Hi, it's been a long time since I posted. What with final exams,
and school fest, and ten million essays to write and the laziness following all
of this, I think I can be excused. Anyway, the important thing is here I am
with a new post. Have a look.
I recently came across
an article, which I found rather interesting and worth sharing with you
all. You can find the link to the original article at the bottom of the page.
The article talks about how speakers of different languages think differently.
Yes, you read it right. If I speak Greek, I think Greek. If I speak Japanese, I
think Japanese.
To understand this, we have to
firstly appreciate that languages are different. While this may seem obvious,
the point I am trying to highlight is that suppose you switch from Turkish to
Tamil, you wouldn't simply be substituting every word for another.
Rather, you will have to change all your ideas about nouns and verbs, and all
the other words, about how their forms vary, and about how all these words in
their different forms must combine with each other to form a complete sentence.
Thus, it is clear that when we switch from one language to another, we switch
our way of thinking about sounds, words and sentences. So far, so good.
But what if I were to tell you that
speakers of different languages not only think differently about processes
associated with languages, but also with respect to various objects? What if
Spanish speakers think of bridges differently from what German speakers think
of bridges? That indeed seems to be the case.
In a study described in the
aforementioned link, German speakers described bridges as 'elegant',
'pretty' and 'beautiful', whereas Spanish speakers described them as 'strong'
and 'sturdy'. If you notice carefully, German speakers tended to stick with
words generally reserved for all things feminine, while Spanish speakers with
'masculine' words. Now, if you know a thing or two about these languages, you
probably know that both of them put nouns into genders. And guess what? Bridges
are masculine in Spanish and feminine in German. Thus, these imaginary genders
of words, which is often an unnecessary inconvenience to learners of these
language, affect how speakers of these languages think of these words. Also, I might add that in the same experiment, a key, which was masculine in German and feminine in Spanish was described by 'masculine' adjective by German speakers and 'feminine' adjectives by Spanish speakers.
So much for genders. But languages don't just make us think of objects in different ways. In fact, different languages give us a different idea of space and direction. Let us consider the Kuuk Thaayorre
people in northern Australia. They are a group of Aborginal people who always,
always use cardinal direction terms (like north, south etc.) instead of
direction words which are used in reference to a certain person/object (like
right, left etc.) This means, that these people, unlike English speakers always
remain oriented. They always know which direction is north, and which is south,
which may not be true for English speakers. Thus, the language they speak
forces them to think of direction in a particular way.
This difference is not limited to languages which
use cardinal direction instead of reference directions, but also to languages
whose writing scripts run from right to left, or from top to bottom. For
example, an experiment was carried out where participants were asked to arrange
pictures of a man ageing in temporal order. They weren't asked to do so in a
particular direction. It was found that English speakers arranged the pictures
from left to right, while Hebrew speakers did so from right to left. It cannot be
a mere coincidence that English is written from left to right, and Hebrew from
right to left. Also, just in case you might be interested, the Kuuk Thaayorre
participants arranged it from east to west, no matter which direction they were
facing.
This idea of direction also extends to time. For example, when English speakers talk about time using space metaphors, they always use horizontal ones. In English, bad times lie ahead of us; those days are behind us. But for Mandarin speakers, the next month is down month, and the previous month is the up month i.e. a vertical metaphor is being used to describe time. And I know you've guessed/known it before, but I should add that Mandarin is written vertically from top to bottom.
It's scary how much the language we speak affects how we think. It shapes the world around us, gives imaginary genders to objects, gives us a sense of direction. After knowing all this, I feel that in some ways, languages can limit our abilities to think about the world. Monolingual speakers see the world in one perspective. Maybe there are more advantages to being multilingual than we think, especially when the languages we speak are not closely related. Obviously, if you speak what you think, the more ways you speak, the more ways you think.
And here is the link to the original article: http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/boroditsky09/boroditsky09_index.html
Yash
