Does Your Language Shape How You Think?

[Outofin]

A very interesting topic.

Does Your Language Shape How You Think?

I guess my answer to the question is: somewhat, but it's more like the other way around. Mind shapes language.

And the idea of gender system in European languages is totaly bizarre to me. A female mountain and a male chair?

Languages like Spanish, French, German and Russian not only oblige you to think about the sex of friends and neighbors, but they also assign a male or female gender to a whole range of inanimate objects quite at whim. What, for instance, is particularly feminine about a Frenchman’s beard (la barbe)? Why is Russian water a she, and why does she become a he once you have dipped a tea bag into her?

Edit: dear admin, I just found the external links don't work nicely in IE9 beta, or more likely IE beta doesn't support your site. Guess that's one reason it's called beta. Anyway I forgive you. There's really nothing to forgive, but I'm just practising forgiving today.

[Hofmann]

I think language affects thought. Take a look at linguistic relativity if you haven't already.

[dreamon]

Does, say, a programming language influence the program? One thing a language definitely influences, I think, is our ability to communicate "between the lines". When we say something, it has a face value and an underlying value ("Why did he say this and not that?") If there is a set {A, B, ..., Z} of possible things to say, and I say "A", people will wonder "Why not B or Z?", and will conclude something about me beyond the face meaning of A. But obviously what they conclude depends on that set {A, B, ..., Z}, and that set, in turn, depends on the language.

[skylee]

Isn't this article similar to the one I posted earlier under Recent Status Updates? -> Lost in Translation

[Outofin]

Now I get one question about the gender system in my first post. When a new thing and thus a new noun is invented, for example, when computer was first invented, how do people decide to call it a she or a he?

[jbradfor]

yeah, I read that article a couple weeks ago when it first came out.

I recommend reading it, but it's not what you think based on the title. Here's my summary. [All from memory from 3 weeks ago.]

1. Talked about an older theory in which it was stated that "Language Shapes What You Can Think About"; that theory is now thoroughly debunked.
2. Talks about a second theory in which it is pointed out that language does change what you need to state, based on the grammar. Examples given: in English, one can say "I was with my neighbor last night" without stating the sex of the neighbor; one can not do that in Romance and most other Germanic languages. However, in English, one still needs to provide the tense saying when it happened; that is not required in Chinese, however. It gives some research results that tries to determine if this factor has an actual impact.
3. Most of the article, however, was talking about a couple of languages that use compass directions (N, S, E, W) when giving directions, e.g. "please pass me the item to your west", rather than "please pass me the item to your left". That part I thought was totally fascinating.

P.S. Re: computer's gender: http://www.jokesplace.com/joke/computersmf.html

[Don_Horhe]

Now I get one question about the gender system in my first post. When a new thing and thus a new noun is invented, for example, when computer was first invented, how do people decide to call it a she or a he?

Loanword gender assignment is usually done according, but not limited, to the phonological features of the word in question. In Bulgarian, for example, 'masculine' nouns almost always end in a consonant, so when the word 'computer' was borrowed, it was assigned masculine grammatical gender.

[renzhe]

I agree with Don Horhe, and it is my experience that this is how it works in other Slavic languages as well. The grammatical gender is closely tied to the way a noun is declined. In Croatian, almost everything ending in -a (more rarely also -ast and -ost), almost everything ending in -e or -o is neutral, everything else is masculine. Loanwords follow this.

In Latin for example, almost all the nouns from the first declension (-a declension) are feminine, with some obvious exceptions like "agricola", which typically refer to a male person, but are still declined the same way.

What I find impossible is loan words in German, where it is almost random. If there is a good rule, it's a mystery to me. They seem to take the grammatical gender of the closest German synonym, but even that doesn't work reliably.

In any case, grammatical genders are a result of having the cases match in Indo-European languages, not much more. They have no actual gender meaning. Just like 阴平 and 阳平 tones don't really have anything to do with 阴 and 阳.

[gerri]

LOan words in German seem logical enough to me - they just feel right. The only problem with this statement is that my first language is German... and that you can actually find some differences in gender (of the same word) between German and Austrian German.

More seriously: Do you have examples? Because I think I could find the rules (with the usual caveat: exceptions prove the rules - Ausnahmen bestätigen die Regel).

One comedian explained the problems best: "you see a cucumber, of course you should assume it's male. Just look at the shape. Why the heck is it female, then. Have you never seen a female?"

As for the example of the neighbor... babies, interestingly, are neutral in German. So, yes, you'd have to tell the sex of said neighbor, but you don't have to know whether a baby is a baby boy or a baby girl. Either way, I don't see the problem (except with Chinese confusing he/she all the time...)

[dreamon]

I don't know German, but in Russian you don't have to tell the sex, just use the noun "human" ("человек") which is male, or some other generic noun that can refer to both males and females. Although it may be a little tricky to do it without sending some message "between the lines" due to the unusual word choice. Incidentally, the whole issue about whether to use "he" or "she" when referring to a generic human in English is totally alien to Russian, where the use of "he" or "she" is determined by the grammar. If the implied noun is "человек" (which is typically the case), then it is "he".

[Outofin]

Why can't authority invent a new word for genderless "he or she"? How about "se"?

I figure every language has some unnecessary grammars. For example, English puts too many efforts on "do" and "does".

Languages are for communication. Even though "it do" is grammatically wrong, but

- it does not mislead people,

- it does not lose any information,

- it's unambiguous.

People can live well without "is", "has", "does", -s verbs.

The only advantage I can think of is that when you can't tell whether the subject is plural or singular, you can tell from the verb (when the verb is not in past tense). But the benefit is so minor and can be achieved in many other ways.

[Hofmann]

That's why languages tend to evolve toward being analytic, like English.

[jbradfor]

Why can't authority

And what authority would this be for English, especially American-English?

[Scoobyqueen]

More seriously: Do you have examples?[

I heard my German colleagues not being able to agree about the loan word "preview". Most said die but some thought it was das.

[renzhe]

Oh, I run into this problem all the time, since loanwords are very common in my field. Native German words are simple enough after all this time, and some (common) loanwords are simple: Computer=Rechner, Pointer=Zeiger, Framework=Rahmenwerk, etc, but what is the gender of Benchmark? Paper? E-Mail?

Languages are for communication. Even though "it do" is grammatically wrong, but

- it does not mislead people,

- it does not lose any information,

- it's unambiguous.

People can live well without "is", "has", "does", -s verbs.

Sure. Languages are redundant.

We could also live without tones, characters and measure words. Drop them, and people would still understand.

[Outofin]

And what authority would this be for English, especially American-English?

CNN Standard Language Committee

Sure. Languages are redundant.

We could also live without tones, characters and measure words. Drop them, and people would still understand.

That's not what I meant. Redundancy is necessary. People are sophisticated, so their languages. Tones, characters and measure words are meaningful, they help to communicate. But the variation of 'do' and 'does', I could be wrong, looks a bit pointless. It doesn't convey information or emotion, doesn't imply anything. It's there merely for the sake of grammar rules.

[Glenn]

It implies person and number (first person/third person plural, second person single/plural for "do" and first person/third person singular for "does"). I'd say it bears the same weight as measure words. Why have anything other than 個? You don't really need anything else. You don't even need 個, really.

[Guest realmayo]

Redundancy is necessary

I don't think you meant this! B)

EDIT: scrub that! I was trying to do something with do/does !! (sh) (sh) (sh)

[gerri]

Sorry for the absence. Scoobyqueen, Renzhe, interesting examples, I have to admit to not knowing why they are as they are... that said, your examples can be found in the Duden:

Preview, die (which troubles me because I'd have gone for der Preview...)

Paper, das (probably directly from das Papier)

Benchmark, die or der

E-Mail, die or das ... yeah, German isn't actually all that clear, anyways. With E-Mail, you find geographical variation: Southern Germany, Austria and Switzerland tend to consider it neutral, hence "das"

Don't go, figure. Go, look it up... though that's a flight back to some kind of authority.

[Don_Horhe]

In regards to the article in the OP, there's another article by one of my favorite linguists - John McWhorter - in The New Republic, whose first part addresses Guy Deutsher's book "Through the Language Glass", from where "Does Your Language Shape How You Think?" is taken. I just thought it might be interesting to the linguistically curious.

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