I’m interested in how the languages we speak shape the way we think. […]
Let me give you an example. Suppose you want to say even the simplest thing, like “Humpty Dumpty sat on a …” Well, even with a snippet of a nursery rhyme, if you try to translate it to other languages, you’d immediately run into trouble. Let’s focus on the verb for a moment. Sat. To say this in English, if this was something that happened in the past, then you’d have to say “sat.” You wouldn’t say, “will sit” or “sitting.” You have to mark tense. In some languages like in Indonesian you couldn’t change the verb. The verb would always stay the same regardless of whether this is a past or future event. In some languages, like in Russian, my native language, you would have to change the verb for tense, but you would also have to include gender. So if this was Mrs. Dumpty that sat on the wall, you’d use a different form of the verb than if it was Mr. Dumpty.
In Russian, quite inconveniently, you have to mark the verb for whether the event was completed or not. So if Humpty Dumpty sat on the wall for the entire amount of time that he was meant to sit on it, that would be one form of the verb. But if he were to say “have a great fall” that would be a different form of the verb.
In Turkish, and this is one of my favorite examples, you have to change the verb depending on how you came to know this information. If you actually witnessed this event with your own eyes, you were walking along and you saw this chubby, ovoid character sitting on a wall, that would be one form of the verb. But if this was something you just heard about, or you inferred, from say broken Humpty Dumpty pieces, then you would have to use a different form of the verb.
When people have looked at differences like this across languages, one first response has been “Wow, languages really require different things from their speakers, therefore people who speak different languages must think differently.” On the other side, people have argued, “Not so fast. Just because languages differ in what their speakers are required to say, doesn’t mean that people have to think differently. The differences could be just on the surface, just in how people talk, not in how they think.”
Here’s an argument that lends that point of view some weight. Whenever we talk, whenever we say anything, we’re only reporting a very small proportion of what we know. For example, if you were to say, “It’s raining today,” you can say that without having to say “It’s raining today, but only outside and not inside,” even though you very well know that it’s only raining outside and not inside. The person hearing you also knows that you know that. You don’t have to report everything that you know, and the sentence that you do say contains only a small proportion of the information that you actually know. Some people have argued just because Turkish, Korean, Japanese, and Russian speakers say different stuff and include different information in their sentences, doesn’t mean they actually know different stuff. They could know the same things, remember the same things, see the world the same way, and just include different things in their sentences. That is, people could all think the same ways, but talk differently.
{ Lera Boroditsky/Edge | Continue reading }
