I worry that I'm forgetting French (Spanish may be a lost cause!) and I'm wondering if there is a network involved that degrades and loses functionality slowly at first and then it finanlly all collapses -- or is that even the model or the behaviour? Is that similar to a memetic ananysis of a text? What is the relationship between knowledge of a language and the ability to perceive "socio-political" messages (memes) in that language/culture? are they related? can they be quantified?
And then does this take us back to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, i.e., that the structure of one's languages determines the kind of culture one can have, e.g., the Greeks were logical because of their language. Lots of people would have a lot to say about Chinese, too, I think and that's one of the big reasons I want to learn (finish learning) that language, i.e., because I want to understand how ideas and poetic/literary notions may be expressed and what that looks like. Example, Japanese 俳句
haiku are highly evocative/connotative as opposed to descriptive/denotative, and I have the impression that Chinese is even more so, and even more generally so. All poetry is more or less evocative, i.e., it relies on a "knowledge substrate" of cultural and emotional presuppositions on the part of the reader, as opposed to prose, which puts forth more information.
However, I think everybody has the impression that their [sic] native language is highly denotative and all foreign languages are connotative and have tons of tacit implications wrapped up in them, and just as one has the impression that as one crosses into fluency the "volume gets turned up" and suddenly things that one could not hear clearly start to stand out (it's like a percolation/phase change phenomenon) and all of those connotative implications suddenly make perfect sense (although the ability to explain them/ translate them across languages may not be concordant -- that seems to be a separate ability which some seem to have and others not).
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