How does our language shape the way we
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This document discusses whether and how the language we speak shapes our thinking. It presents evidence that speakers of different languages think differently in subtle ways due to linguistic differences between languages. For example, speakers of languages that mark verbs for tense pay more attention to aspects of time, while speakers of languages using cardinal directions to describe space have better spatial abilities. Experiments teaching new linguistic concepts suggest language itself, not just culture, influences thought.
How does our language shape the way we
- 1. Humans communicate with one another using a dazzling array of languages, each differing from the next in innumerable ways. Do the languages we speak shape the way we see the world, the way we think, and the way we live our lives? Do people who speak different languages think differently simply because they speak different languages? Does learning new languages change the way you think? Do polyglots think differently when speaking different languages?
- 2. Most questions of whether and how language shapes thought start with the simple observation that languages differ from one another. And a lot! Let's take a (very) hypothetical example. Suppose you want to say, "Bush read Chomsky's latest book." Let's focus on just the verb, "read." To say this sentence in English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we have to pronounce it like "red" and not like "reed."
- 3. In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can't) alter the verb to mark tense. In Russian you would have to alter the verb to indicate tense and gender. So if it was Laura Bush who did the reading, you'd use a different form of the verb than if it was George. In Russian you'd also have to include in the verb information about completion.
- 4. So if it was Laura Bush who did the reading, you'd use a different form of the verb than if it was George. In Russian you'd also have to include in the verb information about completion. If George read only part of the book: you'd use a different form of the verb; rather than if he'd read through the whole book.
- 5. Clearly, languages require different things of their speakers. Does this, therefore, mean that the speakers think differently about the world? Do English, Indonesian, Russian, and Turkish speakers end up attending to, partitioning, and remembering their experiences differently just because they speak different languages? For some scholars, the answer to these questions has been an obvious yes. Just look at the way people talk, they might say. Certainly, speakers of different languages must attend to and encode strikingly different aspects of the world just so they can use their language properly.
- 6. Scholars on the other side of the debate don't find the differences in how people talk convincing. All our linguistic utterances are sparse (редкий), encoding only a small part of the information we have available. Just because English speakers don't include the same information in their verbs that Russian and Turkish speakers do doesn't mean that English speakers aren't paying attention to the same things. All it means is that they're not talking about them. It's possible that everyone thinks the same way, notices the same things, but just talks differently.
- 7. Believers in cross-linguistic differences counter that everyone does not pay attention to the same things: if everyone did, one might think it would be easy to learn to speak other languages. Unfortunately, learning a new language (especially one not closely related to those you know) is never easy; it seems to require paying attention to a new set of distinctions. Whether it's distinguishing modes of being in Spanish, evidentially in Turkish, or aspect in Russian, learning to speak these languages requires something more than just learning vocabulary. It requires paying attention to the right things in the world so that you have the correct information to include in what you say.
- 8. Recent research, carried out on a group of Aborigine's, in Cape York, Northern Australia – a tribe called the Kuuk Thaayorre, produced some interesting results; as to how they talk about space (пространство/протяжённость/место) Instead of words like "right," "left," "forward," and "back," which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space. This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like "There's an ant on your southeast leg" or "Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit." "Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit."
- 9. " One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. Therefore, the normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is "Where are you going?" and the answer should be something like " South southeast, in the middle distance." If you don't know which way you're facing, you can't even get past "Hello." The result is a profound difference in navigational ability and spatial knowledge between speakers of languages that rely primarily on absolute reference frames (like Kuuk Thaayorre) and languages that rely on relative reference frames (like English). Therefore, speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are much better than English speakers at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings
- 10. People's ideas of time differ across languages in other ways. For example, English speakers tend to talk about time using horizontal spatial metaphors (e.g., "The best is ahead of us," "The worst is behind us"), whereas Mandarin speakers have a vertical metaphor for time (e.g., the next month is the "down month" and the last month is the "up month"). Mandarin speakers talk about time vertically more often than English speakers do, so do Mandarin speakers think about time vertically more often than English speakers do? Imagine this simple experiment. I stand next to you, point to a spot in space directly in front of you, and tell you, "This spot, here, is today. Where would you put yesterday? And where would you put tomorrow?" When English speakers are asked to do this, they nearly always point horizontally. But Mandarin speakers often point vertically, about seven or eight times more often than do English speakers.
- 11. Even basic aspects of time perception can be affected by language. For example, English speakers prefer to talk about duration in terms of length (e.g., "That was a short talk," "The meeting didn't take long"), while Spanish and Greek speakers prefer to talk about time in terms of amount, relying more on words like "much" "big", and "little" rather than "short" and "long." Research into such basic cognitive abilities as estimating duration shows that speakers of different languages differ in ways predicted by the patterns of metaphors in their language. (For example, when asked to estimate duration. English speakers are more likely to be confused by distance information, estimating that a line of greater length remains on the test screen for a longer period of time, whereas Greek speakers are more likely to be confused by amount, estimating that a container that is fuller remains longer on the screen.)
- 12. An important question at this point is: Are these differences caused by language per se or by some other aspect of culture? Of course, the lives of English, Mandarin, Greek, Spanish, and Kuuk Thaayorre speakers differ in a myriad of ways. How do we know that it is language itself that creates these differences in thought and not some other aspect of their respective cultures?
- 13. One way to answer this question is to teach people new ways of talking and see if that changes the way they think. Beyond abstract or complex domains of thought like space and time, languages also interfere in basic aspects of visual perception — our ability to distinguish colours, for example. Different languages divide up the colour continuum differently: some make many more distinctions between colours than others, and the boundaries often don't line up across languages.
- 14. In Russian there is no single word that covers all the colours that English speakers call "blue." Russian makes an obligatory distinction between light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). Does this distinction mean that siniy blues look more different from goluboy blues to Russian speakers? Indeed, the data say yes. Russian speakers are quicker to distinguish two shades of blue that are called by the different names in Russian (i.e., one being siniy and the other being goluboy) than if the two fall into the same category.
- 15. For English speakers, all these shades are still designated by the same word, "blue," and there are no comparable differences in reaction time. Further, the Russian advantage disappears when subjects are asked to perform a verbal interference task (reciting a string of digits) while making colour judgments but not when they're asked to perform an equally difficult spatial interference task (keeping a novel visual pattern in memory).
- 16. The disappearance of the advantage when performing a verbal task shows that language is normally involved in even surprisingly basic perceptual judgments — and that it is language per se that creates this difference in perception between Russian and English speakers. When Russian speakers are blocked from their normal access to language by a verbal interference task, the differences between Russian and English speakers disappear.
- 17. Even what might be deemed frivolous aspects of language can have far-reaching subconscious effects on how we see the world. Take grammatical gender. In Spanish and other Romance languages, nouns are either masculine or feminine. In many other languages, nouns are divided into many more genders ("gender" in this context meaning class or kind). For example, some Australian Aboriginal languages have up to sixteen genders, including classes of hunting weapons, canines, things that are shiny, or, in the phrase made famous by cognitive linguist George Lakoff, "women, fire, and dangerous things."
- 18. What it means for a language to have grammatical gender is that words belonging to different genders get treated differently grammatically and words belonging to the same grammatical gender get treated the same grammatically. Languages can require speakers to change pronouns, adjective and verb endings, possessives, numerals, and so on, depending on the noun's gender. For example, to say something like "my chair was old" in Russian (moy stul bil' stariy), you'd need to make every word in the sentence agree in gender with "chair" (stul), which is masculine in Russian. So you'd use the masculine form of "my," "was," and "old."
- 19. If, instead of speaking of a chair, you were speaking of a bed (krovat'), which is feminine in Russian, or about your grandmother, you would use the feminine form of "my," "was," and "old? "It turns out that it does, according to the research carried out.
- 20. In fact, you can even see these effects of language; through art, in an art gallery. Look at some famous examples of personification in art — the ways in which abstract entities such as death, sin, victory, or time are given human form. How does an artist decide whether death, say, or time should be painted as a man or a woman?
- 21. It turns out that in 85 percent of such personifications, whether a male or female figure is chosen is predicted by the grammatical gender of the word in the artist's native language. For example, German painters are more likely to paint death as a man, whereas Russian painters are more likely to paint death as a woman.
- 22. The fact that even quirks (странности в поведении) of grammar, such as grammatical gender, can affect our thinking is profound (глубокий). I have described how languages shape the way we think about space, time, colours, and objects. Other studies have found effects of language on how people construe events, reason about causality, keep track of number, understand material substance, perceive and experience emotion, reason about other people's minds, choose to take risks, and even in the way they choose professions and spouses.
- 23. Together, all these results show that linguistic processes are pervasive (проникающий) in most fundamental domains of thought, unconsciously (бессознательно) shaping us from the nuts and bolts (азы ) of cognition and perception (восприятие) to our loftiest (отрешённый: Имеется ввиду супер высокий) abstract notions (галантерея) and major life decisions. Language is central to our experience of being human, and the languages we speak profoundly shape the way we think, the way we see the world, the way we live our lives.