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comment by rob05c
rob05c  ·  3817 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Give me a great quote from something you're reading, have read recently.

    different languages impose different world views on their speakers

I've also heard the hypothesis that those different world views affect problem-solving. For example, might it be easier to solve a particular math problem while thinking in German rather than Farsi?

The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis makes dying languages all the more tragic.





lil  ·  3816 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Absolutely. It's impossible to even imagine the particular view of the world encompassed in a language. In the quote below, living in another language is described as being immersed in an alternate universe:

"The more advanced second language learner often finds herself immersed in a sort of alternate universe. . . Part of what makes learning a second language so difficult is precisely this: the commitment one made early on in life to a particular cutting up of the world at its joints is hard to see as merely one possible commitment among many, and just as it is hard to see, it is hard to let go of.

  - Louder than Words, Benjamin K. Bergen