Language varies widely from pronunciation to meaning, this is strongly displayed when simply analyzing verbiage, and meaning. Lera **** took a great interest in this when completing a worldwide investigation on whether our native language can have not only a significant but the life-altering effect on how we think as a whole.
She begins this study by discussing the difference in descriptions of events, referencing English speakers' tendencies to play the ‘blame game’ When describing the event of someone incidentally knocking a cup off of the table, thus causing it to break. In English we would put the owner of that cup pronouns, then state ‘they broke the cup’. Whereas in other languages, when being directly translated to English, they describe this accidental event as ‘the cup broke itself’.
A theory that backs this statement is the Sapir Whorf hypothesis, which believes that every experience is shaped by the structure of the language they use daily. This applies to the use of the ‘blame game’ in English because this use of blame also comes with a sense or feeling of guilt and shame within itself. Whereas with other languages this is seen as much more legitimately accidental, and no feeling of pressure is applied to the individual.
The larger principle of this is linguistic relativity. This principle believes that despite having lexical and grammatical differences in each ranging language, humans as a whole are created with complex minds, and are able to visualize the same things despite not having the words to describe them. An example of this is how the Inuit people describe snow, they have around three different words simply to describe the different properties they may have. For example, translated into English ‘wet snow’, ‘clinging snow’ ‘frosty snow’. Whereas English only holds one word for this and the use of adjectives is necessary for a more in-depth description.
The flip side of linguistic relativity is linguistic determinism. This theory was developed by Edward Sapir in 1929. It is widely believed by supporters of linguistic determinism that the native language spoken by oneself determines the state of one's mind. For example in Spanish, French, and Russian there are two ways to address one another, however, in English, there is only one second-person pronoun.
The article itself tends to lean much heavier towards the linguistic determinism side, and Lera **** often proves the universalism theory wrong. This is done because almost the entirety of the article is about how when comparing the thought processes of people scattered about the world, everyone provided different answers. For example, “In the Yagua language of Peru, there are five distinct grammatical forms of the past tense,” Because of this when comparing yagua to English they are able to make a much more specified statement about what or when they are in the midst of doing something. Once again English speakers would need to be aided by the use of an adjective or another verb.
Further on, when describing her trip to a small village in Australia, Lera describes an experience where the children of the village took her hand and showed her how to avoid being put in danger. Realistically the average child in a suburban environment would have little knowledge or care about these kinds of things, but this seemed to be what was considered the main concern. For example, “show her how to avoid being gobbled by a crocodile.”, in the most modernized area allowing a child to get even somewhat close to danger like that is looked down upon.
This supports the behaviorist theory, which was developed by B.F. Skinner in the early 1930s. This theory believes that people and animals are trained and conditioned by what is shown in their natural surroundings.
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