If you collect and learn all languages that ever existed, then perhaps you would gain a better understanding of the world. I’m not a linguist, but I am fascinated with the fact that languages each have their own unique quirks and words untranslatable to another language. These quirks and words which are only unique to a language reflects the value of the culture speaking that language. For example, Austronesian languages are gender neutral. There is no “he” or “she” pronouns. That reflects the largely gender egalitarian value of Austronesians. The Japanese have another word for a shade of blue, which most other people won’t easily recognise except the Japanese. Some African greetings say “I see you”, which is not only a salutation, but is recognising the person being greeted as an individual.
Ukrainian also has 2 separate shades of blue! The lighter and darker blue have their own words. On the contrary, some other languages like Vietnamese collapse blue and green into one root word, with adjectives to distinguish them as shades.
The quirks about colors are especially interesting to me.
Like English is one of the few that makes a distinction between pink and red. In Russian, they draw a similar a distinction between what we would consider light blue and dark blue. I don’t remember which it is, but I recall that some languages merge orange and brown. I think yellow/green is another one.
If you collect and learn all languages that ever existed, then perhaps you would gain a better understanding of the world. I’m not a linguist, but I am fascinated with the fact that languages each have their own unique quirks and words untranslatable to another language. These quirks and words which are only unique to a language reflects the value of the culture speaking that language. For example, Austronesian languages are gender neutral. There is no “he” or “she” pronouns. That reflects the largely gender egalitarian value of Austronesians. The Japanese have another word for a shade of blue, which most other people won’t easily recognise except the Japanese. Some African greetings say “I see you”, which is not only a salutation, but is recognising the person being greeted as an individual.
Ukrainian also has 2 separate shades of blue! The lighter and darker blue have their own words. On the contrary, some other languages like Vietnamese collapse blue and green into one root word, with adjectives to distinguish them as shades.
The quirks about colors are especially interesting to me.
Like English is one of the few that makes a distinction between pink and red. In Russian, they draw a similar a distinction between what we would consider light blue and dark blue. I don’t remember which it is, but I recall that some languages merge orange and brown. I think yellow/green is another one.