Mandarin also does not have direct equivalents of ‘yes’ and ‘no’. There is a negator word 不 bù, but just answering 「不」 wouldn’t make sense. You answer a question with the verb that was asked. ‘Do you like coffee?’ ‘Like!’ or ‘不like‘. It doesn’t feel any different or make me experience any sort of mental contortion to use this pattern to convey the exact same information I’d convey in English.
I used to really like these pop linguistics kind of articles about exotic languages without tenses or plurals or what have you. It made my imagination churn to think about how it might influence your conception of the world if you expressed time in terms of length, size, or quantity. I remember a RadioLab show about the ancient Greeks having no word for blue, and that as a result they couldn’t perceive it.
I’ve since learned that this all stems from a theory called linguistic relativism, that the language we use constructs our worldview. I’m much less excited in this kind of idea since learning mandarin. I express the exact same thoughts and ideas I have in English, even if I express them without syntactical tenses, plurals, or whatever. Feels the same.
I used to really like these pop linguistics kind of articles about exotic languages without tenses or plurals or what have you. It made my imagination churn to think about how it might influence your conception of the world if you expressed time in terms of length, size, or quantity. I remember a RadioLab show about the ancient Greeks having no word for blue, and that as a result they couldn’t perceive it.
I’ve since learned that this all stems from a theory called linguistic relativism, that the language we use constructs our worldview. I’m much less excited in this kind of idea since learning mandarin. I express the exact same thoughts and ideas I have in English, even if I express them without syntactical tenses, plurals, or whatever. Feels the same.