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Does Your Language Shape How You Think?


The idea that your mother tongue shapes your experience of the world may be true after all.


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 mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.


More on: NYTimes

Economist debate:The language we speak shapes how we think


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Commenti

  1. Anonimodicembre 07, 2010

    is language a virus? what the similarity or the differences..is it only a poetical metaphor or a analogy to go into more depth?

    RispondiElimina
  2. Maria Pia Montorodicembre 13, 2010

    Yes Language can be considered a virus: take the "meme theory" as example: "Life-forms can transmit information both vertically (from parent to child, via replication of genes) and horizontally (through viruses and other means). Malcolm Gladwell wrote, "A meme is an idea that behaves like a virus--that moves through a population, taking hold in each person it infects." Memes can replicate vertically or horizontally within a single biological generation. They may also lie dormant for long periods of time. Memes spread by the behaviors that they generate in their hosts."

    RispondiElimina
  3. Anonimodicembre 13, 2010

    as you know there's only one difference: the host remains alive ;-)not just in peace but..alive!!

    RispondiElimina

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Fonti:


Terminologia etcEnglishfor.it





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