I was reading...

[fajrdrako]

An interesting item about memory and language.

I suppose it would be the same in languages other than English?

Comments

[kikibug13.livejournal.com]

Huh. I don't know? I mean, tenses are very ... the mapping with other language is very imperfect? But I have honestly not seen any research on that about other languages. *ponders, adds to things to observe self at*

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Yes. I find the subject of 'how language affects psychology' interesting, and whether it contributes to national characteristics and identities, even to stereotypes. My inclination is not to believe it - that language is much more universal than that, as a psychological pattern that is more or less constant the world over, and that nationality is incidental to this. In other words, culture builds language, not the other way round.

Which has nothing much to do with memory except that the article posits (or proves?) a relationship between language and ability that I think unlikely. Or at least surprising.

[msp-hacker.livejournal.com]

I'm running out the door, but yes, it does. Can I come back to this later?

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Yes, please do.

[msp-hacker.livejournal.com]

I think it's less of a case is "stating things in the imperfective helps you remember the steps better!" but explaining what you did in the step would make a better impression than just that you did the step. Teaching helps you learn the subject better, kind of thing.

I do think that the cultural aspects embedded into the language is an interesting thing to consider. We were discussing in class the odd choice of using "thereof" in the King James Bible, as there was ambiguity what exactly to use for the third person non-gendered possessive so the author commettiee decided to skip the whole thing and work around it. Shakespeare just used whatever the hell he wanted and used "it" where we today would use "it's".

So there may be bits of cultural hindbrain used for the memory task, but using what they recommend just sounds like a shiny new way to use I-statements.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Yes; I think the consciousness of the process is the important aid to the memory.

I like the way Shakespeare talked - because however he used the language, he tended to be very clear. If only we all had that knack!

(Yeah, I know, there was only one Shakespeare.)

[chatona.livejournal.com]

It would only be the same in languages other than English that have the connotation to imperfect and perfect as English does. For example, in German, the only difference between imperfect and perfect is that one is used in written language while the other prevails in oral language and thus I don't think the same would hold true if the test had been done in the German language.

In French and Italian, though, I think it would hold true, because the use of imperfect and perfect underlies pretty much the same rules (reasons) as in the English language.

... Not sure if that made sense just now >>

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

That makes sense; I was wondering about German. I don't know enough non-Romance languages to judge, or even to guess. My impression is that Esperanto doesn't use the imperfect nearly as much as we do in English. And are there not languages which don't commonly use the imperfect at all? I'm not even sure.

[chatona.livejournal.com]

I'm not sure myself, either. The only languages that I can talk about with any kind of certainty are English, German, French and Italian. My Dutch isn't good enough yet for me to make any kind of definite statement, though I think it's very similar to German. The two are generally similar.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

You name exactly the same languages I have studied and spoken - adding Esperanto - and it's much of a muchness. I think Russian uses a form of the imperfect, but does Japanese? Arabic? Turkish? I have no idea.

[chatona.livejournal.com]

It's been a great many years since I've studied Japanese and I never got very far with it. I know that I only learnt one kind of past tense and I think that our teacher did not omit any kind of past tense, so Japanese might only have one on the same level of imperfect and perfect in English? But don't quote me on that.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

It would be interesting to look it up; or ask someone who knows Japanese. I wish we could just ask Toshiko!

[chatona.livejournal.com]

I could ask my best friend. He's half Japanese.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Let me know what he says.

[chatona.livejournal.com]

No, there's no such thing in Japanese. Although if you want to say you "have done" something at some point in your life, there's a specific way of saying that

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Right!

And the Japanese, in my experience, have good memories.

[sollersuk.livejournal.com]

I very much doubt it. The use of the imperfect is far more optional in English than it is in, for example, the Romance languages, where it has to be used for habitual actions or actions that were continuous in the past. Consequently sentences using different tenses would have a completely different meaning.

Speaking as someone with a degree in psychology and another in a linguistics-related area, I think the whole thing is a lot of codswallop based on a mistaken interpretation of the grammatical term "imperfect". It might have limited validity in English, where a reluctance to use imperfects often gives rise to ambiguity and confusion, but I doubt that there is a general psychological principle here.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

Well, you confirm my skepticism about the whole thing! The more I think about it, the less sense it makes to me. In any language.

[allyra.livejournal.com]

Interesting!

Possibly related (but probably not): it seems as though learning the difference between the perfect and the imperfect in languages other than English is rather difficult for native speakers of English. It's almost as though we somehow don't even realize that we use those constructions in English.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I think the problem is that English grammar is not widely taught i nschools, so people in general have very little sense of what English grammar is all about. I remember once being shocked when a good friend of mine - a man who read all the time, mostly fiction and history - didn't know what a verb was. I assume most people have more knowledge of grammatical words than that, but maybe not a lot.

[duncanmac.livejournal.com]

I wish I could say I'm surprised at your comment about English grammar, but I'm not.

Among the items I remember about my teenage years were the few times we dealt with English grammar. Case in point: while I had learned about the four main parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs) by or before Grade 6, I was in Grade 9 (!) before I understood the meanings of subject, predicate and object -- and their roles in a normal sentence. Likewise, I did not learn the difference between "subjective" and "objective" till about that same time.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

They covered grammar rather thoroughly still when I was in public school. I don't remember getting any grammar at all in high school. I knew about phrases, clauses, subjective, and objective, but it didn't really acquire significance till I started learning languages in which it mattered - Esperanto probably being the first.

Not long ago I was talking about Latin with several friends, and one of them had no idea what a 'case' was. No reason she should, I guess, but we were talking at cross-purposes for a bit.

[dejla.livejournal.com]

That's fascinating!

Aren't there some languages though that don't differentiate between imperfective and perfective?

I seem to remember that in Japanese there's a tense which specifically references something about to become an action.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

We all have different ways of expressing the same things, regardless of the grammatical forms we use to do it. The more I think about these findings, the more skeptical I am.

[duncanmac.livejournal.com]

I would be curious about the test results if said test was used with a different language, especially a more archaic one. Classical Greek, IIRC, had more verb tenses than most modern European ones. I believe the same holds true for Albanian, Basque, and Finnish (but speak here under correction).

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

I think the experiment is highly dubious.

[catalenamara.livejournal.com]

What a cool link! Thanks for posting.

[fajrdrako.livejournal.com]

You're welcome!