An interesting discussion by Guy Deutscher, Aug. 26, 2010.
Excerpt: “Since there is no evidence that any language forbids its speakers to think anything, we must look in an entirely different direction to discover how our mother tongue really does shape our experience of the world. Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.” This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about.”
See: The New York Times
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Thailand
Local time: 01:34
English to Thai
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In short, languages indicate features. I remember I speak Japanese very quickly and Thai very slowly. Those are the life styles and cultural background. I write Sanskrit (a dead language in India) very carefully about verb forms like Latin, but not in Thai and Chinese.
Soonthon Lupkitaro
United Kingdom
Local time: 19:34
French to English
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An additional thing to think about is that just because a language makes it ... See more
An additional thing to think about is that just because a language makes it more convenient to habitually *express* particular notions doesn't necessarily mean that speakers habitually *interpret* those notions as being "relevant". When a French speaker hears you say, "J'en ai parlé hier avec le voisin/la voisine", they may be tuned to "filter out" the gender information if it's not central to the speaker's point. (Consider in English if instead of "neighbour" you say "I was chatting about that yesterday with the guy/lass next door"-- I wonder to what extent does the listener focus on or filter out the gender information if it is not actually relevant to the point being made?) ▲ Collapse
Netherlands
Local time: 20:34
Dutch to Romanian
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There is a nice article about it "Sex, Syntax and Semantics" by L. Boroditsky, L.A. Schmidt, and W. Phillips in a collection of Articles on Psycholinguistics - Language in mind. The idea of the whole research was to determine if people speaking different languages have different representations about objects, just because they are ... See more
There is a nice article about it "Sex, Syntax and Semantics" by L. Boroditsky, L.A. Schmidt, and W. Phillips in a collection of Articles on Psycholinguistics - Language in mind. The idea of the whole research was to determine if people speaking different languages have different representations about objects, just because they are speaking different languages.
The part I liked the most is related to the results of a study made on 1. Native speakers of German; 2. Native speakers of Spanish (all the subjects were fluent in English (a gender-less language) and the study was made 100% in English).
The subjects were requested to give English adjectives for selected English nouns (determining objects, with no biological gender), so that the German and Spanish nouns were having different genders (i.e. if the noun is feminine in German, the noun meaning the same in Spanish is masculine). I will quote:
of adjectives Spanish and German speakers produced. For example,
the word for ‘‘key’’ is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish.
German speakers described keys as hard, heavy, jagged, metal, serrated,
and useful, while Spanish speakers said they were golden, intricate,
little, lovely, shiny, and tiny. The word for ‘‘bridge,’’ on the other hand,
is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish. German speakers
described bridges as beautiful, elegant, fragile, peaceful, pretty, and slender,
while Spanish speakers said they were big, dangerous, long, strong,
sturdy, and towering.
It seems that languages do shape the way we think. In Romanian mythology the sun (masculine in Romanian) marries the moon (feminine in Romanian), which is totally not possible in Russian culture, where the sun has neuter gender. It is clear that the basic concept about sun and moon in two different cultures is determined by the language.
I find the subject very interesting.
Veronica ▲ Collapse
Canada
Local time: 14:34
Member (2008)
English to French
It's all about seeing reality through the lens of language (in this case Ovid in Latin). And how does a person who never learnt/heard a language think (a wild boy he adopts)?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Imaginary_Life
Thailand
Local time: 01:34
English to Thai
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I wrote some theses for my Ph.D. program in Japan. I found I had to use my native language to write very complicated logics of the thesis assertations. That is, native languages only links our brain cells rationally and effectively: second, third language etc. cannot replace roles of mother tongue easily.
Soonthon Lupkitaro
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