

How Does Our Language Shape The Way We Think? - swannodette
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/3457

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Tangurena
I'm surprised that the author of the article managed to make an entire essay
without once referring to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Perhaps the simplest
explanation of the SWH is _"language cuts the grooves in which our minds
move."_

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity>

Lakoff has made this more popular and accessable to non-linguist with books
like "Women, Fire and Dangerous Things" (which I recommend reading, and the
author mentioned briefly).

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Lakoff>

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WalterGR
I took a class from George at Berkeley. We used _Philosophy in the Flesh: The
Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought_ as the text. Absolutely
fascinating stuff.

The article
([http://edge.org/3rd_culture/boroditsky09/boroditsky09_index....](http://edge.org/3rd_culture/boroditsky09/boroditsky09_index.html))
is well worth reading. She explains that English speakers will usually refer
to a "short movie" or "long movie," and that Spanish and Greek speakers will
usually say "small movie" or "big movie." Then:

"Our research into such basic cognitive abilities as estimating duration shows
that speakers of different languages differ in ways predicted by the patterns
of metaphors in their language. (For example, when asked to estimate duration,
English speakers are more likely to be confused by distance information,
estimating that a line of greater length remains on the test screen for a
longer period of time, whereas Greek speakers are more likely to be confused
by amount, estimating that a container that is fuller remains longer on the
screen.)"

That one parenthetical sentence blew my mind.

Edit: Added some missing context to the article quote.

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psygnisfive
As I said in the other version of this:

Psycholinguistics research has repeatedly shown that the amount of influence
is minimal, amounting to, in general, forcing you to pay attention to certain
aspects of the world more so when you're describing using language than when
you're thinking about things in other ways. E.g., you notice color differences
more quickly or more accurately when you have to choose between two words that
your language could have, than if you were picking a tee-shirt. Or you're more
attentive to left and right orientation if your language has words for left
and right when you're talking about something positioned relative to your
body, but if you're just trying to navigate somewhere or looking for
something, your language doesn't affect your thinking.

This effect is precisely what you'd expect, ofcourse, because you get it for
absolutely everything else. If your culinary habits involve avoiding high
fructose corn syrup, when you're looking for food you're going to be quicker
to notice the presence of HFCS than if you're just talking to someone and they
mention the corn industry's current HFCS production rates or whatever.

The generalization: when some cognitive task requires that you pay special
attention to something, you will. Language is not special in this regard.

And that is how language influences the way we think.

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albertcardona
The actual article by Lera Boroditsky at the edge.org:

[http://edge.org/3rd_culture/boroditsky09/boroditsky09_index....](http://edge.org/3rd_culture/boroditsky09/boroditsky09_index.html)

~~~
pradocchia
Pretty interesting article, once I got past how hot the author was, and how
young she was when she became a professor at MIT. Women like that used to fill
my dreams.

I think it's self evident that language influences articulate cognition. It's
a discrete index to a world of continuous phenomenon. But not all cognition is
articulate. How far do our linguistic markers reach? Take math for example.
When a mathematician intuits a proof, he's already conversant in the language
of mathematics. He'll use that language to construct a formal proof. But did
it also help in the first place?

