How does language shape the way we think?

In the last post, I told you that I'm sure that "The way that we use our language may help us to fight against discrimination and help to reach gender equality in the real world". I think that it will be interesting to develop a little bit this idea. If changes in the vocabulary of a language may be an element of the fight aginst negative phenomena, we can pose such a question: If we deleted all the words that express hate, would we get rid of it? Imagine that you open a dictionary and you can't see the following words: "hate", "to affront", "discrimination" and so on... if you can't find them, you can't use them, right? Sometimes we think about dictionary as a place where we can find all the words that exist in a language and that can be used be its spakers. But we need to remember that a dictionary is a result of linguits' work. They observe how speakers use the language and note it. So, if we "threw the bad words...

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...