Here’s something that might shed some light on the subject (or confuse it even further).
As a child growing up in Russia I absolutely hated it. As soon as I was old enough to understand what a country is (5 or 6 years old) I realized that mine sucks and I want to move. When I finally did move to the US (at the age of 13), I felt a weird mix of nostalgia and painful resentment towards the place I used to call home. Ever since then, any dreams that involve being in Russia, which are typically dreamt in Russian, are grey, bleak, unhappy and completely black and white. Dreams taking place anywhere else, real or imaginary are typically colorful, even if they are nightmares. It is as if my brain has two conceptual sets “Russia” and “Everything Else” and to distinguish between the two eliminates color information from “Russia” out of spite. To tell you the truth most of my memories of Russia became black and white over time as well, I even remember recent news reports in the US that show pictures of Russia and the pictures in my memory are black and white.
There’s so many things that were black and white in the past - photographs, movies, television, printed matter. It is possible that for some people an inherent mental link is formed of “past era” = “black and white”, “current era” = “color”, and things that are black and white are identified as belonging to the past era and things belonging to the past era become black and white. Moving from one country to another might just be enough of a stressful trigger to “switch eras” mentally so to speak.
my chinese dreams are in color - as are my english dreams. my chinese wife, mother in law just gave me the biggest wtf look when i asked this dumbass question.
I wonder if dreaming in black and white was common when people only had black and white TVs? If you only ever saw the Super Bowl on a black and white TV, would your dreams of the Super Bowl be in black and white?
Do you think this might have anything to do with the admittedly racist Western ideas of the 1930s and 1940s that (IIRC) Asian peoples couldn’t see at night (because their eyes are different from ours :rolleyes: )? I can see how your boss might have conflated night=black=dreams=only in b&w. I suppose it only works if your boss is of a certain age, however.
Just because ideas are wrong and underline some difference between ethnicities or nationalities doesn’t mean they are racist. There are physiological and cultural differences between ethnic groups some about as severe as dreaming in black and white (although that’s a rather subjective judgement). For example, most Japanese will not be able to answer you why they get out of bed in the morning or what the hell you’re asking in the first place. The concept of a discrete set of personal ambitions without which you cease to function and die is only present in certain subsets of certain cultures. There are tonal languages and there are people who have no concept of time passage (i’d love to see a cite on this, i’ve been told but with out enough information to google). It isn’t too much to hypothesize that there are people who have no concept of music or who dream in black and white.
Does this relate perhapse to the missinformation being put arround at the time to hide the effect of Radar to the war effort? Like the idea that allied airmen ate lots of carrots to see in the dark. When in reality they were relying on the information from the radar bases.
Of course they do! Not only that but the steet cars in Japan, China and Taiwan all go down the street side ways.
Perhaps a survey is in order. Only Orientals would know for sure and even then there appears to be some anamolies.
There is also the not so remote possibility your boss was throwing you a curve.
Do you know when/if you are being swooshed?
You see in dreams images/representations of experiences of what you seen when awake.
To add to Excalibre’s excellent post, Chinese characters (and, by extension, Japanese kanji) are referred to as logographs. Japanese kana, hiragana and katakana, are syllabries. The Roman characters English uses make up an alphabet.
Contrary to what most people likely assume about Egyptian hieroglyphics, they are logographs as well. Mayan heirolglyphs, on the other hand, were actually pictographs.
Disclaimer: IANAL(inguist). If this was a real linguistic emergency, a qualified linguist would be posting this information.
Interestingly enough, a chinese coworker of mine has a LOT of trouble seeing in the dark - she won’t drive, and even has trouble managing the 3-4 steps leading up to her front door if the light is off. Just bad eyes, she says, and it never occured to me to ask if there might be a genetic component that could be more prevalent in chinese people than in other populations. Even if it were a genetic case, it’s a huge stretch to say ALL chinese/asian people can’t see well in the dark. How big a percentage would something like that likely be, anyways! But since we were just talking about this at work today, I thought I’d toss this little anecdote into the pile.
Though she uses glasses, her daytime vision is fine, and her daughter can see quite well, day and night.
Odd, how conversation subjects come back at you like that!
In fact this goes back to WWII, when towards the end the Japanese people were starving due to there being virtually no merchant marine left to import food. The government told them that Japanese people had longer intestines than others, and so could extract more nutrition from the little food they were getting so didn’t need as much. Complete bollocks of course, but there are still Japanese who believe it today (in exactly the same way that many Britons still believe that carrots make you see better at night, which was a story concocted in 1940 by the RAF to cover up the advanced state of their radar system). Like everyone else, given the slightest excuse the Japanese are prone to believe they are superior, and once established that’s hard to shake.
Including many languages in East Asia and a large number of African languages. That doesn’t represent a very fundamental departure from non-tonal languages, though - after all, in English or any language, changes in pitch convey information. It’s just that in tonal languages it’s a function that’s more grammaticalized.
Oh, it’s true. You see, people don’t have the capacity to appreciate differences that aren’t encoded in their native language. So for instance, Chinese lacks verb tenses, and thus the Chinese have no concept of time. By the same token, have you ever heard a Chinese speaker misuse “he” and “she”? That’s because Chinese makes no distinction between the two pronouns, and as such Chinese people don’t have the concept of gender! Much as with English speakers - English doesn’t have a future tense, so English speakers have no concept of future time. Also, English doesn’t have any grammatical imperfect aspect to its verbs, so English speakers have no concept of actions performed repeatedly or habitually. It’s true!
Sorry to be sarcastic. I’ve heard claims like the one you cite before; as a matter of fact, that claim about some cultures lack the concept of time or have a very different concept of time are based their languages. Way back in the bad old days when racist ideologies were accepted as scientific, there was an erroneous idea that if a language doesn’t have a grammatical feature, it means that speakers somehow are unaware of it. It was once seriously stated, for instance, that since Chinese lacks any explicit verb marking that indicates a counterfactual statement, that Chinese people somehow don’t or can’t distinguish between what is and what might have been.
Of course those claims are nonsense - every language lacks some of the grammatical features that other languages have. In the case of English, we don’t have a future tense - but we do have a periphrasis involving an auxiliary verb, will, that expresses the same idea. We also use the present (or non-past) tense for the same purpose in some circumstances, e.g. I’m seeing the doctor on Thursday. Even though the future time in that sentence is not grammatically marked at all, there’s no doubt that English speakers know the difference between present and future and can figure out the time from context. Same goes with all of these sorts of differences - a language doesn’t encode something grammatically, but that doesn’t mean speakers of the language won’t express the exact same meaning explicitly through words. And they do. It’s a mistake to try to read into a language some sort of “mindset” on the part of its speakers; things just don’t work that way.
