Section B: Language and the self Question Read the following text, which is taken from the Stanford University online magazine. Discuss what you feel are the most important issues raised in the text relating to the ways in which language can shape and reflect how individuals think.You should refer to specific details from the texts as well as to ideas and examples from your wider study of Language and the self. [25] The idea of linguistic relativity, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis Can language shape how we think? A Stanford researcher says yes, and her work speaks volumes about what makes people tick. Lera Boroditsky’s journey to answer one of psychology’s most intriguing and fractious questions has been a curious one. She’s spent hours showing Spanish-speakers videos of balloons popping, eggs cracking and paper ripping. She’s scoured Stanford and MIT’s math and computer science departments for Russian speakers willing to spend an hour sorting shades of blue. She’s even traipsed to a remote aboriginal village in Australia where small children shook their heads at what they considered her pitiable sense of direction and took her hand to show her how to avoid being gobbled by a crocodile. Yet she needs little more than a teacup on her office coffee table to explain the essence of her research. ‘In English,’ she says, moving her hand toward the cup, ‘if I knock this cup off the table, even accidentally, you would likely say, “She broke the cup.”’ However, in Japanese or Spanish, she explains, intent matters. If one deliberately knocks the cup, there is a verb form to indicate as much. But if the act were an accident, Boroditsky explains, the speaker would essentially say, ‘The cup broke itself.’ 5 10 15 The question is: 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? Boroditsky focuses on linguistic features that may inform more fundamental differences in how cultures convey their relationship to concepts such as space, time or gender. ‘What I’m really interested in are the ingredients of meaning. I don’t believe we can explain how we construct meaning without understanding patterns in metaphor and language.’ 20 expresses the time points associated with events such as start or end time. Consider time. Some languages require 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, for example, to describe when an event occurred: a few hours prior; the day before; roughly one week to a month ago; roughly two months to two years ago; and the distant or legendary past. English is not that precise, but it is true that every time you use a verb in English, you are conveying information about time. Depending on whether something has happened already (I made dinner), is happening now (I am making dinner), or will happen in the future (I will make dinner), the speaker must pick different verb forms. Without the temporal information, the utterance would feel incomplete, ungrammatical. You couldn’t just say, ‘I make dinner’ in all three cases. 25 30 Not so in Indonesian. Unlike English, Indonesian verbs never change to express time: Make is always just ‘make’. Although Indonesian speakers can add words like already 35 or soon, this is optional. It doesn’t feel incomplete or ungrammatical to just say, ‘I make dinner’. Languages such as Finnish, Hungarian, Estonian, Turkish, Indonesian and Vietnamese do not have grammatical genders at all. In Zarma there are no conjugation verb endings, the verb itself never changes, either for person or number. A Zarma verb, without any auxiliaries, is in the past tense or, to be more precise in the completed tense (or state of being). "A ga ka" (incomplete aspect) could mean "He will come" or "He comes" or "He was coming". The context of the conversation makes the time clear. Zarma people think about the future and plan just the same as we do. Most of the time, the language we use in our daily life, without thinking about it and noticing the meanings of the words we use, can direct our thoughts, attitudes and judgments. People may use sexist language for a variety of reasons. They may do so because it is traditional, it is ingrained in current written and spoken language and can be difficult to change, they lack knowledge about what constitutes sexist language, and Proverbs, idioms, and even slang expressions in our language, on the one hand, enhance language and expression and add flavor to life, on the other hand, lead to the existence of stereotypes that leave societies behind. The origin of grammatical gender is not necessarily well understood, but presumably it originated like any other inflectional feature and then became associated with gender when it was noticed that some prominent things of one natural gender fell into one paradigm and things of another into another, upon which those paradigms might have been generalised to other things of the same natural gender and, eventually, things that couldn't reasonably be said to have a natural gender. The Eskimo language, Greenlandic dialect Kalaallisut (alias West Greenlandic) has traditionally been described as having a rich tense system, with three future tenses (Kleinschmidt 1851, Bergsland 1955, Fortescue 1984) and possibly four past tenses (Fortescue 1984). Recently however, Shaer (2003) has challenged these traditional claims, arguing that Kalaallisut is in fact tenseless. They conclusively show that Kalaallisut is truly tenseless, but has an alternative system that conveys temporal information, even about the future, as precisely as the English tenses. Claims of tenselessness are of most theoretical interest if they assume maximally inclusive criteria for what counts as a tense marker. But to be meaningful, the criteria must also reflect the actual use of the term tense in descriptive work. Tenseless languages are by definition languages whose grammars do not express the ordering relation between utterance time and 'topic time', the time with respect to which an utterance performs a speech act (Klein 1994). Read the following text, which is an extract from an article published on The Conversation website in 2019. The power of language: we translate our thoughts into words, but words also affect the way we think Have you ever worried in your student years or later in life that time may be starting to run out to achieve your goals? If so, would it be easier conveying this feeling to others if there was a word meaning just that? In German, there is. That feeling of panic associated with one’s opportunities appearing to run out is called Torschlusspanik. 5 German has a rich collection of such terms, made up of often two, three or more words connected to form a superword or compound word. Compound words are particularly powerful because they are (much) more than the sum of their parts. Torschlusspanik, for instance, is literally made of ‘gate’ – ‘closing’ – ‘panic’. 10 If you get to the train station a little late and see your train’s doors still open, you may have experienced a concrete form of Torschlusspanik, prompted by the characteristic beeps as the train doors are about to close. But this compound word of German is associated with more than the literal meaning. It evokes something more abstract, referring to the feeling that life is progressively shutting the door of opportunities as time goes by. 15 English too has many compound words. Some combine rather concrete words like ‘seahorse’ and ‘butterfly’. Others are more abstract, such as ‘backwards’ or ‘whatsoever’. And of course, in English too, compounds are super words, as in German or French, since their meaning is often distinct from the meaning of their parts. A seahorse is not a horse;a butterfly is not a fly. 20 One remarkable feature of compound words is that they don’t translate well at all from one language to another, at least when it comes to translating their constituent parts literally. Who would have thought that a ‘carry-sheets’ is a wallet – porte-feuille –, or that a ‘support-throat’ is a bra – soutien-gorge – in French? This begs the question of what happens when words don’t readily translate from one language to another. For instance, what happens when a native speaker of German tries to convey in English that they just had a spurt of Torschlusspanik? Naturally, they will resort to paraphrasing, that is, they will make up a narrative with examples to make their interlocutor understand what they are trying to say. 25 But then, this begs another, bigger question: Do people who have words that simply do not translate in another language have access to different concepts? Take the case of hiraeth for instance, a beautiful word of Welsh famous for being essentially untranslatable. Hiraeth is meant to convey the feeling associated with the bittersweet memory of missing something or someone, while being grateful of their existence. 30 Hiraeth is not nostalgia, it is not anguish, frustration, melancholy, or regret. And no, 35 It is not homesickness, as Google Translate may lead you to believe, since hiraeth also conveys the feeling one experiences when they ask someone to marry them and they are turned down, hardly a case of homesickness. Shemomedjamo (Georgian) This word describes someone knowing he or she is full, but continuing to eat anyway. Kummerspeck, (German) which literally translates to “grief bacon” in German, refers to weight gained from emotional overeating. Iktsuarpok (Inuit) You know when you’re so eager for someone to arrive at your house that you keep heading outside to see if they’ve made it yet? Iktsuarpok describes that. Schnapsidee (German) Have you ever had a great idea (that’s really not that great…) after one too many drinks? Schnapsidee refers to “ brilliant” plans that originate when intoxicated. Bilita Mpash (Bantu) An excellent dream; the opposite of a nightmare. Tsundoku (Japanese) So, you’ve purchased all those classics you said you’d read – but then they end up piling up on the floor, gathering dust. This word describes hoarding books and never reading them. Gattara (Italian) A woman who has a number of cats and would likely rather spend time with them than other humans. This word refers to someone who might be called a “crazy cat lady.” Utepils (Norwegian) To sit outside on a nice day and enjoy a beer. Lagom (Swedish) Not too much, not too little, just right. The Swedes have moderation down. Treppenwitz (German) This term is used to describe a situation in which you think of a clever comeback or witticism after it’s too late to use in a conversation. Fernweh (German) Wanting to go somewhere you’ve never been to. Wanderlust is similar, but Fernweh refers to homesickness for a place that’s completely unknown.
