In the book, Through the Language Glass, the author Guy Deutscher says, “a nation’s language, so we are often told, reflects its culture, psyche, and modes of thought.” Deutscher mentions that culture influences language and the way we think, and that different languages can guide people to think differently. He also tells us that some languages have future tense while others don’t and that is the reasons why sometimes people don’t think about the future. “We learn our mother tongue; we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways”. When we know a language we know the culture and history about it so we start thinking differently. He argues that culture and language does shape a person to think the way they do. Deutscher talks about language, cultural history and science in his book, for example he brings the theories of Darwin and Homer.
Deutscher’s writing is strong because he was able to describe how Linguistics has a link between the language and the culture of its speakers. In the first chapter Deutscher had me thinking about the subject and really think deep about how culture influence language. In the book The Study of Language “The social interaction source” in page 3 it says “ the appeal of this proposal is that it places the development of human language in a social context [and] so, human sounds, however they were produced, must have had some principled use within the life and social interaction of early human groups.” Deutscher expands this idea to a bigger issue and gives details why the society and culture, which develops the way, people speck and think.
Hi Irani! I thought you brought up an interesting point when you said that language influences the way we think. I agree, and one can also go deeper to find out how language influences particularly influences the way we experience the world and interact with people of other culture.
ReplyDeleteI think that for your research paper you could go deeper into how language shapes the way we think. For example, you could start by picking a particular topic like religion, or the role of women and making the connection of how the language of a particular culture might influence the way that society views women rights, or religion.
hey Irani, thanks for the presentation.(A) What I found interesting in your presentation is the comparison Deutscher made between Homer/Dararian's theory.(B) A connection between this book and my language story is Deutscher's view of language that culture shapes language, external world shapes language. This is interesting because this is a popular belief expressed when people are asked where does language come from and what regulates it.(C) A question that can enhance the research paper is why some languages feature similar grammatical structures? Such as Spanish and Italian
ReplyDeleteHi there.I thought that the points you made about language shaping how people think was very interesting, and that if you fully know a language, you know the history and culture of the people.
ReplyDeleteI have to agree with the point you made about how in different languages, people imagine and create different concepts/words for the same things. It sort of relates to my experience of (re)learning Chinese because in English we usually have one or two words to convey a noun where in Chinese, sometimes you have to use a lot more words, usually very simple words, to say the same noun (sort of like the stuff we did in pg 63 of the textbook). This forces me to think more abstractly about a noun when I am learning Chinese.
I think a good question to answer is how does gender influence the language and vice versa.