HERESY said:
The only good thing to ever come from Germany is a Maybach. Nothing else remotely important or useful has ever come from germany.
I admit that germany has contributed a lot to the downfall of mankind, but you can't deny the achievements it has made.
Carl Benz and Gottlied Daimler invented the car, Philipp Reis is one of the inventors of the telefon, Conrad Röntgen dicovered the x-rays, Albert Einstein came up with the theory of relativity, just to name a few, since there are many more in the fields of medicine, literature, music , technology and other sciences.
Would you say those achievements are not remotely important at all ?
What about Johannes Gutenberg who invented the printing press ?
HERESY said:
That is interesting considering the english language is actually a bastardization of several others. I'll look into that.
Old English is actually a variety of Germanic languages. Later on it was frequently influenced by scandinavian languages during the viking attacks,by french after the norman conquest as well as by latin and greek in the period of christianisation.
Whats important is that the language changed from a synthetic to an analytic language, which basically means that it was simplified. A lot of inflections and cases were dropped.
I doubt that the difference between an analytic and synthetic language has much impact on the complexity of our thinking, considering the analogy of our environment, but i have read an interesting article about Benjamin Lee Whorf, who studied Native American languages such as Hopi. In the Hopi language system there is no abstract symbol or word for past present and future, compared to SAE(Standard Average European) Time is not a lenghts, but the relation between two incidents. They strictly distinguish between imaginary plural and realistic plural (the difference between 10 Men and 10 Weeks).
Altogether, it seems that their whole way of thinking is so much different from ours, based on their language and of course their environment, however i dont know if you could say thst is Hopi less complex, for i have'nt had the chance to put more research into it.
I don't think the difference between English and other SAE languages, whether they are synthetic, analytic or agglutinative, is fundamental concerning the complexity of thinking , because we all know what native english speakers have achieved and contributed to modern life and are capable of.