snackbar wrote:
its "eskimos" ya silly swede.
It's "Inuit" you knowledgeable Canadian
Mighty Midget wrote:
I find this thread interesting if it would show how languages develope according to need.
I heard that Irish Gaelic has a lot of words for death and dying. Must have been an important pastime...
I agree, that's very interesting
I've actually been reading about this more and more (next to my interest for etymology, which doesn't really explain the motivation for the existence of a word; rather just where it came from) since an 'ask Yahoo!' article about the same example kewangji brought forth here (as in, the Inuit-example).
The evolution of language is interesting because we ourselves shape it, but it's a collective thing; so we can't really consciously design it by ourselves.
Somehow specific needs for more and more words and subtleties between similar words arise. Regardless of how the word comes to be (hereby largely leaving out the science of etymology and the beauty of the bow-wow theory
) it's interesting to see that indeed - for example - warrior societies have (had) an interesting amount of words for killing, etc. Think also of japanese: because it's culture has developed in relatively solitary confinement for a long time, it has a lot of words that stand by itself and are relatively unique.
Think of 'harakiri', 'kamikaze' and 'tsunami'.
Also interesting are languages like sanskrit, where one word can have very different, relatively complex meanings (when you translate it), but they are all connected in at least a symbolical way when you look at all of them together.
The word kundalini is usually translated as either 'coiled up' or 'coiled up like a snake', but it holds a lot of other meanings. Direct translations however, usually do contain a serpent nature, which brings us to the symbolical connection of all of this:
Whether you translate it as a (serpent) power, as anything coiled up or, as we usually do, as some kind of revelation or altered state of consciousness: it all has to do with unraveling the complex mysteries of our consciousness, unconsciousness and perhaps the world.
Now, as you can see, a culture like ours that hasn't had to do with meditation and such
(in a similar way) as the cultures where Sanskrit has most of it's influence
1, has great difficulties finding words to describe this one Sanskrit term.
What makes language interesting to me, is that the way languages have evolved in certain areas can say a lot about what and who have been important in their culture, and of their general worldview. To me, language is not only a means of communication, but it also provides a mirror of philosophy (and provides at the same time - see also the Safir-Whorf Hypothesis there
- many roadblocks for it).
1= (it is to India and Southeast Asia as Latin and Greek are to Europe, though it has also had a very important influence on languages such as Dutch and German)
