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How Lingo Changes the Way People Think

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Submitted By GrayJay
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"To have a second language is to have a second soul," said Charlemagne. So what does this mean? Does language actually shape the way we think is it merely a way to express the mumble jumble of ideas and thoughts we have spinning around in our heads? Take a sentence like, "Bob ate the apple." In Russian, the verb would have to indicate whether the whole apple was eaten or not. In Turkish the verb would signify whether the speaker saw Bob eating the apple first hand, or it was reported, or it was inferred. But, that's not all. Some languages have two different words for the exact same thing. For example, Russians have two words for blue, and when those words are present in their mind, they can distinguish finer gradations of the color than English speakers can. But synonyms aren't the only thing that makes languages different. Gender runs deep in some lingo, affecting nouns, adjective endings, pronouns and possessives, and verb endings. This affects how people think about every named thing. For instance, in German the Sun is female and the Moon is male; it's the reverse in Spanish. 'Time' is the most common noun in the English language. Time is often expressed as travel in space: "We're coming up on Christmas." But some languages put the future in front of us, and others put it behind us. For Aborigines in north Australia, time and sequence gets blended into their orientation to the compass directions. They don't use relative terms like "left" and "right," but absolute compass terms. For example, "There's an ant on your southwest leg." They have extraordinary orientation skills, does their language play a part? Obviously, different languages require different things of their speakers. Does this mean that the speakers think differently about the world? Do English, Indonesian, Russian, and Turkish speakers end up remembering their experiences differently

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