Electronic/World Wide Web>Internet Article: Boroditsky, Lera (6.12.09), How Does Our Language Shape the Way We Think?, Edge, Retrieved on 2013-04-26Source Material [www.edge.org]
Folksonomies: culture cognition language Memes
26 APR 2013
Examples of How Language Affects Cognition
Most questions of whether and how language shapes thought start with the simple observation that languages differ from one another. And a lot! Let's take a (very) hypothetical example. Suppose you want to say, "Bush read Chomsky's latest book." Let's focus on just the verb, "read." To say this sentence in English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we have to pronounce it like "red" and not like "reed." In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can't) alter the verb to mark tens...Examples of how languages differ between cultures in their constructs, how those constructs affect the way the speaker thinks about things, and how teaching a person a new language can alter the way they think.
26 APR 2013
How Giving Nouns Genders Affects Thought
In Spanish and other Romance languages, nouns are either masculine or feminine. In many other languages, nouns are divided into many more genders ("gender" in this context meaning class or kind). For example, some Australian Aboriginal languages have up to sixteen genders, including classes of hunting weapons, canines, things that are shiny, or, in the phrase made famous by cognitive linguist George Lakoff, "women, fire, and dangerous things." What it means for a language to have grammatical...Spanish, German, French, and Russian languages attribute genders to all nouns, and this has a profound affect on the way the speakers perceive the world.