Language Influences The Way You Think

Ananova ^ | 9-12-2003

[blam]

Language influences the way you think

Speakers of different languages not only describe the world differently but think about it differently too, according to a new study.

Researchers used a cartoon featuring black and white cat Sylvester to study how language was reflected in the gestures people made.

Dr Sotaro Kita of the University of Bristol's Department of Experimental Psychology, showed the cartoon to a group of native English, Japanese and Turkish speakers and then watched their gestures as they described the action they had seen.

He found speakers of the three different languages used different gestures to depict the same event, which appeared to reflect the way the structure of their languages expressed that event.

For example, when describing a scene where Sylvester swings on a rope, the English speakers used gestures showing an arc trajectory and the Japanese and Turkish speakers tended to use straight gestures showing the motion but not the arc.

Dr Kita suggests this is because Japanese and Turkish have no verb that corresponds to the English intransitive verb 'to swing'.

While English speakers use the arc gesture as their language can readily express the change of location and the arc-shaped trajectory, Japanese and Turkish speakers cannot as easily express the concept of movement with an arc trajectory so they use the straight gesture.

Dr Kita said: "My research suggests that speakers of different languages generate different spatial images of the same event in a way that matches the expressive possibilities of their particular language.

"In other words, language influences spatial thinking at the moment of speaking."

Story filed: 14:06 Friday 12th September 2003

[snarkpup]

A.k.a. the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, from the 1930's.

[anniegetyourgun]

Give you a greater appreciation for ASL, eh?

[RightWhale]

"In other words, language influences spatial thinking at the moment of speaking."

The waving of hands is also important to engineering and math teachers even though they have plenty of words to describe almost any motion one might come across.

[Timesink]

"My research suggests that speakers of different languages generate different spatial images of the same event in a way that matches the expressive possibilities of their particular language."

Or the lack thereof.

I've always considered English to be a generally superior language to most others (if not all the major ones) simply because he have so many more words from which to choose in order to express ourselves. (Maybe German can give us a run for the money, since they can make up so many new words by combining smaller ones. ;) )

[the gillman@blacklagoon.com]

Used to travel a lot.

Here's a tip.

When in South America, should you go into a tough bar or find yourself threatened by someone, slap them on the shoulder and give them the OK sign, right in their faces.

They will think you are one of them,
and they will kill you.

[SpaceBar]

"Language influences the way you think"

This is also true for computer programmers. Lisp programmers have a peculiar "inside-out" way of thinking while C and Fortran programmers tend to order their thoughts procedurally in a sequence of well defined steps. Prolog folks tend to spend their time pondering a complete set of rules on sets that span the space of all possible configurations.

[Lessismore]

Yes, but a lot of English words come from French, and my vocabulary is now cut in half.

[the gillman@blacklagoon.com]

Oberammergaueralpenkräuterdelikatessenfrühstückskäse

Now that's precision. Face it, the Germans kick our ass, when it comes to long freakin words.

[Harmless Teddy Bear]

I've always considered English to be a generally superior language to most others (if not all the major ones) simply because he have so many more words from which to choose in order to express ourselves.

Maybe because it is a combination of many different languages. It certainly is much easier to express technical ideas in English.

Spanish has more words then any other language but it can be extremely difficult to express technical ideas in Spanish.

I have always found it interesting how much language reflects the culture. Or does the culture reflect the language?

[W. W. SMITH]

I have always wondered how the spoken language of a nation affects the stability of their government.

[and the horse you rode in on]

This is hardly new:

"Science and Sanity: An Introduction to Non-Aristotelian Systems and General Semantics"
by Alfred Korzybski

back in the '30s also

[luckystarmom]

I'm curious if this affects people that have speech problems.

My daughter has a severe speech problem. She's almost 7 and talks like a 2-3 year old. She's got an average IQ (100), and she understands everything.

Her oral muscles are weak, and she cannot say many multi-syllable words.

When she is describing things it's very interesting. One day she was telling me about Madeline (book/show). She couldn't say Madeline, but she was telling me "She has yellow hat. She has a blue coat. She has a dog."

Anyway, I am just curious what my daughters thoughts are compared to someone that speaks normally.

[lizma]

Oberammergaueralpenkräuterdelikatessenfrühstückskäse

Now that's precision.

Yes but we have the term "lewinsky". Far fewer letters yet still very precise in it's meaning.

Why do they even have to have a word for "herbed delistyle breakfast cheese from Garmish"??? If they needed it so badly why couldn't they make up a new word using six or seven letters? So much for German efficiency.

[Yardstick]

Why do they even have to have a word for "herbed delistyle breakfast cheese from Garmish"??? If they needed it so badly why couldn't they make up a new word using six or seven letters? So much for German efficiency.

And of course the opposite of that would have been the Chinese, who would have drawn up a brand new, unique symbol to add to their tens of thousands of other unique symbols.

[boris]

See, e.g., 1984 by George Orwell;
The Languages of Pao, by Jack Vance.

--Boris

[boris]

"Why do they even have to have a word for "herbed delistyle breakfast cheese from Garmish"??? If they needed it so badly why couldn't they make up a new word using six or seven letters? So much for German efficiency."

Why do they have a single word denoting "poison dwarf"? (Giftzwerg).

Why is the term for "space travel" Rhaumfhart?

--Boris

[Alas Babylon!]

Spanish has more words then any other language but it can be extremely difficult to express technical ideas in Spanish.

Not true. Read below, from the Oxford English Dictionary Online:

Is it true that English has the most words of any language?

This question is practically impossible to answer, for the reasons set out in the answer to How many words are there in the English language? However, it seems quite probable that English has more words than most comparable world languages. The reason for this is historical. English was originally a Germanic language, related to Dutch and German, and it shares much of its grammar and basic vocabulary with those languages. However, after the Norman Conquest in 1066 it was hugely influenced by Norman French, which became the language of the ruling class for a considerable period, and by Latin, which was the language of scholarship and of the Church. Very large numbers of French and Latin words entered the language. Consequently, English has a much larger vocabulary than either the Germanic languages or the members of the Romance language family to which French belongs. English is also very ready to accommodate foreign words, and as it has become an international language, it has absorbed vocabulary from a large number of other sources. This does, of course, assume that you ignore `agglutinative' languages such as Finnish, in which words can be stuck together in long strings of indefinite length, and which therefore have an almost infinite number of `words'.

[patton]

Or how about "Dienstleistungsimportuberschuess"?

Or "Sammenausstossendesgassenschlampe"?

[boris]

Your---Link---Is---Broken