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Futureless languages and saving habits

(4 posts)
  1. henrik

    Novice
    Joined: Apr '12
    Posts: 28

    TED talk (12 min Youtube video) by Keith Chen - research of links between people's saving habits and the existence of the future tense in their language. Might be interesting for fellow futureless speakers on this forum:)

    Posted 3 months ago #
  2. Ego

    Master
    Joined: Nov '11
    Posts: 787

    Incredible! Thanks for that Henrik.

    Posted 3 months ago #
  3. secretwealth

    Expert
    Joined: Jun '11
    Posts: 1,596

    Interesting how this implicitly supports the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which most linguists dislike these days as a potentially racist/ethnocentric supposition. Still, I think it makes a lot of sense on an idiosyncratic level about language choice.

    Also, to be a stickler: some of the languages that he mentions don't have a future tense technically do, although they're infrequently used.

    Posted 3 months ago #
  4. henrik

    Novice
    Joined: Apr '12
    Posts: 28

    I think that's true for even the majority of them, but it doesn't matter, since his point was being forced to use a grammatically distinct future tense, i.e. having no other option.

    Posted 3 months ago #

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