Today, when talking about multilingualism, nearly any one
avoid to discuss the vocabulary.
This paper too, emphasis:
“Benjamin Lee
Whorf, an American linguist who died in 1941, held that each language encodes a
worldview that significantly influences its speakers. Often called
“Whorfianism”, this idea has its sceptics, including The Economist,
which hosted a debate on the subject in 2010. But there
are still good reasons to believe language shapes thought.”
The key
point is that different language gives different inspiration. I think this is a
typical style of “bottom decide brain” that is to say, once you get a seat in Parliament, you will always showed partiality for a certain group. Besides
it may be the idea of 1941, when there were no one talking about an issue
called information explosion. At that time, people still thought that they can
master all human’s knowledge during dozens years. At that time the vocabulary
of every language was less than what we meet now. What they worried about was
how to encounter new idea. But later we found that their enthusiasm of different languages didn’t return
them any useful new idea. Great invention didn’t come from second language but
from the detail of understanding the nature and society. It is to say if you
always repeat a handful words in different languages, you will never touch the
detail of new idea.
The only way to pursuit new idea is
mastering more words. When your vocabulary growing up, the idea will going up
too. It means the say the number of words decided the thought. The biggest
problem of linguists, is that they always looking for a solution of how to
describe a world by a small pool of words, such as 30,000 to 50,000, while the
fact is it required millions words to describe. If they learnt something about
mathematics, they may understand that it is not new idea but paranoia.
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