Terribly Polite Language
Dec. 24th, 2009 12:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lightcastleSome Language Log fun:
1) The guy who designed the Na'vi language for the Avatar film explains the structural basis of the language.
2) An interesting study on how conceptual frames can bleed into each other. In this case, reading a story about dangerous invisible bacteria and a story using body metaphors for the country then resulted in harsher attidudes about illegal immigration.
3) Two fun articles from the Economist.
The first article is a wonderful examination of politeness in various languages, how it has evolved over time, and how it plays into any number of social dynamics. (For instance, across cultures, the tendency is for left-wingers to like intimate forms of address while right wingers favour formality. I leave it as an exercise to the reader why that might be so.)
The second involves "the world's hardest language" (with appropriate caveats) and has lots of neat stuff.
I liked learning that Bora, spoken in Peru, has more than 350 genders and that some languages distinguish whether "we" means "me and other people including you" and "me and other people but not including you".
And finally, for the more epistemologically-oriented among you, some languages have "evidentiality" - you not only accord things with gender and number and time but you must accord statements with how you know this information.
Diga ape-wi means that “the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)”, while diga ape-hiyi means “the boy played soccer (I assume)”.
According to someone at Language Log, a book on the subject in 2004 estimated that about 1/4 of the world's languages have this property in some form hardwired into their grammar.
1) The guy who designed the Na'vi language for the Avatar film explains the structural basis of the language.
2) An interesting study on how conceptual frames can bleed into each other. In this case, reading a story about dangerous invisible bacteria and a story using body metaphors for the country then resulted in harsher attidudes about illegal immigration.
3) Two fun articles from the Economist.
The first article is a wonderful examination of politeness in various languages, how it has evolved over time, and how it plays into any number of social dynamics. (For instance, across cultures, the tendency is for left-wingers to like intimate forms of address while right wingers favour formality. I leave it as an exercise to the reader why that might be so.)
The second involves "the world's hardest language" (with appropriate caveats) and has lots of neat stuff.
I liked learning that Bora, spoken in Peru, has more than 350 genders and that some languages distinguish whether "we" means "me and other people including you" and "me and other people but not including you".
And finally, for the more epistemologically-oriented among you, some languages have "evidentiality" - you not only accord things with gender and number and time but you must accord statements with how you know this information.
Diga ape-wi means that “the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)”, while diga ape-hiyi means “the boy played soccer (I assume)”.
According to someone at Language Log, a book on the subject in 2004 estimated that about 1/4 of the world's languages have this property in some form hardwired into their grammar.
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Date: 2009-12-26 12:54 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-26 02:38 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-12-26 03:15 pm (UTC)x
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Date: 2009-12-26 08:35 pm (UTC)"conceptual frames" piece
Date: 2010-01-14 07:09 pm (UTC)