Does language shape the way we think?
For this task, we watched Lera Borditsky’s SAR lecture (from May 2017).
My Annotations with the timestamp:
10:35 -This is such a thought provoking question on whether people who speak different languages think differently. Does this have an impact if you speak multiple languages?
13:21 -This reminds me of “island time” in some places like Hawaii or Fiji where the culture is more laid back and relaxed and not so time focused. People schedule times to meet and get things done, but these times are more of a “soft” time and being late isn’t really a big deal as you are on “island time.”
18:30 – “When you teach people to talk in a new way, you are teaching them to think in a new way as well.” Just this phrase alone makes me reflect on teaching students and how we help them to approach different situations in life such as developing a growth mindset over a negative mindset. If I approach something with positive speech, I think in a more positive way. If I speak negatively, then I approach things in a more negative way.
20: 15 – I wonder the same thing? How are words assigned a gender? I would like to know more about that process when new words evolve? To make this more complicated are there words that are not assigned a gender? In our household we try not to label things as male or female, yet so many items in our life are labeled as one or the other.
28:54- It is interesting how meanings can be easily changed just by tweaking a few words. I think it’s a real art to be able to wordsmith sentences to mean different things. The example with “Chenney bagging a lawyer” reminds me of trying to speak Mandarin and how one word could mean three different things depending on the accent I used when speaking. Needless to say, there were many times that I was laughed at when trying to speak Mandarin because I used the wrong version of the word in the wrong situation.
33:42 – When they are only focusing on the more significant items such as the toast then perhaps the participant is filtering out the “noise” or what they see as unnecessary features of information.
45:15 – “Linguistic diversity” is not something I have ever really thought about before. Lera Boroditsky has really opened my mind to how complex language truly is and caused me to consider all the layers of diversity when we discuss language.