Comments on: The language you speak affects how you think — and what you think

By: Stumpy

Stumpy — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 20:11:51 +0000

Pinker’s book “The Stuff of Thought” has some interesting ideas about what language tells us about culture. Neat book, even though Pinker’s writing grates on my brain a little and I think he missed out on a possible Nietzsche reference, who claimed that our understanding of truths is interpreted by language and filtered by the metaphors, anthropomorphisms, etc. that we use to perceive and communicate.

By: Colin Corneau

Colin Corneau — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 02:46:42 +0000

Funny you mention that. Children have a built-in ability to soak up languages WAY faster than we geezers…it gradually fades away by the time we hit our teens and know everything.

I’ve seen this with friends who have bi-national/racial marriages — kids often speak English and whatever quite interchangeably and with no difficulty.

The really interesting research might come from studying kids who know two different languages with entirely different origins — English and Japanese, say or Spanish and Urdu. I’d suspect languages with similar roots like English and French or English and Spanish are too alike.

By: Grant Hamilton

Grant Hamilton — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 23:59:15 +0000

In an even broader sense, I think this speaks to the adaptability of our human brains. If we can “train” them to perceive the world in different ways from birth, I wonder if we should be looking at early childhood education with this in mind.

By: Colin Corneau

Colin Corneau — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 01:10:15 +0000

I’m guessing Mandarin speakers – with its 4 tones adding as much meaning as the actual word – have a musical bent.

I read somewhere that Japanese test subjects tend to look at an image in an overall sense, the ‘big picture’ so to speak. Whereas English or western subjects tend to fixate individual elements. Maybe that’s a societal product but language is ultimately an expression of a society.