“How language shapes the way we think” ~ My Thoughts

I found it really interesting when Lera Boroditsky was talking about an experiment examining people’s brain activity while differentiating between shades of blue. She mentioned that in some languages, like Russian, there isn’t just one word for blue, instead, there are separate words for light and dark blue. So, Russian speakers are very fast to differentiate between light and dark blue as if they were different colors. While English speakers, for example, have the same reaction to different shades of blue since it could still be classified under the color blue.

I was also intrigued to learn how grammatical gender can influence perception. When languages have grammatical gender, people tend to describe nouns using adjectives that match the assigned grammatical gender. However, in another language where the grammatical gender is switched, the same noun might be described using attributes of the opposite gender (for example, “bridge” in German and Spanish). This tells me that grammatical gender kind of shapes how people perceive an object.