Would you say that a culture's language has a significant impact on how the members of the culture perceive things?
Language is comprised of mental constructs of things, separate from the things themselves. A rock is a hard mineral that you can touch or throw through a window, the word rock is an object unto itself. This in mind, would you say that someone who spoke russian instead of english, would percieve a rock differently than an englishman? Does language directly affect thought?
relativistic linguistics
7 posts in this topic.
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Perhaps language directly affects thought. Although, I would not say that a culture's language has a major impact on the way that the culture perceives things. I think that a country/region's culture has a very big affect on their language, rather than vice-versa. How a country perceives things changes their language.
For example, Québec and France are both French-speaking lands. Even though they both speak French, they have very different dialects. In France they call a hot dog a hot dog, they just say it with a French accent. But in Québec they call hot dogs "chien-chaud" which literally means "hot dog" in French. Also, in France all of the stop signs say "stop" while in Québec they say "arrête" which is French for "stop". Many of the French words said in Québec would be considered very old-fashioned in France. This is because the French-Canadians of Québec want to preserve their French language and culture, while the French of France takes on foreign words and sayings from time to time.
So I would say that a culture has a bigger affect on its language than a language has on its culture. -
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I think that a country/region's culture has a very big affect on their language, rather than vice-versa. How a country perceives things changes their language.
And there you have it. The great debate in relativistic linguistics. Does language affect culture, or vice versa? Perhaps it's all just an auroboros effect, and we should all just think a little more zen-like. Laziness, or wisdom? You decide.
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Some say language structures human thought - after all, most people think in their own tongue, don't they? However, I think that language restricts thought. We find it hard to think without our language, yet animals do, and as a consequence their minds seem to me more open to a 'sixth sense'. Though humans still get instinctive reactions, or think we can sense something, if we can't put those thoughts into language, if we can't define what we feel, we often don't act on it becausewe can't understand. Perhaps if we didn't have language, we would be more open to unstructured thought, and so more able to act on our instincts like other animals. So, in answer to your question, yes, I think language does have an impact on culture, because there are words we cant express in another tongue, and if we can't express it, our brains are reluctant to let us feel it, because we can't put a name on it.
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Mostly the question depends on what level you use language, for example there are hundreds of translations of a single work of German philosophy because there are words in German which contain meanings that can only be expressed as sentences in English so a person born and brought up in a German speaking environment will be by nature a little more concise than someone brought up in an English medium (It's very clearly seen if one of them can converse in both languages, a German will use shorter, sharper English sentences but an Englishman would use longer, sort of more poetic German sentences). This is also why truly great poets like Goethe and Goncalves Dias are virtually unknown to an English reader and their influence is restricted to their particular language so it develops differently and ultimately causes people to think differently (It's quite clear how a country's language has affected its people by looking at some of their greatest leader like Abraham Lincoln -USA, Nelson Mandela in South Africa and Gandhi in India, these people reflect how their mother tongue has shaped their ideologies)
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