Does Language Impact Experience?

The New York Times Magazine this week published a great article on language, revisiting the issue of whether your mother tongue affects your thoughts, impacts how you approach the world or informs your experiences.

The article was adapted from Guy Deutscher's upcoming book "Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages." It was pretty interesting and mentioned some of the points and examples brought up in the Economist article (on language difficult) I posted HERE.

Bottom line is that language does have some impact on how you orient the world and what sort of information is required or processed at a given point in any experience or conversation. Yet the conclusion remains that people are also fully capable of adapting, learning new things and reasoning outside their native language.

Check out the article HERE.

On Language: Is English the Most Difficult to Learn?

Last year, I read this really great article in the Economist on language. It tried to determine which world tongue was most difficult to learn, had the most idiosyncrasies and most complex grammar or spelling rules. While there are many contenders (the usual suspects: English, Latin, Greek, German, Russian, etc.) the magazine arrives at Tuyuca of the East Amazon region as the "most difficult."

A few interesting lines from the article:

• German has three genders, seemingly so random that Mark Twain wondered why “a young lady has no sex, but a turnip has”. (Mädchen is neuter, whereas Steckrübe is feminine.)
  
• English is a relatively simple language, absurdly spelled. “Ghoti,” as wordsmiths have noted, could be pronounced “fish”: gh as in “cough”, o as in “women” and ti as in “motion”.
  
• Latin’s six cases cower in comparison with Estonian’s 14, which include inessive, elative, adessive, abessive, and the system is riddled with irregularities and exceptions.
  
• Most fascinating is a feature that would make any journalist tremble. Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something. Diga ape-wi means that “the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)”, while diga ape-hiyi means “the boy played soccer (I assume)”.

All in all, it's a great (sometimes humorous) piece detailing the complexities of communication which is often intersected by culture, history, class and tone. In light of the recent publication of a book called "Globish" by Robert McCrum exploring how English became the world's language I thought I'd dig the Economist article up and share.

Don't know of a specific link to the site, so I posted the text after the jump.