![\"\"](\"http:\/\/media.npr.org\/news\/images\/2009\/mar\/30\/elpuente_400.jpg\")
There seem to be two camps in linguistic circles on the role language has in shaping how we think.\u00a0 I’ve read a number of books by Stephen Pinker, who is of the opinion that the particular language we speak doesn’t shape how we think, that there is a meta-language underneath, common to all of us, that really determines how we think.\u00a0 (I hope I’m interpreting this right, as it is a complex subject and I’m a novice.)<\/p>\n
I find Pinker’s arguments very compelling and his writing very clear.\u00a0 What he says makes a lot of sense to me.\u00a0 And he seems very analytical in his arguments, relying on the body of evidence to support his thesis in a very convincing way.<\/p>\n
Even so, there is the romantic in me who wants to believe the opposite, that the language we speak does change how we think.\u00a0 Why?\u00a0 Because it makes the diversity of languages that much more interesting.\u00a0 It means that each language represents a unique world view.\u00a0 It means that we should try to save endangered languages since, if they die, a unique perspective of the world around us also dies.\u00a0 And, I want to believe that each language is something special, especially since I like the idea that Basque is special and should be promoted and protected.\u00a0 However, Pinker’s arguments are strong and the evidence he cites simply does not support this romantic notion.<\/p>\n
On NPR yesterday, however, there was a segment<\/a> on the work of Lera Boroditsky<\/a>.\u00a0 She did a simple experiment, showing German and Spanish speakers a picture of a bridge and asking them what they thought about it.\u00a0 Both languages have genders, and in German, a bridge is feminine and in Spanish masculine.\u00a0 This resulted in German speakers using feminine words to describe the bridge, such as beautiful, elegant, and slender, while the Spanish speakers used masculine words such as strong, sturdy and towering.\u00a0 What does this say?\u00a0 It implies that German and Spanish speakers, because in their language the noun bridge is either feminine or masculine, view bridges differently, assigning different attributes.\u00a0 Similar results were found for other nouns.\u00a0 Boroditsky went even further and invented a language in which nouns were assigned random gender.\u00a0 Again, people who were exposed to the language used different types of adjectives to describe an object depending on if they were told it was feminine or masculine.<\/p>\n Boroditsky’s work suggests that language does indeed shape how we see the world.\u00a0 I only speak English fluently, with a smattering of Spanish and just a small vocabulary of Euskara.\u00a0 I wonder how people who grow up in Euskal Herria with Euskara as one of the primary languages and either Spanish or French as the other view things.\u00a0 Does the way you view the world change even a little bit depending on which language you are thinking in?\u00a0 How about the differences between say Spanish and Euskara, where Spanish has gender and Euskara doesn’t?\u00a0 How do you think of puentes versus zubiak?\u00a0 I’d love to hear from people on this topic.<\/p>\n It seems that the debate on the role of language in shaping thought is still open.\u00a0 Boroditsky’s work suggests that language is important in determining how we see the world.\u00a0 To the extent that this is true, it means that with every language that dies we lose one way of viewing the world, one unique perspective.\u00a0 It gives extra impetuous to saving these languages.\u00a0 I hope that the new government of the Basque Autonomous Community doesn’t ignore this fact.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There seem to be two camps in linguistic circles on the role language has in shaping how we think.\u00a0 I’ve read a number of books by Stephen Pinker, who is of the opinion that the particular language we speak doesn’t shape how we think, that there is a meta-language underneath, common to all of us, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[14],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-68","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-euskara"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2sYNu-16","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/buber.net\/Basque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/buber.net\/Basque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/buber.net\/Basque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buber.net\/Basque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buber.net\/Basque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/buber.net\/Basque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/buber.net\/Basque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buber.net\/Basque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/buber.net\/Basque\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}