Paper 4, Question 2

    Language is the method of human communication. This form of communication shapes multiple different aspects. For example the relationship between language and thought. Thought is the process of using your mind to consider or think about something. This mental process includes perception, memory, thinking, and emotion. Language ties in with thought because it deals with speech. Speech allows for a person to distribute their thoughts and allow for their ideas to be publicized. This language has the ability to shape the way we think. 

    Stanford researcher, Lera Borodlitsky, has spent the majority of her life's work committed to uncovering one question; Can language shape how we think? Borodlitsky has spent numerous hours studying the ways in which other nationalities use language. For example, she showed Spanish speakers videos of balloons popping, eggs cracking, and paper ripping. She has had Russian speakers sit and sort shades of blue. She even traipsed to a remote aboriginal village in Australia where small children shook their heads at what they considered her potable sense of direction and took her hand to show her how to avoid being gobbled by a crocodile. Borodlitsky did these things so that she would have a better understanding of how different mindsets and thought processes work.  

    Another example of this language change is how different languages place blame. For example, in English, if a cup were to fall onto the floor, you would say something along the lines of, “She broke the cup.” Though in Japanese or Spanish, they would say, “The cup broke itself.” We can see how the blame inducted changes place depending on the language used. This presents the question; Does the fact that one language tends to play the blame game while the other does not mean speakers of those languages think differently about what happened? This question supports the idea that the way a sentence is written in the way a person will take it. (For example, those of Japanese or Spanish language believe that the cup truly did break itself.)

    Boroditsky’s studies also focused on other linguistic features. These features inform more fundamental differences in how cultures convey their relationship to concepts such as space, time, or gender. Time, in some languages, requires their speakers to include temporal information in every utterance. In the Yagua language of Peru, there are five distinct grammatical forms of the past tense. Examples of this include; a few hours prior, the day before, roughly one week to a month ago, roughly two months to two years ago, and lastly, the distant or legendary past. The English language is not that distinct, though every time you use a verb in English, you are conveying information about time. Past, present, and future forms are used. For example, the statement, ‘I watered the plants’ displays a past form perspective. ‘I water the plants’, would be present form, and ‘I will water the plants’, is an example of future form. Though this is not the case for Indonesian. Unlike English, Indonesian verbs never change to express time. ‘Water’ would always stay ‘water.’ Though these speakers may add words like ‘already’ or ‘soon’ so that their statement may flow better. 

    Language is the way we humans communicate and express ourselves. This form of communication shapes multiple different aspects, for example, language and thought. The relationship between language and thought is solid because speech is used to shape what we think. In our minds, we theorize about what we are going to say next. We always think before we speak. Thought plays a huge role in language because without it we would not know how to communicate.