Teleidoscope

Thu, Mar 01, 2007

Shades of Meaning

Posted at 10:02 pm MST to Miscellaneous

The Whorf-Sapir hypothesis states in its strong form that the vocabulary and grammatical structures of a language place limitations on the way its speakers perceive the world. The strong form has been generally superseded in linguistic theory, but I think the weaker form -- that it can sometimes be easier to notice and remember things you already have words for -- is still generally accepted.

The converse is also true, in a way that can be useful for someone trying to write science fiction or fantasy. Oddities in a language can tell you useful things about the world its speakers inhabit.

In Japanese, there are two kinds of water: mizu is what we would call cold water, and yu is what we would call hot water. Yu can be manufactured from mizu, but adding the adjective for 'hot' to mizu is as bizarre as trying to talk about warm ice would be in English. That simply isn't the way things work.

In European languages the presumption tends to be that hot water is water that has had something done to it. In Japan, if you see a natural spring of 'water', it may be important to know whether it is mizu or yu: if you guess wrong and are not carefull, you could get scalded. I suspect that the presence of large quantities of natural yu in the environment, even though it is less common than natural mizu, helps support the view that they are two related substances "alike in dignity", rather than variants of a single substance.

I'm sure there are similar mappings in other languages.

This may be completely out of left field, of course.

(Yes, I've been watching Japanese movies again. The original "Zatoichi" was on this evening.)

( And don't ask me about color words in different languages. Oi.)

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