In our IB English class, we were asked to read an article, which as titled "Does Your Language Shape How You Think?"
In this article, the writer discussed about the misunderstandings of the limitations that language present to its speakers and that if a language does not have vocabularies for certain concepts, it doesn't necessarily mean that the speakers of that language do not understand those concepts.
An example in the article used by the writer is use of tenses in languages. For example, in Chinese language, there is no past nor future tense. In order to express an action that happened in that past or an action that is expected to take place in the future, the speakers simply add words such as yesterday or tomorrow to show the time of the actions.
One interesting example that I want to talk about is the directions that we use in daily life. When we give other people directions, usually we express ourselves in saying words such as, left, right, in front of, and behind; but a remote language spoken in Australia uses north, south, east, west. An explanation in the article is presented here: "To tell you where exactly they left something in your house, they'll say 'I left it on the southern edge of the western table.'" In my opinion, this is a strange way for me to give directions because most of the time I don't even know where north is!
Language is one of the most common devices that we use in our daily life to express ourselves. I speak Chinese and English fluently, I can communicate in Cantonese and Malay, and I have been learning Spanish for two years. I think it is interesting how sometimes I want to express myself but only one language can express the certain idea that I want to talk about. For example, when I speak to Joseph, who also speaks fluently in both Chinese and English, we usually speak in English because it is more convenient due to the fact that the subjects that we talk about mostly are about the events that happen in school. However, sometimes we express certain ideas in Chinese because Chinese was able to serve the purpose of expressing that particular idea than English.
Although the author of the article does not think that one's mother tongue prevent the speaker to think certain thoughts, I believe that the more languages that a person knows how to speak, the better the person is at expressing himself.
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Interesting thoughts, connections to your own experience, TOK ideas. Bring these ideas in again when we talk about Language as a WoK.
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