Underlying meanings

Recently, I was with a couple of young men and a young woman from El Salvador, a middle-aged, privileged man from Ecuador, a young mother from Mexico, and a hard working middle-aged man from another region in Mexico, an up-and-coming electrical engineer from Columbia, and a young man from Costa Rica.  We were together in the United States where everyone is currently living.

The group had several occasions to talk about both the U.S. where they're now living and the country of their birth.  Most didn't want to move back, but they all brought a perspective that let me know that the U.S. didn't measure up in some way or another to the various countries represented.  Most were from very large cities, the equivalent of New York, L.A., and Chicago.

Interestingly, the group thought that the best way to understand the people of the U.S. was to learn their language.  Then, they might understand the attitudes they had encountered while here.  That is not the only way to learn about a culture of another country, but it is one of the most thorough ways to learn why people act the way they do.

One of the great hypotheses of language learning is that the way a language is structured determines one's outlook on life and how life should work.  At least one linguist (Pinker) has sought to disprove the hypothesis.  But, after listening to the group mentioned above speak of the questions they have about the English language, the hypothesis appears to have some merit.

One example is from the group's difficulty with supplying nouns or pronouns to go with the verbs they used.  In Spanish, the ending of the verb contains the pronoun (as do all Romance languages).  So, they were not in the habit of having to supply the referent for the action.  Semantically, then, action and people are fused in Spanish, whereas action and people are fragmented in English.  The cultural connection is that the people of the group see their families as close knit and families of the U.S. as loose knit.  When asked why, they answered that it seemed the people of the family worked all the time and didn't see each other much.  Activities in the U.S. catered to the individual rather than to the family as a unit.  The sentence structure highlighting this fragmentation is the necessity to use nouns or pronouns separately from the verb.   

Well, that's certainly one viewpoint, and maybe it is accurate.  The argument for the hypothesis has more support for it than this one example, but this example is representative.  Attitudes certainly show through a person's phrasing of an utterance.  The whole field of semantics is about revealing underlying meanings.  Analyzing what people say is fun and revealing.  And, although the semantics producing people's utterances can be a hard deer to hunt, when the deer is killed, the venison is delicious.