日本人友達: I don't understand why presentations [like your thesis] have to be so difficult. Can't you use easier English?
私 (me): Well, it isn't really the English itself. It's just difficult to understand new concepts. It's not like describing something concrete, like this glass or this water. I'm having to explain something you can't really experience from them, or something that only talks about what we experience -- something entirely abstract.
(Brief interrogation about the meaning of abstract.)
私: It's basically the opposite of 具体的 [concreteness].
友: But I think that has a lot to do with culture...
My friend has been veraciously studying the English language, its history and its applications. The content of her presentation (as she described it) for her university homework was something new to me, as it may well have been for her academic audience. She proposed a deep cognitive difference between our (Euro-American and East Asian) cultures concerning abstraction and perception, evidenced by the implementation in English (and other basically neighboring languages) of countable and uncountable units of measure (i.e., glasses versus water).
These Asian languages appear instead to have evolved from no such primary sense of these kinds of units but instead of shape and size, respectively evidenced by the vast number of kinds of units (i.e., 一人, the count of a person; 一台, the count of large and unwieldy objects; 一本, the count of long, cyllindrical objects, or of books; etc.). It would seem that while we (Greeks, Germans, whoever) were mesmerized by the universality of measure of different kinds of things -- how we could measure both the length of a room and a flagpole and be consistent with the unit of measurement we use -- East Asia saw difference, saw not so much the universality of strata as they did the plurality of the things they perceived. It was more important somehow that I immediately got the gist of the shape and size of what you were talking about by the way you measured it or, more directly in this case, counted it.
I know I'm in danger again of bipolarizing the cultures, the psychologies, by using adjectival opposites (and prior to that by using pronouns like 'we' and 'they'), but I'm finding it remarkable: the degree to which the Japanese are so consistently concrete in comparison to the Euro-American regions of the world. The significance of this very simple feature of difference between the two types of language has just never really dawned on me before.
