(en) linguistic relativity
Sneakers and boots are shoes. Flip-flops and getas are sandals. Sandals and shoes are both footwear. But for me, one isn’t the other. In other words, I would never refer to my flip-flops as “shoes,” as to me, sandals and shoes are two very distinct things.
But sometimes it gets a little ambiguous. Slippers. Are they shoes? Are they sandals?
People from the same country as me would probably think the same way as I do: slippers are sandals. They’re light, doesn’t have a hard surface, and doesn’t cover a lot of your feet. But a friend of mine from China might disagree. In Chinese, the words for “shoes”, “sandals”, and “slippers” all have “鞋” or “xié” in them, and because of that, he might’ve perceived these things differently to me.
In class today, I asked him if he always wear socks with his shoes (I mean, in Indonesia, some people sometimes don’t) and he said that he always wear socks when he wears “shoes,” (“靴”/”kutsu” actually, as we were speaking Japanese) and I thought he was referring to his sneakers or something. Only when he lifted it up and showed it on camera that I saw what he was referring to: his indoor slippers.
I think this is a case of linguistic relativity. Because of our language, he and I had different, relative cognition of what a “shoe” is. Problem is, since we were speaking in Japanese, I’m not sure who’s in the wrong here. I corrected him by saying “hey, that’s not a shoe” and he said “oh right, sorry” but the word “靴”/”kutsu” in Japanese might not mean what I think it means. It could have a meaning so wide that encompasses what I think to be sandals as well. I’ll ask my teachers later.