http://SaturnianCosmology.Org/ mirrored file
   For complete access to all the files of this collection
	see http://SaturnianCosmology.org/search.php 
  ==========================================================
Newsweek
Sponsored By
What’s in a Word?

Language may shape our thoughts.

Sharon Begley
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Jul 20, 2009

When the /Viaduct de Millau/ opened in the south of France in 2004, this
tallest bridge in the world won worldwide accolades. German newspapers
described how it "floated above the clouds" with "elegance and
lightness" and "breathtaking" beauty. In France, papers praised the
"immense" "concrete giant." Was it mere coincidence that the Germans saw
beauty where the French saw heft and power? Lera Boroditsky thinks not.

A psychologist at Stanford University, she has long been intrigued by an
age-old question whose modern form dates to 1956, when linguist Benjamin
Lee Whorf asked whether the language we speak shapes the way we think
and see the world. If so, then language is not merely a means of
expressing thought, but a constraint on it, too. Although philosophers,
anthropologists, and others have weighed in, with most concluding that
language does not shape thought in any significant way, the field has
been notable for a distressing lack of empiricism—as in testable
hypotheses and actual data.

That's where Boroditsky comes in. In a series of clever experiments
guided by pointed questions, she is amassing evidence that, yes,
language shapes thought. The effect is powerful enough, she says, that
"the private mental lives of speakers of different languages may differ
dramatically," not only when they are thinking in order to speak, "but
in all manner of cognitive tasks," including basic sensory perception.
"Even a small fluke of grammar"—the gender of nouns—"can have an effect
on how people think about things in the world," she says.

As in that bridge. In German, the noun for bridge, /Brücke/, is
feminine. In French, /pont/ is masculine. German speakers saw
prototypically female features; French speakers, masculine ones.
Similarly, Germans describe keys (/Schlüssel/) with words such as hard,
heavy, jagged, and metal, while to Spaniards keys (/llaves/) are golden,
intricate, little, and lovely. Guess which language construes key as
masculine and which as feminine? Grammatical gender also shapes how we
construe abstractions. In 85 percent of artistic depictions of death and
victory, for instance, the idea is represented by a man if the noun is
masculine and a woman if it is feminine, says Boroditsky. Germans tend
to paint death as male, and Russians tend to paint it as female.

Language even shapes what we see. People have a better memory for colors
if different shades have distinct names—not English's light blue and
dark blue, for instance, but Russian's /goluboy/ and /sinly/. Skeptics
of the language-shapes-thought claim have argued that that's a trivial
finding, showing only that people remember what they saw in both a
visual form and a verbal one, but not proving that they actually see the
hues differently. In an ingenious experiment, however, Boroditsky and
colleagues showed volunteers three color swatches and asked them which
of the bottom two was the same as the top one. Native Russian speakers
were faster than English speakers when the colors had distinct names,
suggesting that having a name for something allows you to perceive it
more sharply. Similarly, Korean uses one word for "in" when one object
is in another snugly (a letter in an envelope), and a different one when
an object is in something loosely (an apple in a bowl). Sure enough,
Korean adults are better than English speakers at distinguishing tight
fit from loose fit.

In Australia, the Aboriginal Kuuk Thaayorre use compass directions for
every spatial cue rather than right or left, leading to locutions such
as "there is an ant on your southeast leg." The Kuuk Thaayorre are also
much more skillful than English speakers at dead reckoning, even in
unfamiliar surroundings or strange buildings. Their language "equips
them to perform navigational feats once thought beyond human
capabilities," Boroditsky wrote on Edge.org.

Science has only scratched the surface of how language affects thought.
In Russian, verb forms indicate whether the action was completed or
not—as in "she ate [and finished] the pizza." In Turkish, verbs indicate
whether the action was observed or merely rumored. Boroditsky would love
to run an experiment testing whether native Russian speakers are better
than others at noticing if an action is completed, and if Turks have a
heightened sensitivity to fact versus hearsay. Similarly, while English
says "she broke the bowl" even if it smashed accidentally (she dropped
something on it, say), Spanish and Japanese describe the same event more
like "the bowl broke itself." "When we show people video of the same
event," says Boroditsky, "English speakers remember who was to blame
even in an accident, but Spanish and Japanese speakers remember it less
well than they do intentional actions. It raises questions about whether
language affects even something as basic as how we construct our ideas
of causality."

/Begley is NEWSWEEK's science editor./

URL: http://www.newsweek.com/id/205985
© 2009