In Borditsky’s SAR lecture from May 2017, she addresses how language can change the way we think. She initially premises that language does not change one’s ability to think, but rather what key pieces of information each culture identifies and connects to. This video really resonates with me as somebody who speaks several languages and has always lived in a very multicultural city. I grew up in an English-speaking household but went to a French school where we were only allowed to speak French. I also made French friends, who also only spoke French, and for a period of about a year, my thoughts and dreams were also in French. For that year, I found it incredibly strange that the reflection in my own head was a different language than the one I shared with my parents. The rest of my family, parents, and siblings, are monolingual and it was weird to feel like I was a bit “slower” in my native language. Now, I can hardly speak French and I feel extremely estranged from the language as I haven’t used it in years and really have no place to exercise my skills. As a bilingual speaker, I experienced firsthand the malleability of language. Language is not pre-determined and its existence shifts through time and place, both on a cultural and personal level. 

In the subsequent points, I outline six ideas Borditsky brings up and I relate them back to my own experience with language.

1. [3:13] –  Borditsky opens her lecture with an example of how a verb in different languages will change the meaning of a sentence and what is being communicated. After I graduated from my undergrad (well after I stopped speaking French), I spent about 6 months intensively learning Spanish. And knowing French really helped my listening and vocabulary skills but made it unbelievably hard to properly pronounce Spanish vowels, specifically the sound of “e”. Because in French the sound of “e” changes depending on the letters surrounding it, so the sound of “e” can actually have dozens of phonetic sounds, whereas, in Spanish, “e” is always one sound. My only English-speaking classmates found the pronunciation aspect much easier than me but often struggled with the speed of the language because English is a very wordy language. In Spanish, the verb inherently tells the who, and speakers generally drop the pronoun before the verb, making the sentence more direct and requiring fewer words to describe a situation.
2. [6:40] – Borditsky shows a chart that looks at several Navajo verb stems that describe different endings to the verb for eating. The different stems then change the what or the how of what the person was eating. In English, we need to use additional words to provide context, whereas, in the Navajo language, the content is inherently described in the word (Borditsky, 2017). In situational descriptions, finding alternatives to expression is much easier because we can name the physical thing that would otherwise be embedded into the term; however, it’s much more challenging to use appropriately translate or describe a feeling that is explicit in one language but not in another. As a philosophy student, I needed to read a lot of German translations of philosophical texts and an issue I always ran into was that there are no true translations for many of the words that describe feelings. The German language has a far more expansive vocabulary than English for describing the way one feels. Perhaps if the English language had more words for describing how we feel, then we would be more attuned to our emotional needs!
3. [19:15] – Borditsky shares the fact that Russians have different words for light and dark blue, which is interesting considering how many cultures still don’t have a word for the color blue (Borditsky, 2017). When reading “The Oddesy”, Homer described the sea as a “wine-dark” because many ancient civilizations didn’t have a word for blue, but rather saw colors in shades, (dark vs light). Her point also reminds me of a study conducted that compared western conceptions of blue to the Himba tribe which does not have a word for blue because in their language blue is considered a shade of green (Lindsey et al., 2015).
4. [22:00] – Borditsky asks the audience if they speak another language that uses gendered endings, and she shares that the gendered words also change the way the culture perceives masculine and feminine (Borditsky, 2017). As a french student, when I was in elementary school, my second-grade teacher would ask us to line up against the wall before we would enter the classroom and she would individually say a word to each student before entering, in french, and the student needed to tell her if it was masculine or feminine. When repeating the word back to her the student also needed to do the action of either putting their index finger over their top lip (to create a faux mustache) to signify masculine or they needed to bow and pretend to lift their imaginary skirt to signify feminine. So instead of verbally saying if the word is masculine or feminine, we needed to show a feminine or masculine mannerism.
5. [29:18] – Borditsky puts up an example of several different headlines that selectively use different language to describe the situation of Cheney shooting Wittington. And she uses a very comical example of how language can change how information is received by the reader, by pulling a headline from “The Onion” that satirizes the situation (Borditsky, 2017). I think this is a really interesting approach to assessing language because it demonstrates how the words we use, or don’t use, can change how a situation is perceived. I think the example of a new article is really smart because it shows how bias or motive can be interwoven into political writing to change what the reader is encouraged to believe.
6. [36:05] – Borditsky also points out how different cultures count and how different cultures also have different textual methods of documenting counting (Borditsky, 2017). While growing up, my best friend was Chinese and she moved to Canada when she was 12. She was also very good at math, and she told me that one of the reasons why doing math in Chinese was much easier, was because of how phonetically simple numbers were. The phonetic consistency and predictability of numbers in Chinese actually made it easier to do multiplication and division.
7. [40:00] – In one of Borditsky’s concluding thoughts she notes how certain individuals within the Nicaraguan deaf community never learned the signs for numbers, so they struggle to understand how numbers work (Borditsky, 2017). This example reminded me of the history of written language, and that initially, language started as hieroglyphics on rocks in Mesopotamia and for centuries most cultures used oral language to communicate. Math and written communication are very much a learned technology and not inherent in the human identity, despite how dependent modern societies are on written and mathematical concepts. In fact, our familiarity with written language and math is a fairly recent development in human history; during the early Victorian century, many folks did not know how to do complex math or how to read and write.

References

Lindsey, D. T., Brown, A. M., Brainard, D. H., & Apicella, C. L. (2015). Hunter-gatherer color naming provides new insight into the evolution of color terms. Current Biology, 25(18), 2441–2446. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2015.08.006

Borditsky, Lera. (2017). Lera Boroditsky, How the Languages We Speak Shape the Ways We Think. YouTube. Retrieved April 8, 2023, from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iGuuHwbuQOg.