From a linguistics perspective, Arrival's groan inducing. (Off-Topic)

by Kahzgul, Monday, April 03, 2017, 05:16 (2573 days ago) @ Funkmon

Thank you! That was fantastically enlightening.

Your quartz-breathing metaphor is great, and I'm still laughing thinking about it. That makes perfect sense now.

For the purposes of the film, I'm willing to suspend my disbelief when it comes to the time traveling thing, since that's the conceit of the entire film (not actually time traveling, but having memories that are, as Vonnegut would put it, unstuck in time), but I now understand what you're saying about the linguistics being laughable. It's a shame. I loved that film, and - from my standpoint of linguistic ignorance - it was flawless. Design, direction, editing, acting, and story were all executed to a T without being overwrought.

Follow up questions: How does language and it's cultural use relate to thought? Since Japanese linguistic culture values creative metaphor, the kids growing up who are good at metaphors tend to view those who aren't as dumb. The language hasn't created that in their heads, but the culture has placed emphasis on developing a language that is well suited to that purpose, correct? Or like how Germans disdain use of the irregular words in their language (my professor in college told me to memorize all of the irregular words so that I might never accidentally use them), and value efficient speech (despite their language often being inefficient purely in terms of how long the words are). Is that a modern reaction to, shall we say, historically poor choices when it came time to making new words?

I've also read that people think Americans are inventive because we have a language that easily accepts the creation of new words, but it seems you're saying it's more likely that we have a culture that easily accepts invention and thus we feel liberated to invent new words on our own, and that would be the same no matter which language we spoke?

This is really neat to me, as it's a thing I've often heard people who know nothing about it discuss, so I really appreciate your expertise here. If this is all beneath you and bothersome, I understand. Frankly, I'm really impressed with the explanation you already gave me; it was far more than I'd hoped for!

Thanks again!