[lg policy] Not exactly language policy, but...

[Harold Schiffman]

All:  here's an interesting article that seems to claim
psycholinguistic significance for the fact that
languages with strong future tense marking make their speakers less
concerned with fiscal
conservatism (?).  German and Chinese don't have obligatory future
marking, and thus their
speakers "live more in the future" and spend less money, or something like that.

Read on:


Foreign Policy: Tomorrow, We Save

by Joshua E. Keating
A lama student writes Chinese characters on a blackboard during a
class on November 1, 2007 in Dari County of Guoluo Prefecture, Qinghai
Province, northwest China.
Enlarge China Photos/Getty Images

A lama student writes Chinese characters on a blackboard during a
class on November 1, 2007 in Dari County of Guoluo Prefecture, Qinghai
Province, northwest China.
text size A A A
August 16, 2012

Joshua E. Keating is an associate editor at Foreign Policy.

Why do Germans revere austerity and fiscal discipline, while Greeks
spend like there's no tomorrow? Why can't the United States convince
China to consume more and save less? Yale University economist Keith
Chen thinks part of the answer may be in language — particularly in
how different languages treat time.

Languages differ in the degree to which they distinguish future events
from the present. For example, in what linguists call strong
future-time reference (FTR) languages like English, a speaker says,
"It will rain tomorrow." In a weak-FTR language like German, one
simply says "Morgen regnet es"— literally, "Tomorrow, it rains."
Mandarin Chinese has similarly weak time construction. Strong-FTR
speakers have to do a little more verbal work to make it clear they're
talking about the future. Chen, who grew up in a Chinese-speaking
household in the United States, thinks this subtle difference actually
changes the way speakers of different languages conceive of time —
which affects how people act in the present.

Extensive psychological research shows that linguistic differences
actually do affect the perception of external phenomena. A 2007 study
in the National Academy of Sciences journal noted that Russian
speakers, who have separate words for "blue" (siniy) and "light blue"
(goluboy), have a better ability to distinguish between similar shades
of the color than English speakers. When it comes to gauging time,
Chen's hypothesis is that weak-FTR speakers see the future as less
distant and therefore engage in fewer behaviors with negative future
consequences."Every time your language forces you to specify that
you're talking about the future, it's a little nudge that this is
something different than the present," Chen says. "It's something that
you do to yourself thousands of times a day."

Weak-FTR languages include German, Mandarin, Japanese, and the
Scandinavian languages, while English, Greek, Russian, and Spanish are
strong-FTR. In a recent paper, Chen compared European families of
similar education, income, and religion and found that speakers of
weak-FTR languages on average save more for retirement, smoke less,
and are less likely to be obese. "Every one of the countries that we
think of as an outlier in terms of savings is also an outlier in terms
of how they speak about the future," Chen says.

So it's not just that the Chinese and Northern Europeans are better at
planning for the future: They're already living — or at least speaking
— in it.


http://www.npr.org/2012/08/16/158919618/foreign-policy-tomorrow-we-save

HS

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