That Whorfian Thing Again

Weird running across it twice in one day, or at least one 24 hour period, but maybe it's the (virtual) company I'm keeping these days. By way of the Delany group again, She explores the world of language and thought:

At the heart of [Lera] Boroditsky's research is a question: Does the language we speak shape the way we think?

At first, the answer seems obvious. The 6,000 languages of the world are wildly diverse, and it seems reasonable that language must shape the way people think about the world. Take gender, for instance. English speakers don't assign any genders to nouns. But in Spanish, the word for "bridge" for example, is masculine and in German it is feminine. In a recent study, Boroditsky found that German speakers used words such as "elegant," "fragile," and "pretty" to describe a bridge, where Spanish speakers chose adjectives such as "strong," "sturdy," and "dangerous."

But what do these differences really mean? As Steven Pinker put it, "just because a German thinks a bridge is feminine, doesn't mean he's going to ask one out on a date."

Boroditsky argues that each individual effect might be small, but the cumulative effects could be awesome.

"A lot of languages have small grammatical differences, like genders that attach to every noun," she said. "Now in each case that's a small difference, but if you add it all up -- every single noun -- it could be huge."

[. . .] Her work at Stanford showed that English and Mandarin speakers think about time differently because of differences in how the two languages talk about time. The results were hailed by proponents and critics alike, and today there are at least a dozen groups across the country doing similar research. Boroditsy herself has just established a lab in Indonesia, and the first round of studies -- on Indonesian verbs -- is intriguing.

Click through to find out what's so intriguing, if you're interested.

And if you are, you could look around Lera Boroditsky's page at MIT; there's some papers, working and otherwise. When did folk start using PDF instead of PostScript for those? Honestly. Young people these days.

And MIT OpenCourseWare is always worth a look, even if I have neglected to mention it before, being a flake.

Update: Oh look, Lera's name-checked in an entry at languagehat. Note to self: Chaos Magic Bad, runaway synchronicity mildly disturbing.