You Say Potato, I Say Cassava: Language, Culture and Perception: Scientific American Po... - 0 views
-
"Do you think its just a coincidence that the same culture that uses this kind of indeterminate word is the culture that came up with the uncertainty principle
-
we are obsessed with time, we talk about time all the time and in fact time is the number one noun in terms of usage according to the Oxford [English] Dictionary.
-
So we are talking about time all the time, but if you actually ask someone to define what time is, [they] really can't do it.
- ...3 more annotations...
-
So how do we talk about time? We talk about it metaphorically, and for the most part and this not just in English, but across the world in many different languages.
-
So the metaphors we have like time being a landscape that we are moving across; so we talk about "coming up to Thanksgiving," as though Thanksgiving is a location that we are moving towards, but we also sometimes talk about time as something that's moving while we are static.
-
Kuuk Thaayorre, the language of Pormpuraaw, is that time moves for them from east to west, so they don't talk about it as moving from east to west, but in terms of nonlinguistic cognition—we've tested this in various ways—they seem to depict it as moving from east to west
