KayYip的中文、普通話、日語、手工橡皮印章的天地

I read a book today, called'through grassXX'(I forgot the english name).

It told us about the difference between languages. For example, in some languages, they dont distinguish the words"arm' and 'hand', therefore, they dont have the word 'arm', so 'hand' represents 'hand and arm'.(In chinese, we have both words)

The other example is the front of neck and the back of neck, some languages has 2 different words to distinguish them, but english will just call neck, dont divide that.(In chinese, we dont divide front and back,the word 頸means whole neck)

The most interesting thing is a language that doesnt have the concept left and right and front and behind. They substitutes them by east, south, west, north. For example, we usually say the car is on your right hand side; but for that language, they will say the car is on the north. It means the people they could recognise the 4 directions anytime even without compass. How do this effect thinking? They know directions, so they have the sense of directions. And even could notice something that we couldnt. I want to describe a test in the book, it proved our thinking are different, but it is with pictures, very difficult to explain. The result of the test told us our thinking is different from them.

It also said naturally people recognised the 4 directions first, almost 11years old could recognise the concept of left and right. For me, it is true, I remember it very deeply, as I always blame myself that I was too late to recognise the left and right, I was tested in primary school with it in maths, but I didnt understand, until in secondary school. I am sure that I couldnt learn the 4 directions people's language, it is really hard to know 4 directions correctly. Those people could recognise 4 directions by the hint of sun positon, the shadow of tree, the ant's movement,etc.

Some languages such as French, they divide female and male words, for example, I had dinner with my neighbour,in english, you dont know if the neighbour is male or female, but in French, the sex should be indicated.

The book said German and French are very well organised languages. Therefore, those people are also smarter and well organised. 

After the reading, I am quite sure that learning language is not about talent, everyone could learn by training and hardworking. Language is reflecting our thinking.

Also, I am thinking if Chinese is a well organised language. Chinese doesnt put tense in sentence. We have some words represent past and future, but not change verb, so need not to pay attention on tense of verb,even we dont put the time word in sentence as many as English.(So you may easily find that my tense in English is wrong sometimes, I still dont know when should I use past tense in some situations) However, I dont think we should change verb to indicate tense, this make words become too complicated.Chinese is quite complicated, for example, chair椅子,just 1 character 椅could express this,but Chinese makes it 2,guess it sounds nicer.Chinese has many words, so I guess Chinese is quite observed and have good memory.

The book said if a language that dont have words to indicate future or future tense, it will disappear.