Reflection:

Does your language shape how you think Article

The article first talks about Benjamin Lee Whorf, a chemical engineer who is widely known for
his idea about languages power over the mind, which seduced a whole generation to believe that our
mother tongue restricts what we are able to think. Then, later in the article, they talk about the flaws
about Whorfs understanding about language, and describe that his idea was wrong (if a language has
no word for a certain concept, then its speakers would not be able to understand this concept). This
idea is countered in this article saying If the inventory of ready-made words in your language
determined which concepts you were able to understand, how would you ever learn anything new?.
Next, the article talks about the real force of mother tongue, which was Languages differ essentially in
what they must convey and not in what they may convey. pointed out by Roman Jakobson. The article
uses English, French and German as an example of this. The article says, in English if you say I spent
yesterday evening with a neighbor., you do not have to explain whether the neighbors sex. However,
in German or French, you would be obliged by the grammar of language to choose
between voisin or voisine; Nachbar or Nachbarin. Another example used afterwards, was English and
Chinese, about the timing of the event. The article says, I have to decide whether we dined, have been
dining, are dining, will be dining and so on., whereas in Chinese, it does not force speakers to specify
the exact timing of the event. These examples were given to convey that your language forces you to be
attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other
languages may not be required to think about all the time.
The article then continues, and gives evidence for this happening. The article uses Spanish, German,
French, and Russian as an example of language forcing you to be attentive to certain details of the
world, and how it differentiates depending on the speaker of the language. Spanish, German, French,
and Russian assign male, or female, to inanimate objects. In the article, they compare German and
Spanish, for example, a German bridge is feminine (die Brcke), but el puente is masculine in Spanish.
When Spanish speakers were asked to grade objects characteristics, they answered bridge as more of a
manly image, whereas the German speakers answered that it is slender, or elegant. Another
experiment was raised in the article, where they asked French speakers and Spanish speakers to assign
human voices to certain objects. When French speakers saw a fork, they wanted to assign a female
voice, but on the other hand, Spanish speakers preferred a male voice for it.
Lastly, the Article talks about how some languages oblige the speakers of those languages to pay
attention to the nearby surroundings. They used the Australian aboriginal tongue, Guugu Yimithirr, from
north Queensland as an example of this. In English, when you wanted to describe to a person how to
get to a destination, you would describe it by using the words, left, forward, right, behind since
egocentric coordinates are based directly on our own bodies and our immediate visual fields, and we do
not require a map or a compass to figure out which direction you are talking about. However, the
Guugu Yimithirr rely on cardinal directions. This means that they use the terms North, East, South, and
West to describe the direction they want you to go in. Since the speakers of Guugu Yimithirr are forced
to pay attention to the nearby environment and to accurately remember it the habit soon becomes
second nature, effortless and unconscious, and they know where north is, as you would know where
behind is.

Jessa Mae J. De Guzman
BSED English