4 ms·
What you say about how language does not constrain our thoughts is borne out by American English. This was the product of Noah Webster and his educational mater
by Theodores 13y ago
What you say about how language does not constrain our thoughts is borne out by American English. This was the product of Noah Webster and his educational materials including the dictionary - 'Mirriam Webster'.
The rationale was to move the language away from 'aristocratic' English and to make things secular. Obviously the spellings survived - 'color' - but god somehow thrived in America (we are secular in the UK).
Webster was well aware that language could constrain thought or at least shape it, this was the rationale behind his work. However, do Americans think differently in subtle ways compared to Brits due to the changes to the language made aeons ago by Webster?
- Jongseong 13y agoOther than in matters of spelling (which belongs to the realm of written language and is thus outside the scope of usual discussions about language and cognition), Noah Webster did not introduce any significant differences in American English in terms of grammatical categories, syntax, etc. Any influence he might have had was in matters of diction in the sense of vocabulary and stylistic choices. If Webster's educational materials were intended to be secular, they achieved this by choosing expressions that avoid religious references, for example, not by changing the building blocks of the language to make secular thoughts easier to express. The relationship between diction and cognition may be an interesting topic in itself, but it's not what we mean when we usually discuss language and cognition, where we are concerned with the structural aspects of the language itself, e.g. its tense or pronoun system, not the stylistic choice of what we express with it.