How does language shape the way we think?

For Polish speakers the idea of using an article before nouns is very difficult to understand. Although it's only a few letters, it causes huge problems in learning foreing languages. That's because in Polish we don't have such a structure. There are two main situations that are not easy to comprehend. Firstly, the choice between definite and indefinite article (and no article) which is not always clear. Secondly, and most importantly concernig the topic I'm writing about, the choice between masculine and feminine gender (obviously, not in the case of English). There are a lot of situations when the grammatical gender of a word is different in different languages. And, as you can easily guess, it does influence the way we think about the world around us. Let's see an example. In Spanish the equivalent of the word 'bridge' is masculine. In German, it's feminine. Spanish speakers who were supposed to describe a bridge were more likely to use words l

Imagine a young man who broke a vase. Imagine a vase that was broken.  The same situation could be described by using different structures. In the first sentence we see the phrase that says: "A young man broke a vase". It's the easiest and the most likely to be said description. Subject, verb, object. In the second example, we have a passive voice that was applied. If you read my posts regularly, you know that I haven't underlined this difference with no purpose. As I wrote before, we can talk about a situation in different ways. And yes, it has consequences to how we perceive it.  If an English speaker saw a young man breaking a vase in a museum, he would probably use the first construction. On the other hand, Spanish or French speaker would be more likely to say that the vase was broken .  Pay attention that the English speaker is more concentrated on the subject - here: a young man. The second speaker is focused on the action (because of c

In the post about "double universe" of bilingual speakers, I mentioned that the differences in naming colours have consequences in the way that they're perceived. Today, I would like to develop this issue. Maybe you've already heared about some cultures that don't make distinction between blue and green. There was an experiment holded in Namibi where speakers of Himba language don't differenciate this two colours. They have been showed some green squares and one blue square. They didn't see the difference. Hard to believe? Source: in the link below What do you see above? 12 green squares, am I right? According to Himba speakers, there is one in different colour. Which one? Source: in the link below And now, can you see the difference? Neither do I. Although Himba speakers don't make distinction between "our" green and blue, they are far more sensitive when talking about various shades od green ( link ). But let's ta

I would like to start with a question: When did people start to translate? We know that the first form of language was the spoken form, so maybe it's better to ask: When did people start to interpret? The answer is simple: they started doing it when two societies that were using different languages met for the first time. A long time ago. Even though people have been interpreting for thousands of years, linguists ask all the time what translation actually is. So many questions without simple answers: Is the translated text all the time the same text as before translation? What is the position of translator? How much can translator change in a text? And many others. One of  the problems here is that tranforming text into another language is extremely difficult because of the differences between languages. Differences between languages might be less or more visible. When you compare Italian to Spanish, you may notice different pronounciation or idioms but it is nothing when

Imagine that you're spending a lovely afternoon with your friend in his home and you're starting to have a headache. You want to buy some drugs so you ask him where is the closest pharmacy. The friend tells you: "The pharmacy is north from you". Is it helpful? It is believed that human beings are not good in distinguishing the world directions without using some divices. Most of languages have an egocentric coordination system that refers to the human body (your "right side" might be someone else's "left side"; it depends on your positions). But there are some languages, for example Tseltal Mayan (spoken in one region of Mexico), where the world directions might be taken as reference. Across languages, there are also differences in describing relations between objects. It can be observed by comparing different preposition systems: English (as French and Polish) makes a distinction between the prepositions on and above . In the first case,

As you already know, language influences the way that we see the world around us. Each of you perceives various aspects of your sourroundings a bit differently. But what happens when somebody has two mother tongues? How does he or she perceive the world? And what about people who learned a second language in their adult life? First of all, we need to notice the difference between learning language as a mother tongue and in adulthood. The truth is that we (people who started studying languages at school) rarely achieve native-speaker's fluency. Even if we spend enormously lot of time and effort on this activity. The thing is that babies have this amazing ability to acquire every natural language that exists in our world exceptionally fast. Some studies on 11 moths babies (where the magnetoencephalography technology has beed used) have shown that they can process sounds of two languages that they are affected even before they actually start producing sounds. Isn't it incredible