4 ms·
People often say things like "This culture doesn't have a word for that color, how strange is that?", but isn't it stranger that basically every culture has so
by username90 7y ago
People often say things like "This culture doesn't have a word for that color, how strange is that?", but isn't it stranger that basically every culture has so many similarities, like words for the same very abstract things like love, marriage, colors, emotions and so on? Especially if you look at the typical persons of societies instead of the upper classes. I believe many greatly underestimate how much our culture is rooted in our genes, I see no other reason why human societies has so much in common.
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y ago“Mama” and “papa” are interesting words, because some variation on those, with the same meaning, exist in almost every language. Does this mean every language borrowed them from some common ancestor? No, not quite. It's just that newborn children make babbling sounds that resemble speech, with a very limited range of “consonsants”, and humans are such narcissists that they assume those babblings refer to them, the parents :)
- nonsapreiche 7y agothat reminds me the lecture of Bernstein (The unanswered Question) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fHi36dvTdE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8fHi36dvTdE
- pntnp 7y ago> and humans are such narcissists that they assume those babblings refer to them, the parents :) Or mama, papa, appa, amma, etc are the easiest words for infants/toddlers to pronounce and hence we used these word for children to call attention to the two most important people for their survival? Is it narcissism or the fact that infants/toddlers cannot even pronounce most vowels/consonants other than a, m, b/p?
- TazeTSchnitzel 7y agoYou're assigning meaning onto young infants' babblings that isn't there. They're not words.
- 1996 7y agoPeople like to insist on differences. I prefer to insist on commonalities. We are all human, the same race living on the same planet, with minor variations in customs that add salt to life.
- shrimp_emoji 7y agoPeople like to insist on commonalities. I prefer to insist on differences. If the salt includes prison camps and religious insanity, I'll have low sodium please.
- dgellow 7y agoYou may be interested by Chomsky’s work on Universal Grammar theory https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_grammar
- dr_dshiv 7y agoWhich is now simplified to a single function, "merge", which combines two elements into 1. https://dlc.hypotheses.org/1269 https://dlc.hypotheses.org/1269
- dgellow 7y agoWow, that’s fascinating. Thank you for sharing!
- blondin 7y agoam i the only one who wishes mobile wikipedia were the standard default layout? i tend to put ".m." in those links now. big fonts, straight forward structure, clear spacing. it is so much better ah :)
- firethief 7y agoI use the Redirector Firefox extension for that (and only that). WP's desktop view isn't bad (compared to typical cluttered sites), but their mobile view is fantastic.
- davidy123 7y agoI see a lot of people using m, but to me the point of Wikipedia is not just a base article, but also its history (recentness, number of editors/edits) and talk page, as well as the consistent sidebars, which expresses the common attributes of that type of information. The hotkeys don't even work on the mobile site. So I get really peeved when people use m links, and don't get me started about the heinous Wikiwand; Wikipedia loses a lot of its value if people consider it a read-only thing (and yes, casual people can edit successfully, still).
- ben_w 7y agoWe might all have a word that gets translated as “marriage”, but the concept attached to that word is not universal. It’s not even the same concept between all people within a single nation and who share a single language and are subject to a legal definition of the word regardless of how well it matches their own personal definition. I suspect that the parts of our culture that are rooted in language are things most of us don’t even have words for, because they come too naturally for us to need to talk about.
- zachrose 7y agoI’ve been told that in Tamil it would be considered very weird if you used the same word to say you “love” your spouse and you “love” your children
- Tsiklon 7y agoWhich makes sense, as English doesn't have a word to delineate between Familial Love and Romantic Love. This is more a fault in English than it is a quirk of Tamil.
- blondin 7y agofunny how coincidental this comment is! i was thinking about the expression "welcome" today. as in: you are welcome here, welcome home, etc. how ubiquitous that expression is and how there are many languages i know of that have some equivalent of that expression. i have no background in linguistics but my thought was that since our ancestors moved from place to place. when they move to a new inhabited place, people there needed that word to let them know that their (long) journey has reached a stopping point, they can rest now, or stay, etc.