The reason I picked the article was because the title intrigued me. The title is Does your language shape how you think? When I read the title, what came to my mind was "What does it mean? Do they think that if I were to originally speak a different language other than English, I would think in a different way?" The article is related to language because it looks at multiple examples of how people may or may not think differently based on their language.
I found the article to be very interesting. The reason I feel that is because it talked about how different languages I am unfamiliar with worked. I didn't know before that some languages didn't have words or concepts such as left, right, front, or behind. They instead just use north, south, east, and west when referring to everything. For example, I would say there is a person sitting to the left of me. They would say there is a person sitting to the north of me.
I agree with the article about the part where it talks about how just because a language may not have a word for a certain concept, it doesn't mean that speakers of that language wouldn't understand the concept.
I think that the article on its own isn't enough, but it can give someone a start on finding different ways to view other languages. If someone can understand the concepts talked about in the article, they can have an easier time learning more about how their own language works, and they can understand better how other languages work.
I will probably research this topic more in the future because I think it can help me to understand more about different concepts in other languages.
Hey Steve, I agree that language does not determine how we think or perceive things. Just because people do not have a particular word in their language does not mean they do not understand the concept. For example, we feel things that we cannot put into words, yet we still perceive the feelings. People tend to perceive things differently, especially cultures that are train to focus on words that are relevant to their environment. The article was interesting to read, especially all the examples proving that language does not affect our thoughts or perception. The article you chose was insightful and interesting.
ReplyDeleteThis was really interesting to read! I've sort of always had this thought in my head and it's good to have an article to read upon. It's so weird to think that some of our words to really have an interpretation in another language or might not even mean the same thing. Like the whole right or left thing and to another country they would refer to a direction in north, south, east, or west. Super cool.
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