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[–] rulloff_in_a_jar 0 points 1 point (+1|-0) ago  (edited ago)

Interesting. I've noticed that allot of American black people I've known don't seem to view you keep your word even if the situation changes as a thing. Culturally and socially I'm very much a WASP, so the whole idea of making a promise, not keeping it strikes me as wrong very instinctively, but with black people they see it more as a promise to "try" and not "do". Also they'll view the indefinite and definite the same , i.e. the difference between asking "do you think...?" vs "do you know...?". I've met maybe two who didn't.

I'm biologically part black, it's some fraction but I ended up getting the knack for abstraction, I'm a pure math major, I'm good at linguistics and yeah most black people tend to be very concrete thinkers and also have a really odd tendency to think of things or situations that they don't know anyone personally having experienced as not really real even though they know such things occur.

My first thought reading this was maybe Zulu is just highly morphological so it has a small "vocabulary" but according to google this isn't the case. English didn't have dictionaries for most of it's history, it's part of the reason people were so wlling to use Shakespeare's invented words and it wasn't until middle English really and the gramarrians that English was culturally seen as having a more correct form where you could be prescriptivist about it, but still I think it's both a lack of abstraction and a lack of separation between the internal/external world, the subjective and objective so language and maybe the reality is seen as something almost stemming from the individual's perception rather that the perception being something that is engaging with a larger external reality.

Edit:

Other points that struck me, are things that I've noticed that are related. Many African Americans get annoyed by hypotheticals. They don't understand being bothered about something that might have happened. That feeling you get in the pit of your stomach when you realized you narrowly avoided something awful.

Many I've met consider long term planning, being willing to suffer in the short term for a long term goal foolish. That in particular always puzzled me because how do you enjoy the present when you're endangering your own aspirations, how isn't that something that just doesn't naturally make you anxious. This is the case especially if it's one that doesn't have a large monetary reward.