28 / / 09 / / 2020
THE GRAPEVINE A TOUR OF EUROPEAN LANGUAGES
How does language shape what we think? EVA O’DONNELL
My experience of learning foreign languages MAEVE COOPER Dans cet article, je décris mes expériences en Norvège, en Italie, et en Irlande. Je decris comment j'ai appris les langues et mon expérience de vivre dans des pays différents. When I was around 3 years old, I moved from Canada to Norway with my parents. I learnt Norwegian as my second language, along with English, which I was learning from my parents. It was easy for me to learn Norwegian, as I was so young, and it's quite a simple language, so I caught on quickly, I spoke it in school, with my friends and everywhere else. After 7 great years in Norway, we moved to Italy. I was put in a public school where the teachers tried hardest to teach me the language. It was a lot more challenging than learning Norwegian because it was a lot more complicated. There were a lot more ways to write verbs and I also had to learn every other subject in Italian too. But after 2 years of being fully immersed in the language and the culture, I spoke pretty fluent Italian. We moved again, this time to Ireland because if i had stayed any longer in Italy i would have gone into secondary school, which is a lot more difficult than primary school. Also, my dad’s contract with the place he worked was nearly over and there would have been more work opportunities for him elsewhere. When we came to Ireland, I was lucky to be eleven at the time meaning I didn’t have to learn Irish because everyone would know so much more than me and it would have been hard to catch up. I did choose to do European section though which is definitely challenging, especially with the similarities between Italian and French, but it's great. I am very lucky to have lived in so many countries and learned to speak the languages, I hope that I can continue to keep them up
Language is one of the building blocks of civilisation. Without it, we wouldn’t have progressed past the Stone Age. Before language, our ideas died with us, but with it we can share and spread them beyond the constraints of our own minds. You pass on an idea, a spark, and it will spread from person to person and hop around until that spark has been fanned into a flame. But does the language we speak change the way we think? Most languages follow the same basic structures, even though most of them developed without knowing there were other languages. These are lexemes (words), phonetics (a sound system), syntax (making sentences), morphology (changing words internally), semantics (understanding spoken language), and pragmatics (using language in conversation). Although the building blocks are the same, the final structures are often very different from one another. Take the Kuuk Thaayorre, an indigenous Australian tribe, for example- while we use left, right, forward and back, their language has developed to use the cardinal directions instead, North, south, east and west. While we might say ‘your left shoe is falling off’, a Kuuk Thaayorre would say ‘your southeast shoe is falling off’. As a greeting, they announce the direction they are heading- for example, ‘I am going northeast’, ‘I am going west.’ ‘So how was your day?’ ‘Ah not too bad…’ etc. As a result, they have almost perfect internal compass, because their language makes it vital to constantly know the direction. If I were to ask you where east was, right now, you’d probably have no idea. Whereas for a Kuuk Thaayorre, knowing the answer is literally as easy as saying hello. Language can also change our perception of time. In English, we talk about time in chunks, like 10 minutes, half an hour, two hours, etc. This makes us think of time as ‘stuff’, something that can be wasted or saved.
Whereas a speaker of a language like Hopi, which doesn’t have these terms, time is thought of as a continuous cycle.Colour is also affected by language. There are an infinite number of different colours, but we only have words for the 7 main ones. If you have a can of red paint and slowly add blue to it, drop by drop, it will very slowly change to a reddish purple, then purple, then bluish purple. Each drop will change the colour very slightly, but there is no one moment when it will stop being red and become purple. The colour spectrum is continuous. Our language, however, isn't continuous. Our language makes us break the colour spectrum up into 'red', 'purple', and so on. In Russian, there are two different words for light blue and dark blue, goluboy and siniy. Russian speakers think of these as 'different' colours. While this may sound strange, do you think of red and pink as different colours? If so, then your thinking has been affected by your language, because pink is just light red! In languages like French, German, and Spanish, all nouns have a gender. It turns out, this also has an effect on how we see the world around us. In a study, a group of German speakers and a group of Spanish speakers were asked to describe a bridge. Bridge is feminine in German, and sure enough, the most commonly used words were “feminine” words like elegant, beautiful, and slender, while Spanish speakers described it as big, strong, and sturdy, more “masculine” words, as bridge is masculine in Spanish. The effect of language on our thoughts is very much an ongoing area of study. Up until recently, it was thought that it would be impossible to ever answer these questions. Our knowledge on the subject will only grow, and with it hopefully will come a greater understanding of other cultures.
IN THIS ISSUE HISTORY OF EUROPEAN LANGUAGES
PERSONAL EXPERIENCES
USEFUL PHRASES AND EXPRESSIONS
PAGE 1