El artículo lo he leído hace un tiempo atrás en inglés. Es realmente fascinante y muy bien escrito, realmente un recomendado para todos los fanáticos de los idiomas y también de los inventados para tener en cuenta en sus construcciones.
--- En ideolengua@gruposyahoo.com, David Antonio Ward <antonio_ward_1...@...> escribió: > > Tomado de otra lista: > > > Does Your Language Shape How You Think? > Horacio Salinas for The New York Times > By GUY DEUTSCHER > Published: August 26, 2010 > > Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short > article that set in motion one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the > 20th > century. At first glance, there seemed little about the article to augur its > subsequent celebrity. Neither the title, âScience and Linguistics,â nor > the > magazine, M.I.T.âs Technology Review, was most peopleâs idea of glamour. > And > the author, a chemical engineer who worked for an insurance company and > moonlighted as an anthropology lecturer at Yale University, was an unlikely > candidate for international superstardom. And yet Benjamin Lee Whorf let > loose > an alluring idea about languageâs power over the mind, and his stirring > prose > seduced a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts > what > we are able to think. > > In particular, Whorf announced, Native American languages impose on their > speakers a picture of reality that is totally different from ours, so their > speakers would simply not be able to understand some of our most basic > concepts, like the flow of time or the distinction between objects (like > âstoneâ) and actions (like âfallâ). For decades, Whorfâs theory > dazzled both > academics and the general public alike. In his shadow, others made a whole > range of imaginative claims about the supposed power of language, from the > assertion that Native American languages instill in their speakers an > intuitive > understanding of Einsteinâs concept of time as a fourth dimension to the > theory > that the nature of the Jewish religion was determined by the tense system of > > ancient Hebrew. > > Eventually, Whorfâs theory crash-landed on hard facts and solid common > sense, > when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to > support > his fantastic claims. The reaction was so severe that for decades, any > attempts > to explore the influence of the mother tongue on our thoughts were relegated > to > the loony fringes of disrepute. But 70 years on, it is surely time to put > the > trauma of Whorf behind us. And in the last few years, new research has > revealed > that when we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits > of > thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways. > > > Whorf, we now know, made many mistakes. The most serious one was to assume > that > our mother tongue constrains our minds and prevents us from being able to > think > certain thoughts. The general structure of his arguments was to claim that > if a > language has no word for a certain concept, then its speakers would not be > able > to understand this concept. If a language has no future tense, for instance, > its speakers would simply not be able to grasp our notion of future time. It > seems barely comprehensible that this line of argument could ever have > achieved > such success, given that so much contrary evidence confronts you wherever > you > look. When you ask, in perfectly normal English, and in the present tense, > âAre > you coming tomorrow?â do you feel your grip on the notion of futurity > slipping > away? Do English speakers who have never heard the German word > Schadenfreudefind it difficult to understand the concept of relishing > someone > elseâs misfortune? Or think about it this way: 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? > > > SINCE THERE IS NO EVIDENCEthat any language forbids its speakers to think > anything, we must look in an entirely different direction to discover how > our > mother tongue really does shape our experience of the world. Some 50 years > ago, > the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about > differences between languages in a pithy maxim: âLanguages differ > essentially > in what they mustconvey and not in what they mayconvey.â This maxim offers > us > the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different > languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what > our language allowsus to think but rather because of what it habitually > obligesus to think about. > > > Consider this example. Suppose I say to you in English that âI spent > yesterday > evening with a neighbor.â You may well wonder whether my companion was > male or > female, but I have the right to tell you politely that itâs none of your > business. But if we were speaking French or German, I wouldnât have the > privilege to equivocate in this way, because I would be obliged by the > grammar > of language to choose between voisinor voisine; Nachbaror Nachbarin. These > languages compel me to inform you about the sex of my companion whether or > not > I feel it is remotely your concern. This does not mean, of course, that > English > speakers are unable to understand the differences between evenings spent > with > male or female neighbors, but it does mean that they do not have to consider > the sexes of neighbors, friends, teachers and a host of other persons each > time > they come up in a conversation, whereas speakers of some languages are > obliged > to do so. > > > On the other hand, English does oblige you to specify certain types of > information that can be left to the context in other languages. If I want to > tell you in English about a dinner with my neighbor, I may not have to > mention > the neighborâs sex, but I do have to tell you something about the timing > of the > event: I have to decide whether we dined, have been dining, are dining, will > be > diningand so on. Chinese, on the other hand, does not oblige its speakers to > specify the exact time of the action in this way, because the same verb form > can be used for past, present or future actions. Again, this does not mean > that > the Chinese are unable to understand the concept of time. But it does mean > they > are not obliged to think about timing whenever they describe an action. > > When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of > information, it 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. And since such habits of speech are > cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle > into > habits of mindthat go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, > perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world. > > > BUT IS THEREany evidence for this happening in practice? > > Letâs take genders again. Languages like Spanish, French, German and > Russian > not only oblige you to think about the sex of friends and neighbors, but > they > also assign a male or female gender to a whole range of inanimate objects > quite > at whim. What, for instance, is particularly feminine about a Frenchmanâs > beard > (la barbe)? Why is Russian water a she, and why does she become a he once you > have dipped a tea bag into her? Mark Twainfamously lamented such erratic > genders > as female turnips and neuter maidens in his rant âThe Awful German > Language.â > But whereas he claimed that there was something particularly perverse about > the > German gender system, it is in fact English that is unusual, at least among > European languages, in not treating turnips and tea cups as masculine or > feminine. Languages that treat an inanimate object as a he or a she force > their > speakers to talk about such an object as if it were a man or a woman. And as > anyone whose mother tongue has a gender system will tell you, once the habit > has taken hold, it is all but impossible to shake off. When I speak English, > I > may say about a bed that âitâ is too soft, but as a native Hebrew > speaker, I > actually feel âsheâ is too soft. âSheâ stays feminine all the way > from the > lungs up to the glottis and is neutered only when she reaches the tip of the > tongue. > > > In recent years, various experiments have shown that grammatical genders can > shape the feelings and associations of speakers toward objects around them. > In > the 1990s, for example, psychologists compared associations between speakers > of > German and Spanish. There are many inanimate nouns whose genders in the two > languages are reversed. A German bridge is feminine (die Brücke), for > instance, > but el puenteis masculine in Spanish; and the same goes for clocks, > apartments, > forks, newspapers, pockets, shoulders, stamps, tickets, violins, the sun, > the > world and love. On the other hand, an apple is masculine for Germans but > feminine in Spanish, and so are chairs, brooms, butterflies, keys, > mountains, > stars, tables, wars, rain and garbage. When speakers were asked to grade > various objects on a range of characteristics, Spanish speakers deemed > bridges, > clocks and violins to have more âmanly propertiesâ like strength, but > Germans > tended to think of them as more slender or elegant. With objects like > mountains > or chairs, which are âheâ in German but âsheâ in Spanish, the effect > was > reversed > > In a different experiment, French and Spanish speakers were asked to assign > human voices to various objects in a cartoon. When French speakers saw a > picture of a fork (la fourchette), most of them wanted it to speak in a > womanâs > voice, but Spanish speakers, for whom el tenedoris masculine, preferred a > gravelly male voice for it. More recently, psychologists have even shown > that > âgendered languagesâ imprint gender traits for objects so strongly in > the mind > that these associations obstruct speakersâ ability to commit information > to > memory. > > > Of course, all this does not mean that speakers of Spanish or French or > German > fail to understand that inanimate objects do not really have biological sex > â" a > German woman rarely mistakes her husband for a hat, and Spanish men are not > known to confuse a bed with what might be lying in it. Nonetheless, once > gender > connotations have been imposed on impressionable young minds, they lead > those > with a gendered mother tongue to see the inanimate world through lenses > tinted > with associations and emotional responses that English speakers â" stuck in > > their monochrome desert of âitsâ â" are entirely oblivious to. Did the > opposite > genders of âbridgeâ in German and Spanish, for example, have an effect > on the > design of bridges in Spain and Germany? Do the emotional maps imposed by a > gender system have higher-level behavioral consequences for our everyday > life? > Do they shape tastes, fashions, habits and preferences in the societies > concerned? At the current state of our knowledge about the brain, this is > not > something that can be easily measured in a psychology lab. But it would be > surprising if they didnât. > > > The area where the most striking evidence for the influence of language on > thought has come to light is the language of space â" how we describe the > orientation of the world around us. Suppose you want to give someone > directions > for getting to your house. You might say: âAfter the traffic lights, take > the > first left, then the second right, and then youâll see a white house in > front > of you. Our door is on the right.â But in theory, you could also say: > âAfter > the traffic lights, drive north, and then on the second crossing drive east, > and youâll see a white house directly to the east. Ours is the southern > door.â > These two sets of directions may describe the same route, but they rely on > different systems of coordinates. The first uses egocentriccoordinates, > which > depend on our own bodies: a left-right axis and a front-back axis orthogonal > to > it. The second system uses fixed geographicdirections, which do not rotate > with > us wherever we turn. > > > We find it useful to use geographic directions when hiking in the open > countryside, for example, but the egocentric coordinates completely dominate > our speech when we describe small-scale spaces. We donât say: âWhen you > get out > of the elevator, walk south, and then take the second door to the east.â > The > reason the egocentric system is so dominant in our language is that it feels > so > much easier and more natural. After all, we always know where âbehindâ > or âin > front ofâ us is. We donât need a map or a compass to work it out, we > just feel > it, because the egocentric coordinates are based directly on our own bodies > and > our immediate visual fields. > > > But then a remote Australian aboriginal tongue, Guugu Yimithirr, from north > Queensland, turned up, and with it came the astounding realization that not > all > languages conform to what we have always taken as simply ânatural.â In > fact, > Guugu Yimithirr doesnât make any use of egocentric coordinates at all. The > anthropologist John Haviland and later the linguist Stephen Levinson have > shown > that Guugu Yimithirr does not use words like âleftâ or âright,â > âin front ofâ > or âbehind,â to describe the position of objects. Whenever we would use > the > egocentric system, the Guugu Yimithirr rely on cardinal directions. If they > want you to move over on the car seat to make room, theyâll say âmove a > bit to > the east.â To tell you where exactly they left something in your house, > theyâll > say, âI left it on the southern edge of the western table.â Or they > would warn > you to âlook out for that big ant just north of your foot.â Even when > shown a > film on television, they gave descriptions of it based on the orientation of > the screen. If the television was facing north, and a man on the screen was > approaching, they said that he was âcoming northward.â > > When these peculiarities of Guugu Yimithirr were uncovered, they inspired a > large-scale research project into the language of space. And as it happens, > Guugu Yimithirr is not a freak occurrence; languages that rely primarily on > geographical coordinates are scattered around the world, from Polynesia to > Mexico, from Namibia to Bali. For us, it might seem the height of absurdity > for > a dance teacher to say, âNow raise your north hand and move your south leg > eastward.â But the joke would be lost on some: the Canadian-American > musicologist Colin McPhee, who spent several years on Bali in the 1930s, > recalls a young boy who showed great talent for dancing. As there was no > instructor in the childâs village, McPhee arranged for him to stay with a > teacher in a different village. But when he came to check on the boyâs > progress > after a few days, he found the boy dejected and the teacher exasperated. It > was > impossible to teach the boy anything, because he simply did not understand > any > of the instructions. When told to take âthree steps eastâ or âbend > southwest,â > he didnât know what to do. The boy would not have had the least trouble > with > these directions in his own village, but because the landscape in the new > village was entirely unfamiliar, he became disoriented and confused. Why > didnât > the teacher use different instructions? He would probably have replied that > saying âtake three steps forwardâ or âbend backwardâ would be the > height of > absurdity > > So different languages certainly make us speak about space in very different > ways. But does this necessarily mean that we have to think about space > differently? By now red lights should be flashing, because even if a > language > doesnât have a word for âbehind,â this doesnât necessarily mean that > its > speakers wouldnât be able to understand this concept. Instead, we should > look > for the possible consequences of what geographic languages oblige their > speakers to convey. In particular, we should be on the lookout for what > habits > of mind might develop because of the necessity of specifying geographic > directions all the time. > > > In order to speak a language like Guugu Yimithirr, you need to know where > the > cardinal directions are at each and every moment of your waking life. You > need > to have a compass in your mind that operates all the time, day and night, > without lunch breaks or weekends off, since otherwise you would not be able > to > impart the most basic information or understand what people around you are > saying. > > > > Indeed, speakers of geographic languages seem to have an almost-superhuman > sense of orientation. Regardless of visibility conditions, regardless of > whether they are in thick forest or on an open plain, whether outside or > indoors or even in caves, whether stationary or moving, they have a spot-on > sense of direction. They donât look at the sun and pause for a moment of > calculation before they say, âThereâs an ant just north of your foot.â > They > simply feel where north, south, west and east are, just as people with > perfect > pitch feel what each note is without having to calculate intervals. There is > a > wealth of stories about what to us may seem like incredible feats of > orientation but for speakers of geographic languages are just a matter of > course. One report relates how a speaker of Tzeltal from southern Mexico was > blindfolded and spun around more than 20 times in a darkened house. Still > blindfolded and dizzy, he pointed without hesitation at the geographic > directions. > > > How does this work? The convention of communicating with geographic > coordinates > compels speakers from the youngest age to pay attention to the clues from > the > physical environment (the position of the sun, wind and so on) every second > of > their lives, and to develop an accurate memory of their own changing > orientations at any given moment. So everyday communication in a geographic > language provides the most intense imaginable drilling in geographic > orientation (it has been estimated that as much as 1 word in 10 in a normal > Guugu Yimithirr conversation is ânorth,â âsouth,â âwestâ or > âeast,â often > accompanied by precise hand gestures). This habit of constant awareness to > the > geographic direction is inculcated almost from infancy: studies have shown > that > children in such societies start using geographic directions as early as age > 2 > and fully master the system by 7 or 8. With such an early and intense > drilling, > the habit soon becomes second nature, effortless and unconscious. When Guugu > Yimithirr speakers were asked how they knew where north is, they couldnât > explain it any more than you can explain how you know where âbehindâ is. > > > But there is more to the effects of a geographic language, for the sense of > orientation has to extend further in time than the immediate present. If you > speak a Guugu Yimithirr-style language, your memories of anything that you > might ever want to report will have to be stored with cardinal directions as > part of the picture. One Guugu Yimithirr speaker was filmed telling his > friends > the story of how in his youth, he capsized in shark-infested waters. He and > an > older person were caught in a storm, and their boat tipped over. They both > jumped into the water and managed to swim nearly three miles to the shore, > only > to discover that the missionary for whom they worked was far more concerned > at > the loss of the boat than relieved at their miraculous escape. Apart from > the > dramatic content, the remarkable thing about the story was that it was > remembered throughout in cardinal directions: the speaker jumped into the > water > on the western side of the boat, his companion to the east of the boat, they > saw a giant shark swimming north and so on. Perhaps the cardinal directions > were just made up for the occasion? Well, quite by chance, the same person > was > filmed some years later telling the same story. The cardinal directions > matched > exactly in the two tellings. Even more remarkable were the spontaneous hand > gestures that accompanied the story. For instance, the direction in which > the > boat rolled over was gestured in the correct geographic orientation, > regardless > of the direction the speaker was facing in the two films. > > Psychological experiments have also shown that under certain circumstances, > speakers of Guugu Yimithirr-style languages even remember âthe same > realityâ > differently from us. There has been heated debate about the interpretation > of > some of these experiments, but one conclusion that seems compelling is that > while we are trained to ignore directional rotations when we commit > information > to memory, speakers of geographic languages are trained not to do so. One > way > of understanding this is to imagine that you are traveling with a speaker of > such a language and staying in a large chain-style hotel, with corridor upon > > corridor of identical-looking doors. Your friend is staying in the room > opposite yours, and when you go into his room, youâll see an exact replica > of > yours: the same bathroom door on the left, the same mirrored wardrobe on the > right, the same main room with the same bed on the left, the same curtains > drawn behind it, the same desk next to the wall on the right, the same > television set on the left corner of the desk and the same telephone on the > right. In short, you have seen the same room twice. But when your friend > comes > into your room, he will see something quite different from this, because > everything is reversed north-side-south. In his room the bed was in the > north, > while in yours it is in the south; the telephone that in his room was in the > west is now in the east, and so on. So while you will see and remember the > same > room twice, a speaker of a geographic language will see and remember two > different rooms. > > > It is not easy for us to conceive how Guugu Yimithirr speakers experience > the > world, with a crisscrossing of cardinal directions imposed on any mental > picture and any piece of graphic memory. Nor is it easy to speculate about > how > geographic languages affect areas of experience other than spatial > orientation > â" whether they influence the speakerâs sense of identity, for instance, > or > bring about a less-egocentric outlook on life. But one piece of evidence is > telling: if you saw a Guugu Yimithirr speaker pointing at himself, you would > > naturally assume he meant to draw attention to himself. In fact, he is > pointing > at a cardinal direction that happens to be behind his back. While we are > always > at the center of the world, and it would never occur to us that pointing in > the > direction of our chest could mean anything other than to draw attention to > ourselves, a Guugu Yimithirr speaker points through himself, as if he were > thin > air and his own existence were irrelevant. > > > IN WHAT OTHER WAYS might the language we speak influence our experience of > the > world? Recently, it has been demonstrated in a series of ingenious > experiments > that we even perceive colors through the lens of our mother tongue. There > are > radical variations in the way languages carve up the spectrum of visible > light; > for example, green and blue are distinct colors in English but are > considered > shades of the same color in many languages. And it turns out that the colors > that our language routinely obliges us to treat as distinct can refine our > purely visual sensitivity to certain color differences in reality, so that > our > brains are trained to exaggerate the distance between shades of color if > these > have different names in our language. As strange as it may sound, our > experience of a Chagall painting actually depends to some extent on whether > our > language has a word for blue. > > > In coming years, researchers may also be able to shed light on the impact of > language on more subtle areas of perception. For instance, some languages, > like > Matses in Peru, oblige their speakers, like the finickiest of lawyers, to > specify exactly how they came to know about the facts they are reporting. > You > cannot simply say, as in English, âAn animal passed here.â You have to > specify, > using a different verbal form, whether this was directly experienced (you > saw > the animal passing), inferred (you saw footprints), conjectured (animals > generally pass there that time of day), hearsay or such. If a statement is > reported with the incorrect âevidentiality,â it is considered a lie. So > if, for > instance, you ask a Matses man how many wives he has, unless he can actually > see his wives at that very moment, he would have to answer in the past tense > > and would say something like âThere were two last time I checked.â After > all, > given that the wives are not present, he cannot be absolutely certain that > one > of them hasnât died or run off with another man since he last saw them, > even if > this was only five minutes ago. So he cannot report it as a certain fact in > the > present tense. Does the need to think constantly about epistemology in such > a > careful and sophisticated manner inform the speakersâ outlook on life or > their > sense of truth and causation? When our experimental tools are less blunt, > such > questions will be amenable to empirical study. > > > For many years, our mother tongue was claimed to be a âprison houseâ > that > constrained our capacity to reason. Once it turned out that there was no > evidence for such claims, this was taken as proof that people of all > cultures > think in fundamentally the same way. But surely it is a mistake to > overestimate > the importance of abstract reasoning in our lives. After all, how many daily > decisions do we make on the basis of deductive logic compared with those > guided > by gut feeling, intuition, emotions, impulse or practical skills? The habits > of > mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape our orientation > to > the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter, and their > > consequences probably go far beyond what has been experimentally > demonstrated > so far; they may also have a marked impact on our beliefs, values and > ideologies. We may not know as yet how to measure these consequences > directly > or how to assess their contribution to cultural or political > misunderstandings. > But as a first step toward understanding one another, we can do better than > pretending we all think the same. > > > Guy Deutscher is an honorary research fellow at the School of Languages, > Linguistics and Cultures at the University of Manchester. His new book, from > which this article is adapted, is âThrough the Language Glass: Why the > World > Looks Different in Other Languages,â to be published this month by > Metropolitan > Books. > http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1 > > > :=== David A. ===: > > > > > > [Se han eliminado los trozos de este mensaje que no contenían texto] > ------------------------------------ -------------------------------------------------------------------- IdeoLengua - Lista de Lingüistica e Idiomas Artificiales Suscríbase en ideolengua-subscr...@yahoogroups.com Informacion en http://ideolengua.cjb.net Desglose temático http://groups.yahoo.com/group/ideolengua/files/Administracion/top-ideol.html Enlaces a Yahoo! 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