Does Your Language Shape How You Think?

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PeterCH

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Does Your Language Shape How You Think?

Excerpt.

Let’s take genders again. Languages like Spanish, French, German and Russian not only oblige you to think about the sex of friends and neighbors, but they also assign a male or female gender to a whole range of inanimate objects quite at whim. What, for instance, is particularly feminine about a Frenchman’s beard (la barbe)? Why is Russian water a she, and why does she become a he once you have dipped a tea bag into her? Mark Twain famously lamented such erratic genders as female turnips and neuter maidens in his rant “The Awful German Language.” But whereas he claimed that there was something particularly perverse about the German gender system, it is in fact English that is unusual, at least among European languages, in not treating turnips and tea cups as masculine or feminine. Languages that treat an inanimate object as a he or a she force their speakers to talk about such an object as if it were a man or a woman. And as anyone whose mother tongue has a gender system will tell you, once the habit has taken hold, it is all but impossible to shake off. When I speak English, I may say about a bed that “it” is too soft, but as a native Hebrew speaker, I actually feel “she” is too soft. “She” stays feminine all the way from the lungs up to the glottis and is neutered only when she reaches the tip of the tongue.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?ref=general&src=me&pagewanted=print
 
PeterCH said:
Does Your Language Shape How You Think?
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Yes, absolutely. Different concepts can only be taught and thought about in a language capable of conceptualising them. A primitive language has a larger conceptual poverty because the concepts have not been thought of (otherwise the language would encompass them) and expressed.
 
Short answer: yes.

Long answer, very very complicated. But imagine this ...

A person is born a deaf-blind; They have had no way to perceive written or verbal language like the norm. How do they conceptualise thoughts?

The best answers I have found on this was from a nakedscience podcast ... http://www.thenakedscientists.com/HTML/content/latest-questions/question/2521/

** snip **

Hi, I've got a question about deaf people. How do they think? I mean, how to they make ideas on their minds? For example, my native language is Spanish, so most of my thoughts are made in that language. But how does this work for deaf people? Does every person have his own code? Gerardo Garzón, via the Naked Scientists Facebook Page



We put this question to Mairead McSweeney:



Mairead - Yes, so just as he thinks in Spanish and I think in English, so if you're a native user of British Sign Language, you would think in British Sign Language. So then the question really is, well, what’s the nature of that thought? What’s it like? And so, it can be visual or it could be manual, so motoric, and so we can use different methods in the lab to try and get at that question by using different interference techniques. And so, it seems to be a bit of both. There seems to be more weight towards a motor representation that people use in their minds and their thinking in sign language.



Chris - So they would literally see themselves doing the thing rather than think it through talking to themselves doing it like I might for example.



Mairead - Well, no. That would be a visual representation but there’s more weight towards the motoric representation would be more like feeling themselves do it. It’s just like you feel you hear yourself speak, if you like. A motor representation of the movement would be the type of representation that they might be bringing up when thinking.



Diana - So it’s just like imagining eating chocolate in my head. I can feel the sensations.



Mairead - Yes, exactly!

** snip
 
I am fluent in two very different languages and I most certainly drift into different mind-sets each time I sweitch between the two. The way I express myself, explain certain things and even the imagery associated with a sentence that means the same thing in both languages can be very very different. It is one of the things that I love most about Languages.
 
Definitely, just take English and Afikaans for example. You perceive things different when thinking in the one (I sometimes feel a bit common :P) and then also different when thinking in the other.
 
Definitely, just take English and Afikaans for example.
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Agreed: I program in English, I swear in Afrikaans ...
 
PeterCH said:
Does Your Language Shape How You Think?
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IMO your thoughts are played out in images and a language so theoretically the limitations of your language (is there such a thing?) determine the 'quality' of your thoughts to a certain degree.
Based on the above, your proficiency in your mother tongue determines the depth and magnitude your thoughts.
 
IMO your thoughts are played out in images and a language
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In general people can be divided into 3 categories regarding thought ...

Visual, Auditory, Kinesthetic.

This can actually be picked up quite easily from just listening to the words actually used ...

@MartyMarts: You are obviously Visually dominating, meaning that a lot of your thoughts are conceptualised as images. This does not mean that your auditory or kinesthetic abilities are better or worse than anybody else, only that you tend to think in images.

People that are auditory tend to use more sound verbs and pronouns in their sentences, kinesthetic more feeling ...

i.e. Auditory: That sounds about right ...
Visual: That seems about right ...
Kinesthetic: That feels about right ...

This also doesn't imply that there are no other ways of conceptualising thought, but these are the defined interpretations.
 
bin3 said:
@MartyMarts: You are obviously Visually dominating, meaning that a lot of your thoughts are conceptualised as images. This does not mean that your auditory or kinesthetic abilities are better or worse than anybody else, only that you tend to think in images.
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True :o
 
ponder said:
Wonder what Noam Chomsky has to say?
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As I understand it, Chomsky's contributions are a lot more language oriented than thought oriented;

i.e.

Perhaps his most influential and time-tested contribution to the field, is the claim that modeling knowledge of language using a formal grammar accounts for the "productivity" of language. In other words, a formal grammar of a language can explain the ability of a hearer-speaker to produce and interpret an infinite number of utterances, including novel ones, with a limited set of grammatical rules and a finite set of terms. He has always acknowledged his debt to Pāṇini for his modern notion of an explicit generative grammar although it is also related to Rationalist ideas of a priori knowledge.
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This can be extended to the concept of why children pick up language that easy, while it's very difficult for most adults -- hint: If adults picked up languages as easy as babies / children we would all be talking in goo goo gha gah language and might even have understood some other people. We don't: Children are forced to learn the language of adults via some biological patterns, i.e. those that Chomsky describes.

This does not imply that without language there is no thought; only that thought can and is exercised by language.
 
Yes an no . Good question but how do people who don't know how to talk still 'think '? ;)Its a hard question but im sure it most definatley does. Will need to look in my notes for you.
 
I rather believe the way we think shapes our language.

On CNN there's a program GPS hosted by Fareed Zakaria. He once had a guest who talked about the power differences that exist within certain cultures and how that varies from other cultures and nationalities. He reffered to the ranks that exist in businesses and how those distances between ranks are wider or narrower from country to country. In Korea for example, he explained, the power differences between people are so pronounced that their whole language structure has been shaped to accomodate it. It even influenced the safety record of Korean Airlines in the 90's

http://www.clearlycultural.com/2009...-differences-caused-korean-airlines-problems/

A very interesting post on how cross cultural differences between makers of airplanes Boeing and Airbus (located in small power distance countries) and pilots from South Korea (large power distance country) caused series of dangerous situations and accidents in the late 90’s.

Planes produced by Airbus and Boeing are supposed to be flown by 2 pilots without a a significant power distance between them, where one pilot corrects the other when necessary. As a result of the large power distance between the pilots working for South Korean Airlines more than once the co-pilot would not correct mistakes made by the other pilot.
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Afrikaans also has such an example although it is but one word. The word "U" is used to illustrate this greater power difference. In some black cultures the regard of a married woman towards her husband's father are so high (forced maybe) that she doesn't refer to him by his name at all. I can't remember which culture has this trait, I just remember it from Indigenous Law years ago.
 
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Karel/Chares the V: "ek spreek Spaans tegen God, Italiaans tegen vrouwen, Frans tegen mannen en Duits tegen mijn paard. "

"I speak Spanish to my God, Italian to my wife, French to my Nation and German to my donkey"

languages do affect it to a way, however social circumstances play a bigger role, for example a mathematician Afrikaans or English would rather think along the line of X and Y.
 
Picard said:
http://www.clearlycultural.com/2009...-differences-caused-korean-airlines-problems/

Afrikaans also has such an example although it is but one word. The word "U" is used to illustrate this greater power difference. In some black cultures the regard of a married woman towards her husband's father are so high (forced maybe) that she doesn't refer to him by his name at all. I can't remember which culture has this trait, I just remember it from Indigenous Law years ago.
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German has 4 levels of communication, Afrikaans has 3, English has only 1-2 (since some of it is considered to be more 'formal', they don't change the articles, verbs or pronouns though)

Jy/jou for casual, unless you are talking to grownups then you are not allowed to say jy/jou, :
U for formal
Meneer, mevrou, for semi formal,
 
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Picard said:
I rather believe the way we think shapes our language.
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There must be some influence from people's mindsets. English has influences from the Romans, Saxons and Normans, yet it's nouns are not gendered.
 
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