Reality and Language
Interesting differences between languages
If you want to understand a country, know its language.
Colours
Pink isn’t actually a separate colour (It’s just light red)
In Russian they have separate words for light blue, light green (light blue is a colour associated with gay)
In Chinese they traditionally hard a word which meant blue and green and they used to have that as one concept.
Colour doesn’t actually exist, it’s a hallucination of different wavelengths, and because of how our eyes are shaped to detect it with cones and rods.
In languages, they always develop specific languages in a specific order - dark light. / then red / then green etc.,
Future is behind in Madagascan Language - because you can’t see it, but you can see the past, whereas we see the future as in front of us.
Mandarin doesn’t grammatically mark tense at all - time is conveyed through context or words like “yesterday” and “tomorrow.” The verb itself never changes. Whereas in English we think of the future as being separate and distinct from the present. Does this affect how we perceive the future? More likely to take credit and less likely to save for example.
In many Australian Aboriginal languages, spatial direction is absolute and geographic (based on cardinal directions like north, south, east, and west) rather than relative to the speaker’s body (like "left," "right," or "in front of")
In Spanish they describe things with intentionality, but English assigns blame. The vase broke itself vs peter broke the vase.
Many languages force you to choose a politeness register every time you speak - Korean has six levels of formality, and choosing the wrong one is a serious social mistake. English entirely lost this (we used to have thou/you as a distinction).