ITCS-1902 Akbota Kuatbek (ID 28375)
From the aspect of language, from what I’ve seen in this documentary film,
language of Piraha is simple and does not have a complicated structure. I think, it is
the reason why their thinking style is very simple. For instance, they do not think
about very complicated things, such as what will happen tomorrow, what happened
before us, how the universe was created, what it was like thousands of years ago,
and many more things, that people are curious about. In short, here we can see the
real impact of language to cognitive skills.
Having no words for numbers, colors, defining past, present and future, it is
really surprising that they still understand each other and can express themselves
very well. In addition, even though there are many words that are same for defining
different things, they still manage to differentiate it with the help of intonation. It
proves that our language structure has a very strong connection with our way of
thinking.
In a cultural aspect, it shows us how the evolution of language affects the
evolution of culture and thinking ability. On the example of Piraha, we can see that
improvements of technology and knowledge have a huge power to change the
structure of human’s mind. So, it demonstrates the strong connection of language
and culture.
Piraha was not influenced by modern technologies of spreading information,
thus they saved their uniqueness and initial soul and mind. They preserved their
connection with nature. Their lifestyle is very simple: they do not worry about
tomorrow, do not believe in God and life after death, do not think about their past.
They simply live in the moment without much thoughts.
To sum up, from my observation, for some reason it makes me think as if we,
people nowadays, made our life very complicated with many unnecessary things.
On the other hand, it makes me think that these are the things thanks to which we
are who we are today. Also, it clearly showed that our language skills have a very
close relation with our thinking skills and culture.