Group items tagged

This essay looks at the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which is that that the structure of a language determines a native speaker's perception and categorization of experience. This essay looks at how emotional differences in language are tied to the grammar and mechanics and they can't be shared borrowed across languages

"Consistent with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, participants were quicker at distinguishing between a 'green' and a 'blue' than between two 'greens' or two 'blues', but crucially, this advantage only pertained when the colours appeared on the right-hand side of space [when the brain is using the "language-dominant left hemisphere"]."

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. When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.