Interesting. Thanks, and I definitely take your point, though I don’t know much about Russia or Russians aside from a “history of Russia and China” class in college.

Also TIL prosody 😁.

We’re talking about different things.

You’re talking about social dynamics, and what I’m talking about is more general than that.

There’s a certain range of emotions and certain root emotions that are common to everyone but there’s also a great deal of variation between people that speak different languages.

The language you grow up with shapes how you think at a very low level. How you process information, how you see the world.

For example, I read about a study, presumably about Mandarin, that explained an interesting difference between how Chinese people and English speaking people themselves in the future.

In Mandarin, the language sort of forces you to see your future self as self-same to your current self and this causes Chinese people to be much much better about saving money for the future. On the other hand the English language causes one to think of the future self as a different person and it makes it more difficult to identify that future self as truly you.

I tried to find the article for you but couldn’t. The concept is called self-continuity.

Another place I’ve seen this present is in software design, oddly. I used a tool at a previous job that was largely developed by people that didn’t have English as a first language. It had a very clear logic to it and made sense, but everything was put together in ways that were initially counterintuitive.

This also applies to how foreign speakers emote. Like I said, all the root emotions are pretty much identical, but there’s a lot of nuance and a good number of emotions that are not universally represented and not experienced as often (sometimes not at all) in due to lack of language for it. Saudade is an example of it. Not only does it not translate, but it’s not universally experienced.

Anyway, I was more or less “squirreling”.