28 [F4R] Northeast USA - Looking for company

Language is freaking fascinating.

It's a collection of conventional ways to share thoughts, by constructing bigger ideas out of smaller ones, but it turns out the language we speak actually affect how we think and experience the world. It determines the number of colors we distinguish and even the properties we associate with common items. The gender a language gives to objects like 'keys' actually influences whether they're more likely to describe them as cold/hard vs little/precious.

Moving between languages, translation isnw't just swapping words for other words, then fumbling with the order for a bit, you need to try and recreate the same ideas using building blocks and even cultural references, while still trying to match the original ambiguities and remain concise. French has gendered versions of "they" whereas Hungarian doesn't distinguish he/she.

Heck, hungarian doesn't have two distinct words for brother/sister, either you just say sibling or you choose between four distinct words that also tell you if they're younger/elder.

On the other end of gender neutrality, Russia; if a woman says a sentence in Russian, which a man repeats word for word, then the man is implying he is a woman. The gender of the speaker is unavoidably baked into sentence.

Very few things about human language are universal, and I think it's really cool to learn how a lot of what we assume to be universal is really arbitrary, but it was useful in some way so it stuck around in many forms.

/r/r4r Thread