Online Articles: Right or East? Only Language Can Tell

I came across an article on the New York Times website about languages and the ways in which languages affect the thoughts of their speakers. The article starts off discussing Benjamin Lee Whorf and his hypothesis that “Native American languages impose on their speakers a picture of reality that is totally different from ours” (DEUTSCHER, NY Times). At first I was fairly skeptical to this idea and laughed at the thought that the people around me think differently than I do because they speak Hebrew or Chinese. However, after reading through the entire article I looked around and could not see how people of different languages did not think differently.

The article explains some different ways in which languages shape our perception and these differences seem to mainly stem from the grammar and structure differences between the languages. In English one might say he went to lunch with a friend without ever mentioning whether the friend was a male or female. In German or French on the other hand, speakers are obliged, through their grammar, to disclose this information. While in English, speakers are grammatically forced to say whether they ate, are eating, or will eat, in Chinese the same verb is used for past, present and future so speakers do not have to specify when they did something. Another major difference between languages is the distinction between direction and coordinates. In English and in many other languages such as Arabic and Spanish, the speaker would use directional words such as Left, Right and Straight. While this may seem like the only way to give directions, the article explains how “languages that rely primarily on geographical coordinates are scattered around the world, from Polynesia to Mexico, from Namibia to Bali” (DEUTSCHER, NY Times). Therefore when we might say “make a right,” other people may say “turn East.” I thought this difference was incredible because the article explains how an English speaker might go to a hotel where all the rooms are exact replicas of each other. If he walks into another room he would see the exact thing. However if someone else who speaks using geographic coordinates walks into two rooms, he would see something completely different in each. In one room the telephone may be on the north side whereas in the room across it is now on the south side. The English speaker may see the same room twice but the speaker of a geographic language will see two different rooms.

Certainly there are other differences such as the ways different speakers perceive colors and inanimate objects but the underlying idea is that different languages actually do affect the way people think. When people are taught to speak a certain way with specific grammatical rules from a young age, these rules become innate and natural. They turn into habits; Habits of speech and habits of thought. These habits do more than allow you to identify with right and left or north and south. These habits allow you to see a world your classmates may never see and what better way to share a vision than to challenge your mind and learn a new language.  I believe that Foreign Language Learners need to understand this concept to truly connect with the language. If I did not search the NYTimes Website I would not have learned this information about Foreign Languages. Therefore I think having Websites like this readily available to students is important. Just like it taught me something crucial about languages, it could do the same for them. I may have my students spend some time at the end of every class researching news articles relating to the lesson in hopes of them learning something crucial too. 

Would you guys do the same?

Article: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0