.

The evolution of indo-european languages, as related to the expression of emotions is also a very fascinating perspective. For example: both English, German, Russian, Greek and Italian are members of the Indo-European family. Why did they evolve different phonetic patterns, peculiar to the expression of emotions...

This is an absolutely terrific question! I am particularly interested in the responses from Chris and Emanuela. I too have studied Romance and Germanic languages along with Latin, Greek, Turkish, and some Arabic (still working on that one). But as Chris points out, scratch the surface of most any (or all) European languages and there is a common Indo-European root lurking in the background. The mixture of Anglo-Saxon with Norman French to create "English" is one of the most fascinating language events to study--that and the Great Vowel Shift that devastated spelling for English students and continues to do so. But the question of emotionality in the language itself may be difficult to ascertain; that problem of language and culture (are they inter-related, inter-dependent, or does one precede the other?) is going to create problems in studying emotionality in language. Although English may seem less emotional, all one needs to do is watch the Alabama-Auburn football games here in Alabama to question the notion that English and its speakers speak with less emotion than Russians and Greeks. Having grown up with German-speaking grandparents (they spoke Pennsylvania "Dutch" (the mistaken American pronunciation of "Deutsch") I was convinced that German is not a language with high degrees of emotionality ( a view supported by most college educators as well). But then I fell in love with Goethe's "Lieder" and Heine's poetry, the philosophy of Hegel; I began to question German language as non-emotional. It seems that German is often able to present nuances that are difficult to express in English. For instance, both the German and Spanish translations of the Qur'an are more expressive of the original than many English translations (with the exception of the English poetry of Yusuf Ali's Qur'an). Possibly language is not so determinative of culture; culture may simply use language for its own purposes. It may be that a large group of people do not use language to express open emotions, but that does not mean that the language itself is not emotionally expressive. I can definitely state that my German family is less emotionally expressive than the Greeks I lived among for a few years. And generally the British are less emotionally expressive than the Americans. Whether language is at the core of these differences is, however, contestable. A skilled translator can dig deeply into a language and bring its strongest elements to life. FOr instance, my favorite translator of German philosophy and literature is Walter Kaufmann because he can say in English very nearly what Goethe or Hegel (even Kant) meant in their German originals.

As for present-day American English, it is in serious decline on all fronts. In the 1970s newscasts were generally presented with approximately an 11th grade word level. Presently that level is about seventh grade. Formal English writing has also declined to a great degree, a situation that in turn creates huge problems when we try to teach academic English for university and research writing. Students read more online than in print; most online seems to follow a journalistic format of short paragraphs, simpler terms, and less global cohesion than one finds in academic writing. We have to remind college students that they may not use their abbreviated language to write academic papers. Even the best of American news magazines generally present materials about 11th grade reading levels. Only the science magazines or the more "literary" magazines like "Harpers" or "Atlantic" aim at audiences with higher reading levels. I live in Alabama, a state with a 20% illiteracy rate; some counties have as high as 50% illiteracy. Most high school graduates read at an 8th grade level. The formal levels of English in the US have been in decline for decades, but the decline is much more pronounced in poorer states like those in the Deep South.

Aysha,

The current decline of English is awful, isn't it?

It is happening partly because of the unavoidable simplification and dumbing down stemming from its status as the world's lingua franca - you should e.g. see the utterly ghastly English coming out of the European Institutions in Brussels. Far from trying to lift the level of English of their foreign counterparts there, native speakers just don't bother and merely stoop down to the general level and blithely maul their own language.

It's awful - proper English simply gets lost and forgotten, then foreigners smirkingly put down English as simple and dumb, and the spiral goes on and deepens.

Partly, English also reflects the class society of English-speaking countries - as you point out publications like Harper's and The Atlantic still use great English (as do a number of contemporary popular writers, e.g. Cormac McCarthy, and , once upon a long ago, Stephen King himself (whose level of English has unfortunately rather sharply declined in recent years.)

English is however consistently at the very least every bit as expressive as any other language. e.g. - Compare an original Goethe text below with its English translation - is it me, or does the English seem even better than the original?

Goethe:

Still und eng und ruhig auferzogen/Wirft man uns auf einmal in die Welt;

Uns umspülen hunderttausend Wogen/Alles reizt uns, mancherlei gefällt,

Mancherlei verdrießt uns und von/Stund' zu Stunden/Schwankt das leichtunruhige Gefühl;

Wir empfinden, und was wir empfunden/Spült hinweg das bunte Weltgewühl.

English:

Raised in the calm and placid seas of childhood/ Suddenly we are brutally thrust into the frothing world

Where countless choppy waves swirl and rush /And the world intrigues and delights

And chagrins / But feelings of unease always flicker back

We attempt to feel but feelings never jell / As the world ceaselessly swills our feelings away

Chris,

The English translation is certainly excellent and the work of a sensitive translator. I particularly like "swills"that gets to the sense of loss or worthless effort as we "attempt to feel." One of the elements that I find fascinating in the debate about language and culture is just how powerful both "culture" and "language memory" may be in our judgement of expressiveness or emotionality in language. I suspect our memory, our comfort zone, our culture speak much more eloquently to our feelings as we express them in language. For instance, my grandmother read the Bible to me in German, sang songs in German, and instilled in me a combined sense of physical comfort and language. In addition, in school I found German's prefixes that serve to intensify such a superb and economical means to express the greatest loathing and/or the greatest joy. It just seemed that English needed a lot more words to get those same points across. When we understand the original, there is always something to be gained--a sense of the person,his/her culture--all those elements we accidentally (or purposefully) reveal in our language.

I'm sorry to see English decline in world use because English at its best is a superb language. But the majority of my students revert only to the Microsoft thesaurus rather than to a much more credible source that picks among the best and most meaningful synonyms (since there is no such thing as the perfect synonym). I do not understand the Lowest Common Denominator (LCD) teaching approach that refuses to raise the bar and instead lowers it as low as possible to reach the worst or least prepared among the majority. My advisor in graduate school was a graduate of Gottingen (I don't have an umlaut handy). He demanded the best of every language whether English, German, or even Gothic, Saxon. His translation exercises were demanding to say the least but the standards were of highest order. Those days seem gone, if I judge by too many graduate programs I have seen in the last 30 years in the USA.

Here, when English speakers attempt to raise the level of diction even in university settings, we are often accused of elitism. But as I have often asked, since when did good diction, competence in writing and speaking become elitist? We allow the slovenly thinkers to grow into slovenly writers; we then praise the best of the worst, unmindful that speakers in the past were glorious orators (at least the ones we listened to). Frederick Douglass certainly was not a formally educated speaker and writer but his speech to Americans on the 4th of July stands as one of the most profoundly rhetorically appropriate addresses ever made to an audience. We simply demanded the best of our national icons--and we got the best. Now we have celebrities whose command of English wouldn't satisfy a middle school English teacher. But we also have poorly-prepared English teachers whose command of the language and its literature is pitifully inadequate. The US still refuses to raise the standards of its teachers and to raise the curriculum designed to educate the teachers for their professions. The preparation is sad and focused more on control and organization of the classroom, not upon content and pedagogy that can raise the levels of reading and writing for those being taught. It is sad but all too often true--we choose the least prepared to enter schools of education and we choose the best to go to medical school or engineering programs. And it just goes round and round with no solution in sight.

Aysha

@ Asha Bey: we have the same problem in France at all levels. It is the same ideology : language is a tool, knowledge has to be immediately useful. The new mantra: pedagogy for pedagogy's sake. You don't teach a subject, you learn how to control a class, a disciplinary approach seems obsolete. The new reforms in the selective exams (capes) lower the standards of education. I am very worried for our children and for democracy.

way tooooo anglocentric all this: listen to this, and comment on the lyrics, please:

Franco,

All of these are fascinating questions. I only meant to address emotions specific to language prosody, which I think have a specific cognitive role: to motivate connecting sounds to their meanings - the essence of language.

Prosody is essential for children in bilingual families, prosody helps the children identify which sound belongs to which language and thus to build up a kind of inner dictionary

Leonid

Sorry if I was at the same time expanding and condensing questions.

I have been always fascinated by sensing that every conversation is at the same time a dance and a concert. We sync our movements and voices in order to tune up our emotional communication.

There are interesting examples in in the Stanislavski training system for actors about this.

Probably the opera and musicals are exploiting this natural attitude, not just human, but quite widespread in the animal world.

Studying prosody is a way to focus, in measurable ways,on the musical and emotional component of language.

As about what Fiona mentions about the role of prosody in bilingual families, I was reminded of the Memoirs of Elias Canetti, Nobel prize in literature, especially the first book, The Tongue Set Free. There is a dual meaning in the title about finding your own mother tongue in a bilingual family. There is also a funny story about this in the beginning of the book.

In response to Fiona, Franco, and Leonid about prosody. Franco mentions prosody as a means to focus on the "emotional component of language." In my response, I mentioned my grandmother's reading and singing to me in German; I suspect that the sound of the language (more than what she read) has produced that bond to German language that is not actually evident for me in English. I simply love the sounds associated with German.

Strangely (for me) I also fell in love with the sounds of classical Arabic as chanted by an experienced imam in the mosque. There is a powerful emotional component in those sounds, even when I don't understand all the words. Perhaps the prosody is the reason that the hadith (traditions) of the Prophet (pbuh) say that there is reward or blessings in even listening to the recitation of the Qur'an.

Are there studies done on prosody in language? Is there some sort of quantifiable means to study the impact of prosody?

Aysha

I don't no any, but it's not my field. What I notice is that british actors are very good at conveying a prosody and that the classical prosody of french rhetorics and poetry has all but disappeared

Maybe besides the point, but because I am 75% Greek, 25% Romanian, went to German primary school, made high school studies and partially university studies in Swedish, studying French and Danish at University later, doing my master of laws in English... all this mix resulted in the fact that when I want to sit down and write I must invent my own language, I must paint with words, extracting their meaning from the most simple forms.... Easter is soon here. Happy Easter to you and if you are curious to listen how I sound...(the link leads you to an original poem)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XC-aG0qh1Y&feature=youtu.be

Spanish does not have an exact equivalent to the English verb "wonder." "I wondered why I failed the exam," for example, would be "Me pregunté por qué fallé el examen." Nevertheless, my travels through Mexico and Spain indicate that Spanish speakers "wonder" just as much as English speakers.

emotional feelings and their way of presentation are cultural-related. there are some principles of emotional feelings and some parameters to be set by instruction. they affect the cultures due to their specific ways of expression and presentation. in other words, there is a mutual relationship between emotional status of mind and symbolic way of representation through language. emotions can influence language and language structures can enhance or limit expressing emotions. best

Some body language is universal; some is not. Laughter and smiling may be universal; however people smile and laugh for many different culturally determined reasons. There is also a matching or a miss-matching between language and body language (sarcasm, etc.) that needs to be taken into account. Check out this link: