wonderful article today in the Wall Street JOurnal......Weekend Section page W3. Great discussion on language, its translations, it meanings, how people read it, and think about it
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Regarding how people think with language, there is an idea called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which essentially claims that one's understanding of the world is moulded by one's language. It is an interesting idea, although the exact degree of determination by the language has been under much debate.
I have seen some interesting examples of it in practice: a Japanese student of English in her 20s saying that she felt that she could be more friendly with a Japanese classmate in his 50s when speaking English, because she was not then obliged to use the distancing, formal addresses required in their own language.
This highlights what I believe to be quite common, which is that people who are not terribly reflective about their own cultural (and linguistic conditioning) can have their thoughts very much conditioned by their language, whereas those who discover other linguistic options are particularly likely to re-examine their default assumptions. In other words, learning another language can introduce one to thinking in new ways.
not to feel a lesser believer, just because you can't grasp it today
This is a very important point. Different people have different gifts, and lacking someone else's gift does not make one any less valuable (which I appreciate, because I can do history and literature, but not chemistry or music). There is, after all, always going to be a great deal more to learn, human lives being far too short to cover it all.
I have seen some interesting examples of it in practice: a Japanese student of English in her 20s saying that she felt that she could be more friendly with a Japanese classmate in his 50s when speaking English, because she was not then obliged to use the distancing, formal addresses required in their own language.
This highlights what I believe to be quite common, which is that people who are not terribly reflective about their own cultural (and linguistic conditioning) can have their thoughts very much conditioned by their language, whereas those who discover other linguistic options are particularly likely to re-examine their default assumptions. In other words, learning another language can introduce one to thinking in new ways.
not to feel a lesser believer, just because you can't grasp it today
This is a very important point. Different people have different gifts, and lacking someone else's gift does not make one any less valuable (which I appreciate, because I can do history and literature, but not chemistry or music). There is, after all, always going to be a great deal more to learn, human lives being far too short to cover it all.
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