Re:Keep Your Identity Small (2009)
by xyzelement on Monday June 07, 2021 @10:03AM
(#27422724)
Interesting tidbit. I guess I didn't argue linguistics with the teacher because I appreciated the larger philosophical point this was trying to teach.
As an aside (not not saying you were doing this btw) whenever there's an analogy, some percentage of people will try to argue the analogy directly rather than try to understand the concept it's attempting to communicate.
This understanding is also closer to Spanish's "ser" and "estar" - both get translated as "am"/"is", but "ser" is for identity and "estar" is for state.
Re:Keep Your Identity Small (2009)
by rrrrrrrrrrrryan on Monday June 07, 2021 @02:30PM
(#27426242)
I absolutely love that Spanish uses different words to describe a temporary state vs a permanent state.
"I am sad" absolutely should use a different word than "I am from California," and English gets it wrong by combining the two.
>This identification is a lie. If you stop drinking coffee and start drinking tea, you are still 100% you,
Your analysis of "I am hungry" is incorrect. In this case, the "am" is acting as a linking word and not about identity. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copula_(linguistics)
Or put another way, "I am hungry" can be thought of as a shortened version of "I am [currently having feelings of] hunger". If the more verbose sentence is not about identity but sensation, the shortened version is expressing the same idea.