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The New York Times Sunday magazine section has a fascinating article entitled “Does Your Language Shape How You Think?” which discusses recent research on how one’s mother tongue shapes one’s experience of the world. A must read.
“If I want to tell you in English about a dinner with my neighbor, I may not have to mention the neighbor’s sex, but I do have to tell you something about the timing of the event: I have to decide whether we dined, have been dining, are dining, will be dining and so on. Chinese, on the other hand, does not oblige its speakers to specify the exact time of the action in this way, because the same verb form can be used for past, present or future actions.”
“Languages like Spanish, French, German and Russian not only oblige you to think about the sex of friends and neighbors, but they also assign a male or female gender to a whole range of inanimate objects quite at whim…Why is Russian water a she, and why does she become a he once you have dipped a tea bag into her?”
“The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter…”
Reference:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html
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