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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| Lost in Translation |
| 2010-07-24 |
| New cognitive research suggests that language profoundly influences the way people see the world; a different sense of blame in Japanese and Spanish |
| Posted by:tipper |
| #2 This comment grabbed my eye: Terrific assessment. My Chinese teacher taught 'Function Words' as the Chinese 'form' of grammar. Years of Russian experience against the 'functional' Soviet Union could and should make everyone 'BLUE', especially since the errors/seeds of Marxist/Leninist Communism have been sowed and grow 'unchecked'[Read: Secular-Progessives] around the world! My formative years of Latin, Classical Greek and Spanish prepped me, with the assistance of the Jesuits, for a 'geopolitical' perspective beginning with the Spanish COMMUNIST Civil War and it's influence on current day Spain and Central and South America to which I was introduced at about age 10/11. So in short, I suspect the issue boils down to, fundamentally, environment, time and circumstance. People/tribes when confronted with existentual change are first confronted with Communication/Control issues(i.e., Language). If they can not adjust to the basic understanding that the 'Language Tool' is the ultimate weapon affecting their survival, then they are subsumed or perish. I believe that America and Western Judeo-Christian foundations have been under 'linguistic attack' since the Russian Revolution and the founding of the Comintern. The SOVIET Union and their Communist agents have and continue to attack our moral and ethical foundations by means of the 'Linguistic Weapon'. They have employed tactical/strategic' wordsmithing' from the beginning. For example, their agents were directed to identify recruits, specifically: PROGRESSIVES, for the Communist War. They tagged General Franco as a "Fascist", rather than the liberator/protector of 'Traditional and Catholic' Spain, when you can't get any more 'Fascist' than a Communist Dictator. Those of this mindset in our country have employed the counterproductive words: "Diversity, Equal Opportunity, Gay ?Marriage?, Civil Unions, and a host of other clever linguistic misdirections to confuse our people and extend their ?Socialist? agenda. Remember, Socialism without 'God" is Communism. So what is to understand that those using these "Politically Correct" linguistic attacks on our traditions and values now identify themselves as "Secular-Progressives" rather than "Democrats", as of the olde original Democrat Party that no longer exists. Our failure to understand the role of Language in our current fight for survival as a nation and people is our most serious shortcoming. Our linguistic shortcomings are a "Core" reason for our failure to protect against 9/11. It continues to be our "Achille's Heel"! I suspect that our enemies/antagonists can muster more "English" speakers than we can speakers of their language(s). If you can accept my conclusion of a "Core" reason for 9/11, then you should worry that we are repeating the mistakes we made in the early 1950s when our linguistic shortcomings were being addressed by a major effort to train/acquire 'missing' languages. If we had been properly successful THEN, I believe 9/11 and a series of earlier deadly attacks on America could have been avoided. So here we have 'Linguistics' in practice and still not understood. In the current case it is the Management Environment and an Existential Internal/External threat we have yet to fully address! The question is: Will we, Can we Survive? Meanwhile, the Linguistic Shortcomings Groundhog Days continue and continue and c... |
| Posted by: 3dc 2010-07-24 22:38 |
| #1 Boroditsky represents one - but not the only - interpretation re: how language, culture and cognition effect one another. But if even one WSJ reader gets the faint idea that maybe people don't all think the same way, and that maybe that is why the western approach to North Korea and Iran aren't working, then the article was worth publishing. |
| Posted by: lotp 2010-07-24 18:38 |