An old blog post I stumbled upon and still love.
[Thursday, April 12, 2007 ]
Okay, so I had to write a small psych paper on “one new thought” I’ve had that was influenced by concepts we have covered in class. Here’s my thought.
I have always seen language as a primary means of illustrating and translating thought.
I myself am not multilingual. I probably should be, being half-Norwegian, but I have only dabbled a bit in the Spanish, French, and Italian languages, only enough to learn and forget the basic mechanics fairly quickly. Despite this lack of exposure, I did have enough to form a hunch that differences in one’s language of origin have a distinct effect on an individual’s psyche.
I first got the idea from my mother. She moved to America from Norway 25 years ago, and is now completely fluent in English. She has explained to me that ever since she has adopted the English language, it is difficult for her to go back and express herself in Norwegian, simply because there are not parallel words in Norwegian to express the thoughts she wants to convey. There just aren’t as many Norwegian words as English words, and my mom now finds herself restrained when trying to communicate with her family, yet before she moved to America, she had no way of anticipating these linguistic differences.
I can be hard for many people to comprehend the fact that many words don’t directly translate between languages, but I had a feeling that there are many languages that contain words to identify ideas that other languages have no term for. What if there are certain words in our language, which define and relate to concepts that other regions haven’t even begun to fathom, and therefore can’t actually be recognized and translated into concrete thought, and vice versa?
Okay let me try and break that down. Not even an hour after I tried to explain this to someone, I stumbled upon a concrete example in my psych textbook — “East Asian languages have no term meant to capture the idea of feeling good about oneself.”
This is kind of a big deal. I checked it out a bit further. It has much to do with the social differences between East-Asian and Western cultures. East Asia has a distinctly interdependent culture, a culture in which individuals tend to identify themselves as part of a collective, rather than as an individual. They have relatively little personal control over their lives, but do not seem to mind or really know the difference. Western cultures, on the other hand, are more independent. People tend to think of themselves as distinct social entities, tied to each other by voluntary bonds, but still essentially separate from other people. In independent cultures, it makes sense to speak of having preferences, beliefs, and abilities that are characteristic of an individual across social situations. In interdependent cultures, on the other hand, you are literally a different person depending on whom you are interacting with. Naturally, this should have an effect on your interpretation and understanding of your existence and its characteristics. Furthermore, if East-Asians do not identify themselves with constant attributes, then the idea of having a sense of self-esteem, an overall positive or negative evaluation of these attributes, does seem a bit farfetched.
Anyway. I hope that made some sense. So do certain languages not possess a particular term becasue they haven’t recognized the concept, or do they not recognize the concept because there is no term to describe it? I think both contribute to each other. Those born into a particular language will develop thought processes that parallel that language. You think in your language of origin. My mom speaks nothing but English except a few times a year when she communicates with family, but she still thinks primarily in Norwegian. Most of us think in English. We use our language to interpret our experiences, and a difference in language may result in a difference of interpretation. If this holds true, that may mean that our personality and logic may have been completely different had we been born in a different region. That’s some crazy shit.
On the other hand, new words are created through new experiences, and as cultures continue to influence each other, languages are influenced as well. For instance, the Japanese have now adopted a term for self-esteem, but it is simply borrowed from the English language — “serefu esuttimu.”
So this idea is nowhere near being concrete. It’s just something I’ve been pondering from time to time when I get bored. If you have thoughts, I’d like to hear them.
[NOTE: I turned a slightly more politically correct form of this as my psychology paper, and it was returned to me with a big fat ZERO, and a note saying "did not follow instructions/topic." I contacted the professor, and he allowed me the chance to resubmit. So I did what the rest of the class did... wrote up a quick one-pager about how their ex-boyfriend or girlfriend did (insert shitty behavior here) and how it demonstrates (insert blatantly obvious social psychology theory here). I got an A.]
3 Comments
Pleased to find your site. Not often I run across thoughtful words with interesting images. Much more to explore here, I think. Thanks for sharing.
As to this particular post, it’s good to see the old Whorf hypothesis pondered anew. If you wouldn’t mind, I’d like to comment. First, not sure what the original assignment was, but it’s plain you put some thought into this. From my experience, and I think this is still the prevailing response to the Whorf hypothesis, language is not deterministic. That is, it doesn’t mold, form, limit, or determine thought. It does give it a kind of container to inhabit. Sensual, physical, and social experience provide the content of thought. Language allows breaking up the continuum of that experience into parcels that can be manipulated in the same way a child manipulates blocks. That different societies break up the continuum of experience into differing parcels shouldn’t be surprising. In fact, it shouldn’t be surprising to find your best friend interprets a shared experience quite differently from the way you do. Similarly, your mother’s experience and tools for interpreting her experience differ from her family that has now led a life separate from her for 25 years. And the fact that I have now here expressed a somewhat different interpretation of something both you and I have noticed is just another example of language in service of thought, not the other way around. It is the quest to understand and the thrill of sharing, I think, that keeps us from total frustration at the inexactitude of communicating.
Thanks for indulging me. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. Hope to read more.
It is so great to see others elaborate upon this! I could talk about this for hours. I actually totally support your perspective… it’s the interconnection of these factors that define the spectrum of comprehension and thought that is so mysterious and fascinating to me. Did you pick up interest on this subject in a scholastic career, or did you end up pondering it on your own time? I feel like not many people have ever thought about it at all.
Anyway, thanks for such a refreshing comment. Hope to see more to come!
hp
A friend of mine spent 14 years in Brazil as a english-language instructor. He would often speak about his experiences there and he too had a theory on your topic – that the structure of their language (portugese) prohibits or promotes certain attitudes. I don’t recall him obviating the need for more descriptive words, but one linguistic example that may interest you is how their verbs are often not pointed to the individual, but instead to the object, if the outcome of the verb is negative. For example, if someone dropped a dish on the floor, breaking it, the literal translation from portuguese to english is “The dish broke itself”, whereas in English we would say “I broke the dish”.
He cited not-this-exact example as one of many difficulties in reconciling with his brazilian now-Ex wife.