3 ms·
I think to some extent linguistic relativity might be a thing. Linguistic relativity is the idea that language affects your world perspective. Some languages s
by partycoder 9y ago
I think to some extent linguistic relativity might be a thing. Linguistic relativity is the idea that language affects your world perspective.
Some languages such as Spanish and French encode a lot of irrelevant information compared to English. e.g: objects like chairs and computers have a gender, words tend to be longer, verb conjugation is more complex... and that eventually translates into more cognitive load.
- 3131s 9y agoAll of those features can lessen ambiguity in other ways though, so that's probably the trade-off at work. Weak linguistic relativity is pretty well attested. I've seen people misattribute or assume qualities about unrelated entities that share a name, e.g. assuming that something true of "milk" is also true of "soy milk". That example is similar to the idea of overextending a metaphor, and since every language has its own particular metaphors, that's likely among the most common ways that a linguistic feature impacts our worldview. Whether or not there are syntactic features that do the same is more debatable, but it's plausible that adjective ordering, pronoun systems, etc. might have an effect.
- tnzn 9y agoCheck out Sapir Whorf theory (the "weak" version. The strong one is most likely bs)