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20503149 No.20503149 [Reply] [Original]

Are there natural languages that have greater precision in expressing meaning than other languages? Are all languages equally capable of expressing the same concepts with equal levels of precision?

>> No.20503156

>>20503149
no

>> No.20503159

English

>> No.20503177

>>20503149
I've heard several sources say that Chinese poetry is very difficult to translate, primarily because the Chinese language is so vague and elusive. In European languages one starts with the specific and builds towards the general; in Chinese it's the other way round.

For example, Arthur Cooper, in his introduction to translations of Li Po & Tu Fu:

...Chinese utterances have to be expanded in order to achieve certain kinds of precision which are built into our grammar in a way that gives us no choice. These are such things in Western langauges as the distinction of the singular and plural of nouns (Chinese nouns, unless otherwise indicated, stand for the general concept alone); the compulsory use of subjects, including pronoun subjects, with verbs (Chinese verbs are autonomous and have no subject, except in the sense of what is being talked about *if* it is necessary to state that); present, past and future tenses, active and passive voices of verbs (less often necessary than we suppose, sometimes misleading, and also expressible by expansion in Chinese); and so on.

>> No.20503277

>>20503149
Precision only exists within set parameters, i.e. what counts as precise in one language will seem vague in another and vice versa. What is meaningful in one language at its core will change the physical reality of the speaker, as they become more attuned to that phenomenon. Languages which differentiate colours differently and more specifically will lead to more cones developing in the eyes of native speakers; languages which don't use the speaker or landmarks as the focus of direction but instead use NWES as ordinal points to navigate will cause the speaker to have a greater intuition of ordinal points; social implications of a culture or cultures can mean a vastly different apprehension of the same word even within shared languages.
Languages have internal consistency, basically, and the sense of precision comes from internally consistent use rather than objective consistency.

>> No.20503287

>>20503277
So technically one could develop tetrachromacy by the way of language?

>> No.20503289

>>20503277
Fascinating. Any book recommendations to read further on this topic?

>> No.20503306

>>20503287
I don't know if any languages preference L cones, as most of the work done on cone development and language is Russian with S cones. Long cones developing into tetrachromacy tends to be a genetic thing, but I'm unaware of any language or region which has a genetic disposition to it.

>> No.20503335

>>20503289
Through the Language Glass is a pretty easy entry into the idea.

>> No.20503376

>>20503289
Just learn another language, that's the only way to understand.

>> No.20504225

>>20503149
Retard Sign Language seems pretty based?