Subscribe Feed (RSS)Changing through language
June 25th, 2007 by eyal | Filed under Living. |
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Interesting research on how the language we speak affects our thoughts and view of the world.
..Whorf said that because English treats time as being broken up into chunks that can be counted—three days, four minutes, half an hour—English speakers tend to treat time as a group of objects—seconds, minutes, hours—instead of as a smooth unbroken stream. This, he said, makes us think that time is ‘stuff’ that can be saved, wasted, or lost. The Hopi [ed: native American ethnic group], he said, don’t talk about time in those terms, and so they think about it differently; for them it is a continuous cycle. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that our language has forced a certain view of time on us; it could also be that our view of time is reflected in our language, or that the way we deal with time in our culture is reflected in both our language and our thoughts. It seems likely that language, thought, and culture form three strands of a braid, with each one affecting the others.
I realized some time ago that over the years that I’ve been away from Israel English has taken a deeper and tighter hold on my psych in place of my native language Hebrew. I often find myself thinking in English these days, actually maybe even more than in Hebrew. In addition, making a switch back to Hebrew is becoming more and more difficult. I’m fine of course once I’ve made the switch but still. There are also some topics in which I can only express myself in English, primarily work and trading related. I wonder if this change has brought about a change also in how I view the world and relate to abstract ideas.
A quote from the philosopher Wittgenstein comes to mind: ‘the limits of my language means the limits of my world.’ I don’t believe it but it sounds good!
Ah yes, Wittgenstein is quite appropriate here. I only have cursory knowledge of his thoughts. Definitely should be on my reading list. Why don’t you believe it?