Semantron 2015

Bellonese have words only for black, white and red. 12 A test devised by Holmgren asked tribespeople to pick a piece of coloured wool from many to match a shown one. Even though they did not have the word for the colour, they could still recognize it and understand the concept. Panos Athanasopoulos devised a test with Japanese-English bilinguals distinguishing shades of the colour blue (Japanese has separate words for light and dark blue). Those individuals who used English more frequently distinguished light blue and dark blue less well than those who used Japanese more frequently, suggesting cognitive changes in perception due to language. A similar test was attempted on monolinguals by a team from Atanford, MIT and UCLA, 13 with the upshot that Russian speakers (who also have two words for blue) were able to differentiate shades of blue far more quickly than English speakers. This shows that cognitive processes are literally affected by the language we speak, and is therefore strong evidence in favour of the hypothesis. My explanation is that the very act of having to define these two categories for blue in everyday conversation would tread neural pathways and set pattern recognizers in accordance with contemporary neurological theory such as Kurzweil’s ‘pattern recognition theory of mind’. This demonstrates that pattern recognizers are primed in the brain and ways of thinking about objects and the world become engrained in the mind depending on the language we speak. In accordance with boas’ paradigm, this happens because language forces speakers to make the distinction. The distinctions language forces us to make have other similar neurological consequences. The Pirahã people only have words for one, two and many, and therefore must only make such distinctions. Cognitive tests showed inferior accuracy and difficulty using fingers to represent individual numbers. In the extreme, aboriginal Guugu Yimithirr speakers are required to use compass directions rather than egocentric ones. 14 This has led to a group of people with a perfect sense of compass direction, even in new environments or blindfolded. This method of orientation also has profound effects on their memory, as can be seen from experiments conducted by Stephen Levinson. in the case of hotel rooms mirrored across a corridor for example, we English speakers would see two identical rooms, while speakers of Guugu Yimithirr would see two rooms flipped around as a result of the different compass positions of objects in the room. Other examples of how language affects our memory include a test devised by Lera Boroditsky and Lauren Schmidt, in which Spanish and German speakers had to remember a name for each of a list of objects given to them. 15 What is fascinating, is that the speakers of both languages had a far higher success rate at recalling the name if its gender was the same as that of the object in their mother tongue. Another interesting observation by Boroditsky is that Spanish speakers have a poorer memory of the cause of an accident than English speakers, possibly because Spanish usually employs passive phrases to describe such events, omitting the agent. These show that the language we speak affects our memory. 16 In support of the hypothesis we have already seen that language affects cognitive processes including perception of colour and memory. A larger influence of language still is in how we use our brains. As discovered by Sophie Scott, the tonal nature of Mandarin, 17 causes speakers to use an area of the brain vocabulary for colour used by Homer and the repetition of such strange colouring across many works of Greek literature, Gladstone concluded that the ancient Greeks saw the world in something closer to black and white than technicolour. 12 Even children in the western world, dominated by colour, who have relentless colour teaching from parents take a considerable amount of time to confidently and repeatedly describe the sky as blue. 13 Russian speakers (who have two words for blue) and English speakers had to select the odd one out of three shades of blue. The Russians chose significantly faster if the odd colour was on the other side of their colour border between light and dark blue even if it was the same objective distance away as other selections. The English speakers showed no such skew. 14 E.g. ‘the ant is south west of your foot.’ 15 Cunningly, the test was conducted solely in English to avoid bias. 16 It is interesting to note that contemporary theory of memory suggests that language is intimately linked with our memories, which could explain the lack of memories from our early childhood. 17 It has no tenses, no cases, no genders (often not even between people) and no subjunctive. Comprehension is almost entirely dependent on word order, while one word can have up to four different meanings depending on the tone assigned to it. This is without even considering characters, one of the many factors which makes it such a hard language to learn for Europeans.

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