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The vase fell to the floor. The Englishman will say – “smashed”, and the Spaniard will wave his hand – “crashed”, which means – no one is to blame. The word follows the thought – or is the very thinking of a person determined by how we speak?
We accidentally dropped a vase. How will a person’s thinking—depending on the language—affect their account of what happened? In English, we usually say that someone broke the vase. But native speakers of Spanish and Japanese would rather say otherwise: the vase broke. The group of Lera Boroditsky*, a professor of psychology at Stanford University, conducted an experiment: speakers of these three languages were shown videos of different people breaking eggs, spilling drinks and breaking toys. English speakers found it easier than Spanish and Japanese speakers to remember exactly who did what—that is, whose fault it was.
What kind of picture of the world does native speakers have with such a structure? Boroditskaya argues that there is a connection between the focus of English on the protagonist and the desire of US law enforcement to punish offenders rather than help victims.
Space among the Australian Aborigines
The Australian Aborigines living in the community in Pormpur do not distinguish between left and right. They define the location of objects differently – “to the northeast” or “to the southeast,” notes Lera Boroditskaya, an expert on linguistic and cultural relations between the United States and Australia. According to her, about a third of the world’s languages describe space in absolute terms – in contrast to the “relative” way, on which, for example, the spatial picture of the world of Russian speakers is built.
How does this affect human thinking? “As a result of constant language training,” Boroditskaya points out, “speakers of such languages perfectly orient themselves in space.” They just can’t get lost in the area! Wherever they go, even if there is a completely unfamiliar landscape around, they will instantly determine the right direction. Studying the life of Australian Aborigines living in Pormpur and speaking the Tayore language, Boroditskaya and her colleagues noted that the Aborigines not only always instinctively correctly indicated the direction of the world to which their eyes were turned: they were also always able to put the photographs of the area in the correct sequence in order from east to west.
Read more:
- Do lefties think differently?
Color among the Zuni Indians and Russian speakers
The figurative thinking of a person is also determined by language, and the picture of the world depends on it in the literal sense: for example, our very ability to distinguish colors is associated with the words that describe them. In the language of the Zuni, the Pueblo Indian people of the southwestern United States, there are no separate names for orange and yellow, so the Zuni find it difficult to talk about these colors as different. And native speakers of Russian – unlike, for example, English – have two different words for light blue (blue, English light blue) and dark blue (blue, English dark blue). The experiment showed that Russians are indeed better at distinguishing shades of blue than the British.
Gender in Finnish and Hebrew
The picture of the world is not only the world around us, but also our idea of ourselves. And even here language plays an important role! Thus, in Hebrew, gender is indicated in many ways, while in Finnish the category of gender is absent altogether. A study in the 1980s confirmed that human thinking follows the language in this too: Hebrew-speaking children learn about their gender a year earlier than those who speak Finnish. In English, the number of gender markers is approximately the average between the above-mentioned languages. And here is a clear confirmation of the connection: English-speaking children “decide on gender” later than Hebrew speakers, but earlier than Finnish speakers.