Question Maze - 4
Long time since i wrote something in question maze.Although I'm constantly questioned by myself I couldn't put forth many of those questions in public on a blog( personal question issues!!).But this link sent by a friend put my thoughts back to action. (here's the link in case you wanna read the original) MANUSCRIPT.
The question raised in the article was "are languages merely tools for expressing our thoughts, or do they actually shape our thoughts?"
Language is central to our experience of being human.Each language is distinctive in its approach. Could this difference create a difference in the way the thoughts map in our mind? ?It's true,mind can be trained-is it the language we speak that's training our minds?? Does the way you describe an object or an experience depends on the language you speak? If yes, then doesn't language interfere in the way we see,understand and absorb the happenings around us(that's a little creepy isn't it?)
Language's could differ from one other vividly or they could share something in common and with so many known languages world wide how easy is it to differentiate behavior in thought? If it's sounding like insanity, don't think so cos there are people who would go to any levels of insanity for research purposes[;)].Today we live in a world that's shrunk by many folds, making research's such as these a reality.
(Here's one paragraph from the manuscript) Does treating chairs as masculine and beds as feminine in the grammar make Russian speakers think of chairs as being more like men and beds as more like women in some way? It turns out that it does. In one study, we asked German and Spanish speakers to describe objects having opposite gender assignment in those two languages. The descriptions they gave differed in a way predicted by grammatical gender. For example, when asked to describe a "key" — a word that is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish — the German speakers were more likely to use words like "hard," "heavy," "jagged," "metal," "serrated," and "useful," whereas Spanish speakers were more likely to say "golden," "intricate," "little," "lovely," "shiny," and "tiny." To describe a "bridge," which is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish, the German speakers said "beautiful," "elegant," "fragile," "peaceful," "pretty," and "slender," and the Spanish speakers said "big," "dangerous," "long," "strong," "sturdy," and "towering." This was true even though all testing was done in English, a language without grammatical gender. The same pattern of results also emerged in entirely nonlinguistic tasks (e.g., rating similarity between pictures). And we can also show that it is aspects of language per se that shape how people think: teaching English speakers new grammatical gender systems influences mental representations of objects in the same way it does with German and Spanish speakers. Apparently even small flukes of grammar, like the seemingly arbitrary assignment of gender to a noun, can have an effect on people's ideas of concrete objects in the world.
It means that when you're learning a new language, you're not simply learning a new way of talking, you are also inadvertently learning a new way of thinking.The more number of languages you learn, the more varied your thinking( that's how i like to presume.) Now that is something to think about!!!!!
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2 comments:
I think the concept of Language shaping our thoughts is quite palpable. Wat we fail to see thru here is that its not the language that is bringing about the change in the behavior of our thoughts but its the culture the language is part of. We as individuals if we learn the language just another medium of communication we wouldn't care less about how we are conveying it(Male or Female). But is only when we live with ppl of that culture that we start to understand the subtleties of the language, for at the end of the language is the by product of a culture ( Sometimes more than one culture )
I think the concept of Language shaping our thoughts is quite palpable. Wat we fail to see thru here is that its not the language that is bringing about the change in the behavior of our thoughts but its the culture the language is a part of. We as individuals if we learn the language as just another medium of communication we would care less about how we are conveying it(Male or Female). But its only when we live with ppl of that culture that we start to understand the subtleties of the language, for at the end of the day language is the by product of a culture ( Sometimes more than one culture )
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