| Wednesday, July 21, 2010

The Economist’s excellent new language blog wonders how language affects thought, or vice versa: “IF YOU speak two or more languages fluently, you may be familiar with the feeling that you act differently in them. I tend to be more excitable in Spanish and ruder in Hebrew, for instance, than I am in English.”

They point, for example, to language researcher Lera Boroditsky: “What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world.”

If you don’t know the words to express an idea, does it mean you can’t think the idea? Clearly not. And does the idea change when you change the language you’re speaking (Are Spanish people rude?)?

If a monolingual English bloke and a monolingual Spanish bloke happen to find themselves standing next to each other and watch a pretty woman walking past—notwithstanding their personal preferences—they’re both going to have experienced the same event.

But the devil is in the details, perhaps.

The question is: do they experience the event differently because they speak different languages, with different grammatical structures and different connotations to the words they might use to describe the situation?

Now, watching a pretty blond woman (or a brunette, or a redhead, for that matter) is, psychologically and linguistically speaking, an incredibly complex event (Spanish and English don’t even agree on the meaning of the word PIG for example), which is why language researchers tend to try academic studies which simplify things.

Personally, I’m convinced that the words and structures you know affect the way you think.

For those of you who speak Spanish and English, think of all of the subtle differences in meaning with the Spanish subjunctive and past-tense verb forms which are difficult to express in English or, similarly, the subtleties hidden away in standard English’s twelve vowel sounds compared to the five available in standard Spanish.

I tend to think that the wider your vocabulary (in any language) and the wider your personal database of linguistic structures (in any language), the greater capacity you have for understanding the world.

Think about bullfighting and cricket, for example. I would wager that there are fewer than 25 words in English to describing the art of bullfighting, (have a go with ‘a porta gayola’). Likewise in Spanish to describe cricket (silly mid-off anyone?).

But if you were conscientious enough, you could develop a Spanish-English bullfighting and cricket dictionary with enough equivalent terms to properly describe each activity in the other language, on a par to the way it is described in the native language.

If you then mixed this with the structures available in each language to string those concepts together, you’d be getting closer to having a proper conversation and being able to critique the bowler, the batsman and the bullfighter.

Regarding the Economist’s other idea of imitating manners and thought whilst learning a language—something which is highly advisable—which native speaker do you try and imitate and what does that mean for your mental health and language learning? Do you imitate Zapatero, Aznar or Torrente?