same direction. More interestingly still, Hebrew children change their perception of time to left to right after just a few months of learning English. These examples demonstrate the slant imposed by language on how we view the world in terms of concept organization. For another example of the way language influences our thoughts we return to gender. Toshi Konishi tested the associations of German and Spanish speakers with objects whose genders differed in each language. 7 Generally speakers from both languages assigned masculine traits to masculine objects 8 and vice versa. This suggests that there is a pernicious effect of gender in the way we perceive objects. Another reason language places a twist on our thoughts is the natural vocabularies and connections within a language, which causes us all to experience certain stigmas and associations. Natural links between words also warp our thinking. For example, let us consider the concept of ‘killing time’: in English this is quite a violent and negative image, while surprisingly the mafioso Italians abandon this brutality and opt for the more playful ‘ingannare tempo’, ‘to hoodwink time’. Fundamentally, these are the same concepts, but I would argue that we English speakers harbour a slightly more negative attitude towards this activity. This would tally with Ray Kurzweil’s ‘pattern recognition theory of mind’, whereby every thought we have and thing we perceive triggers a cascade of associations as pattern recognizers are activated across the neocortex. This means that while superficially some words, phrases or grammars would appear to have little significant effect on the speaker, they nonetheless alter what we experience in our heads. Languages could influence our thoughts by directing our attention to different aspects of a sentence, a phenomenon known as selective attention. A test by Dan Slobin asked children from different countries to tell a story. The results showed markedly different focuses on the story depending on the language spoken. A strong influence exerted by languages is described by a very important paradigm propounded by Franz Boas, specifically that the grammars of languages differ not in what they allow us to express, but in what they force us to express. This has far reaching consequences and is really at the heart of the argument in favour of the hypothesis. For example, even when describing a dinner you ate with your colleague, in English the gender is omitted while in German you are forced to make this distinction. Forced disclosure could have serious effects in society, with far more extreme examples rife, including the Matses tribe where individuals are required to give painstaking information concerning events. 9 Emphasis through word order 10 could also influence our thoughts in this way. German word order requires a sentence to be planned before being executed, and as a result we could say that Germans must think more before they speak. We shall now examine how what we must express interferes with our cognitive processes, starting with colour perception. 11 The colours in some languages are not the same as our own, for example the 7 For example, bridge is female in German (die Brücke) but masculine in Spanish (el puente). 8 The Germans generally described bridges as beautiful, peaceful and elegant, while the Spanish used words such as ‘sturdy’, ‘big’ and ‘strong’. 9 The Matses have a level of accuracy and subtlety when making a statement which would make the eyes of even the worst lawyer water. a speaker must say if an event happened within the recent past, distant past or remote past. They must specify if they experienced something, inferred something, are basing their statement on past occurrences or were told something by somebody else. It is absolutely essential for speakers to get this right, or the statement is considered a lie, to the extent that when asked how many children he has, a man must state that the last time he checked he had say two. This culminates to a difference where in English we would say ‘someone walked here’, they would have to say ‘a person walked here between one month to fifty years ago because our father said he had seen people walk here all the time’. 10 This even extends to encompass the amount of information contained within a word. In modern Greek a sentence is started with a verb which contains a lot of information, and Athanasia Chalari took this to explain why Greeks interrupt each other all the time; they know from the beginning of the sentence what’s coming. 11 Empirical testing has been carried out to test the impact of language on colour since the nineteenth century. This was kicked off by an astute observation by an English politician, William Gladstone, who noticed that throughout Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey there is a very peculiar use of colour, for example the use of the word ‘oinops’, ‘wine-looking’, to describe the sea, and later it is described as ‘ioeis’, ‘violet’, with the same word describing the wool of sheep, while honey is described as ‘chloros’, ‘green’. Further myriad examples exist of this odd colouring, and as a result of this, the limited
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