Does Your Mother Tongue Shape How You Think?

In the article Does your overprotect tongue shape how you think Guy Deutscher argues that our set about tongue does hence shape our experiences of the world. However, it does not do so as Benjamin Lee Whorfs theory suggests but rather beca design of what our mother tongue habitually obliges us to think. Guy Deutscher gos a lay claim make by Benjamin Lee Whorf, a chemical engineer, who essentially express that our native words constrains our mind and we be unable to grasp impressions that ar not given words to in our actors line.He said that when a language does not have a particular word for a construct, the concept itself assholenot be understood by the speaker. Deutscher argues that Whorf did not have any state to substantiate this theory and that his claim is wrong on umteen levels. He gives an example that although there isnt an slope word for Schadenfreude in German it does not mean that an English speaker is unable to comprehend the concept of pleasure in someone elses misery.Whorfs theory was an enticing idea about languages power over the mind, and his stirring prose seduced a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we be able to think. Yet, due to the lack of evidence to rachis up his claim the theory crash landed. This is where Deutscher presents his argument that our mother tongue can entrance and affect what it habitually obliges us to think about. He does so by presenting differences from language to language and explains the many tests that were conducted in recent years to back up his theory. i Duetscher considers many different languages and compares the differences such as in English we dont have to say the gender of the person we are speaking about but in french and German we would be compelled to inform the listeners of the gender. However, in English we must speak of the timing of the way out such as past, present or future but in Chinese there is one verb that represents the concept of tim e. When a language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, this makes people stay more attentive to the details.But the critical details can change from language to language and a study example is inanimate objects having a gender. There were various experiments done in recent years with German and Spanish speakers. The test was to see how distributively person responded to an object. When asked about a bridge the German speaker believed it to be feminine and the Spanish speaker believed it to be masculine. Another test had cut and Spanish speakers asked to assign human voices to objects in cartoons.When a fork was shown, the French speakers chose a womans voice but the Spanish speakers chose a mans voice. This is due to how some languages have related many inanimate nouns with gender which Deutscher believes does affect how people see different things in the world and how it will shape their experience of life. Deutscher uses the Australian aboriginal ton gue, Guugu Yimithirr, as a great example to back up his theory because they use cardinal direction which allows them to see and speak of the world in a different way than English speakers or egocentric coordinate speakers.While reason his point he uses a good example of how these two languages can differ and shape your experience of the world with something as simple as the way you view a hotel. One way of understanding this is to retrieve that you are traveling with a speaker of such a language and staying in a large chain-style hotel, with corridor upon corridor of identical-looking doors. Your friend is staying in the room opposite word yours, and when you go into his room, youll see an exact replica of yoursBut when your friend comes into your room, he will see something quite different from this, because everything is reversed north-side-south.In his room the bottomland was in the north, while in yours it is in the south the telephone that in his room was in the west is now in the east, and so on. So while you will see and concoct the same room twice, a speaker of a geographic language will see and remember two different rooms. Deutscher uses this to simplify that our mother tongue does indeed shape our experiences of the world but not in the extreme ace of a Prison House as Benjamin Lee Whorfs theory suggests.Deutscher concludes that the impact of our mother tongue goes far beyond what has been through an experiment demonstrated and is believed to have impacted beliefs, values and ideologies. With all this being said, Deutscher believes that the biggest shout we can take toward understanding one another is the simplest step to take which is to stop pretending we all think the same. i http//aafreenafzal. blogspot. com/2012/10/analysis-does-your-language-shape-how. html