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Linguistics theory 04-20-2017, 03:51 AM
#1
As some of you may or may not know, I study linguistics in my spare time because I'm a fucking nerd.
After watching Arrival for the third time and doing some preliminary research, I've come up with the theory that English, and other SVO-ordered, nominative-acusative languages structured like it, make their native speakers more impulsive and less thorough compared to native speakers of other linguistic paradigms (some prime examples with circumstantial [so, invalid] evidence are east-Asian languages like Mandarin, Korean, and Japanese).
As a more closely related example, in classical Latin, the speaker must fully plan out their statement before it can be said, and changing as little as the conjugation, tense, or case of a single word can change the entire sentence. For example: meum mater emper sum audiverunt translates to I always heard my mother, whereas meum mater emper sum audibant (which only changes the the Perfect active indicative conjugation (-verunt) to the Imperfect active indicative (-bant), which shouldn't be a big change) translates to My mother always I did not according to Google Translate, but is just nonsense to anyone who speaks Latin.
This is even relevant in the alphabets these languages use. In any language that uses a fixed alphabet for writing (Latin characters, Greek, Cyrillic, etc...), and especially those like English that don't utilize accents or other phonemes like French and Spanish do, the speaker/writer doesn't have nearly as much to consider as one who's writing Kanji or Hangul, which are among the alphabets that require careful construction of every character, or even Mandarin, which has thousands of different symbols in place of words.
On the topic of east-Asian languages, most use an ergative-absolutive syntax - effectively the opposite of nominative-accusative - and completely different word orders, which, as shown above, require more care and planning than even something with as many subtle differences as Latin.
This is where the impulsive behavior becomes relevant. The core of my theory is this: the languages you speak, and most predominantly your native language, drastically effect your thought process and stimulate or atrophy other areas of your brain early in your life (sources here and here). Therefore, that early impression of not thinking things through completely due to the stimulated and atrophied areas of the brain in babies learning how to speak and/or write, two large uses of an infant's brain power, translates into the person's predilections, impulses, and actions later in life.
I plan on testing this through, you guessed it, video games. I'll be spending some time this summer writing and testing either some scripts for Garry's Mod or a mod for Fallout to collect the data I need, but everything is barely on the drawing board at the moment. If anyone has suggestions, insight, support, or anything constructive, I'd love to hear it.
After watching Arrival for the third time and doing some preliminary research, I've come up with the theory that English, and other SVO-ordered, nominative-acusative languages structured like it, make their native speakers more impulsive and less thorough compared to native speakers of other linguistic paradigms (some prime examples with circumstantial [so, invalid] evidence are east-Asian languages like Mandarin, Korean, and Japanese).
As a more closely related example, in classical Latin, the speaker must fully plan out their statement before it can be said, and changing as little as the conjugation, tense, or case of a single word can change the entire sentence. For example: meum mater emper sum audiverunt translates to I always heard my mother, whereas meum mater emper sum audibant (which only changes the the Perfect active indicative conjugation (-verunt) to the Imperfect active indicative (-bant), which shouldn't be a big change) translates to My mother always I did not according to Google Translate, but is just nonsense to anyone who speaks Latin.
This is even relevant in the alphabets these languages use. In any language that uses a fixed alphabet for writing (Latin characters, Greek, Cyrillic, etc...), and especially those like English that don't utilize accents or other phonemes like French and Spanish do, the speaker/writer doesn't have nearly as much to consider as one who's writing Kanji or Hangul, which are among the alphabets that require careful construction of every character, or even Mandarin, which has thousands of different symbols in place of words.
On the topic of east-Asian languages, most use an ergative-absolutive syntax - effectively the opposite of nominative-accusative - and completely different word orders, which, as shown above, require more care and planning than even something with as many subtle differences as Latin.
This is where the impulsive behavior becomes relevant. The core of my theory is this: the languages you speak, and most predominantly your native language, drastically effect your thought process and stimulate or atrophy other areas of your brain early in your life (sources here and here). Therefore, that early impression of not thinking things through completely due to the stimulated and atrophied areas of the brain in babies learning how to speak and/or write, two large uses of an infant's brain power, translates into the person's predilections, impulses, and actions later in life.
I plan on testing this through, you guessed it, video games. I'll be spending some time this summer writing and testing either some scripts for Garry's Mod or a mod for Fallout to collect the data I need, but everything is barely on the drawing board at the moment. If anyone has suggestions, insight, support, or anything constructive, I'd love to hear it.
It's often the outcasts, the iconoclasts ... those who have the least to lose because they
don't have much in the first place, who feel the new currents and ride them the farthest.
don't have much in the first place, who feel the new currents and ride them the farthest.
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