Language

The Way You Think

When looking at a window or saying the word, window, do you view it as a particular gender? What about the bathroom? Does it have a particular gender? If you speak Spanish, you might actually have that point of view. Why? Because within the Spanish language, window is la ventana, (meaning it's seen as feminine) and bathroom is el bano (meaning it's seen as masculine.) What can we draw from realizing that people who speak Spanish view all nouns as either masculine or feminine? We can conclude that language shapes how we view things and how we think.

Lera Boroditsky explains all of this and more within her article, "How Does Language Shape the Way We Think?"Boroditsky has done many studies about language comparing many people from several different countries around the world. She has recorded how a certain community of people in Australia are much like human compasses, because they always know their cardinal directions. She finds just from studying how Russia looks at colors compared to how English look at colors, 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."Overall, Boroditsky's whole article is how language actually does shape thought, and that people who speak different languages think in a different way.

Personally, I find it very interesting how English speakers constantly have to speak within a tense. English speakers would say, "sat, sitting, and sit" all as different uses of tense. Where as Boroditsky states, "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."I find it crazy that our language (English) has so many tenses when another country has none at all. The point I'm trying to make is that this whole language affects and determines thought is a very interesting topic that I look forward to looking more into so that I can not only learn more about other cultures and languages, but learn more about my own.