From: [email protected]
Subject: [Speakers] Languages are parallel universes (Boroditsky talk)
Date: 27 ottobre 2010 21:09:27 GMT+02:00
To: [email protected]
"To have a second language is to have a second soul," said Charlemagne around 800 AD. (((Apparently the guy actually said this, but likely in some language he never spoke in everyday life, because Charlemagne probably spoke a Germanic dialect of the Ripuarian Franks.)))
"Each language has its own cognitive
toolkit," said psychologist/linguist Lera Boroditsky in 2010 AD.
Different languages handle verbs, distinctions, gender, time, space, (((time, space??)))
metaphor, and agency differently, and those differences, her research
shows, make people think and act differently.
Take a sentence such as "Sarah Palin read Chomsky's latest book." In
Russian, the verb would have to indicate whether the whole book was
read or not. In Turkish the verb would signify whether the speaker
saw the event personally, or it was reported, or it was inferred.
Russians have two words for blue, and when those words are present in
their mind, they can distinguish finer gradations of the color than
English speakers can.
Gender runs deep in some languages, affecting nouns (including number
words and days of the week), adjective endings, pronouns and
possessives, and verb endings. And that affects how people think
about every named thing. In German the Sun is female and the Moon
male; it's the reverse in Spanish. In French, "liberty" and
"justice" are each female, and thus the Statue of Liberty is a
female, and so is the blindfolded lady of justice in American
courtrooms.
"'Time' is the most common noun in the English language," (((?!))) said
Boroditsky. (Followed by "person," "year," "way," and "day.") Time
is often expressed as travel in space: "We're coming up on
Christmas." But some languages put the future in front of us, and
others put it behind us. For Aborigines that Boroditsky studied in
north Australia, time and sequence gets blended into their profound
orientation to the cardinal directions. They don't use relative
terms like "left" and "right," but absolute compass terms ("There's
an ant on your southwest leg"), and they have extraordinary
orientation skills. (((This makes one wonder what linguistic group
has extraordinary temporal skills.)))
When Boroditsky asked these aborigines to place a sequence of photos
(a progressively eaten apple) in sequential order, they did not do it
like English speakers (left to right) or Hebrew and Arabic speakers
(right to left), they did it by the compass: from east to west.
"These are not differences of degree," said Boroditsky, "but a
parallel universe."
Different languages assign blame (agency) differently. English is
uncommonly agentive, and so Dick Cheney had difficulty distancing
himself from the fact that he shot his friend in a hunting accident:
"Ultimately I'm the guy who pulled the trigger that fired the shot
that hit Harry." In Spanish, accidents are expressed in terms such
as "The vase broke" rather than "John broke the vase." Political
distancing language such as "Mistakes were made" doesn't sound
awkward in Spanish. Fate looms larger.
Thus, "learning new languages can change the way you think," said
Boroditsky. Multilingual speakers have more mind.
–Stewart Brand
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