Portuguese is an example of this - there was a deliberate narrowing of the lexicon in the 20th century, even extending to losing certain tenses like the future perfect, and this has resulted in a narrowing of the field of expression.
For example, in English you can say “by next week, I will have finished the work”, but in Portuguese you boil it down to the simple perfect, and it becomes unclear as to whether you have already done the work or not.
You also just literally can’t translate stuff like “she must have been going to go” or “she would have had to have gone” or “I will have been living here for five years in two weeks”.
This results in a loss of temporal thinking, hypothetical chains, and allocations of causality and responsibility, and while I don’t at all wish to besmirch the good Portuguese people, the results are a real and long-lasting impact on things like economic productivity and the ability to forward plan.
Or maybe it’s just a hangover from Salazar and I’m barking up the wrong tree, but often when I’ve attempted clarification on this stuff the distinction has just not been comprehensible to my interlocutor. I try to use stuff like the future perfect (as it still theoretically exists, but is almost entirely disused) and people just do not understand - either the structure or the concept.
Chinese doesn't have tense at all. That's why China has been utterly unable to plan anything over the past 30 years whereas the United States with their nicely tensed language has deftly planned and organised lots of infrastructure for the future.
Oddly, standard Mandarin does have tense, but it only shows up in negative sentences. You have to negate verbs differently in the past tense. An English speaker will feel right at home with which negation to use when.
Indo-European languages tend to have a subjunctive mood, and while it's nearly gone in English, we still have the robust distinction between real and unreal situations that mood reflects. This is much hazier in Chinese; it's hard (for an English speaker, and I assume any Indo-European speaker) not to notice that Chinese sentences often don't bother to make a distinction.
China has not really a good track record in terms of planning, especially when it's time related. They plan and build too much and end up with unused ruins, or even infrastructure which breaks down on the first whim. Of course this is not because of language, but in this context here it's a funny twist.
Not sure about that. They scrapped 70% or so of their planned coal plants some months ago because of over-planning. They've built housing for 3 billion or so people, which nobody will ever use. They are building big train stations, for a tiny amount of passengers, just because maybe in some decades somebody will use them.
The thing about western countries like the USA, which people often don't get is: they are old, they've built their sh*t decades and centuries ago, they were the first one building and use new fancy technologies, and now they have to live with it and can't just switch them as easily as people wish for it. Countries like China, who just now start building modern stuff have the benefit of coming late to the game, have not technical debt and old expensive infrastructure they have to honor.
So they advantage is not better planning, or throwing more money at it, but mainly being late to the game and learning from the mistakes of others.
>>They've built housing for 3 billion or so people, which nobody will ever use.
> Planning for future capacity is a mystery to English speakers for some reason.
There was no planning involved, it was just a housing-bubble which busted some years ago and devastated some companies along the way. USA had this in 2008 too.
Also, do you seriously think china will reach 4+ billion citizen in the next 10 years? They have less than half of this now and aim to have even less.
> Have you ever looked at the five-year plans the Chinese government publishes? It's quite interesting how much of their economy is planned in advance.
Yes, it is, and so do other countries. And all those plans are also struggling and failing regularly, in all countries. China is overall as good or bad as every other country in what they are doing, it's mainly their situation which makes a different in the outcome.
USA is a car&plane-nation, trains hadn't a big relevance in the last century for reasons which are now biting them. A bit pointless to compare them on this.
All of those sentences are directly translatable 1:1 to portuguese, with the same tenses, in normal day-to-day speech too. Maybe instead of "terei" a brazilian would say "vou ter", but the effect is exactly the same. I can't find anything correct in your reply.
> the results are a real and long-lasting impact on things like economic productivity and the ability to forward plan.
Source: trust me bro.
History books are littered with authors trying to explain that their language/culture is superior and the source of their society's success. They _never_ establish a connection besides a few examples like you did, a lot of handwaving, and the fact that their society is currently thriving.
The idea that the tools we use shape the output of what we create is intrinsic to reality. The more essential something is, often the harder it is to argue.
And no one in this thread said superior. They said different.
Google Translate says "até à próxima semana, terei terminado o trabalho" for your example sentence. I am not a Portuguese speaker so I don't know if you would say such a sentence but I think you are wrong there.
Portuguese is an example of this - there was a deliberate narrowing of the lexicon in the 20th century, even extending to losing certain tenses like the future perfect, and this has resulted in a narrowing of the field of expression.
For example, in English you can say “by next week, I will have finished the work”, but in Portuguese you boil it down to the simple perfect, and it becomes unclear as to whether you have already done the work or not.
You also just literally can’t translate stuff like “she must have been going to go” or “she would have had to have gone” or “I will have been living here for five years in two weeks”.
This results in a loss of temporal thinking, hypothetical chains, and allocations of causality and responsibility, and while I don’t at all wish to besmirch the good Portuguese people, the results are a real and long-lasting impact on things like economic productivity and the ability to forward plan.
Or maybe it’s just a hangover from Salazar and I’m barking up the wrong tree, but often when I’ve attempted clarification on this stuff the distinction has just not been comprehensible to my interlocutor. I try to use stuff like the future perfect (as it still theoretically exists, but is almost entirely disused) and people just do not understand - either the structure or the concept.