But vaccines, flashlights and dinosaurs are all concrete items. What about more elusive items, like those that refer to the senses? As University of York psycholinguist Asifa Majid and her colleagues have found, many European languages are very limited in describing smells. Thai is much more descriptive, and Thai speakers communicate about odours much more often, including terms like hʉ̌ʉn and měn hʉ̌ʉn (associated with oil for frying), sàap (for the odour of cockroaches), and hɔ̌ɔm grùn (for warm foods like bread fresh out of the oven). Unsurprisingly, smells are very important to religious and culinary practices in Thailand.
It’s hard to grasp the absence of a term, so here’s an example of a fairly recent entry into the English lexicon: the Japanese flavour term umami. “Scientists discovered the taste receptor that’s sensitive to umami, MSG, things like that, in the early 1900s,” explains Majid. “But it wasn’t accepted in Western science until the 1980s…That’s an interesting case, where the science and the public acceptance go hand-in-hand.”
It wasn’t that Westerners couldn’t taste the umami flavour until they had a word to describe it. But they didn’t find it as easy to practise that perceptual ability. “It wasn’t something that was as accessible to people. I think that having language does make it more salient in consciousness,” says Majid.
That is an intriguing point when it comes to scientific terms, but it is important to note that even if a language lacks a certain term, it might not suggest a radically different worldview. For instance, Brazilian linguist de Lima says Yudja “is a language that in the past did not have native words for measuring”. While fluency with mathematical language does affect the ability to do arithmetic, this doesn’t mean that Yudja people didn’t measure substances before borrowing the Portuguese word litro. Instead, they might have used fingers (like “feet” in English) to express height. (Read more abouthow we measure without using mathematics.)
"when" - Google News
January 17, 2020 at 09:03AM
https://ift.tt/2Rq7M71
What happens when words don't translate between languages - BBC News
"when" - Google News
https://ift.tt/2OF69CF
Shoes Man Tutorial
Pos News Update
Meme Update
Korean Entertainment News
Japan News Update
No comments:
Post a Comment