In Lera Boroditsky video she starts by talking about how language is a powerful tool and she calls our gift for language “ a magical ability that we humans have ”. She even adds that we can plant ideas into people’s minds, which makes language a pervasive manipulative tool. Language actually can have a profound impact on the way we perceive our world to the extent that it can dictate the way we live our lives. Although, we generally use language to interact and to convey our thoughts and emotions. There are other uses for it for example it could be used in politics, and as a marketing tool etc. The way we speak reflect on our level of education, our intellect and cognitive ability. I find it fascinating that Lera mentions that our brains reconstitute these signals that are coming from the vibrations in our eardrums into thoughts.
2.09 She uses Trump in a sentence and then she asks the audience to focus on the verb instead of the name.
5.23 She speaks about languages that do not have numbers, colour words and left or right words. This makes me think about the subjective nature of translation. In Arabic for example there are really funny puns and jokes that would not sound funny at all when translated to English. In fact in some cases translating these jokes is not possible from Arabic to English.
11.49 Time & culture
Different cultures use different hand gestures to talk about the past and the future. This makes me think about the relationship between language and culture. Each culture depicts time in the past and future in different ways. How in English we organize series of events from left to right. In Arabic & Hebrew you will have to organise time from right to left.
24.39 How people perceive objects based on the grammatical gender hurricanes with female names are deadlier, because people underestimate the damage and perceive the risk to be lower.
32.34 Can we change what people remember by changing their language environment? How we construe and construct language can shape our world? “Speakers of different languages witness the same event but come away remembering different things.” L, Boroditsky, 2017 I think this statement resonated with me. This makes me wonder about bilingual and multilingual people. So how about people who are starting to learn a new language would that change their perception of reality ?
This is such an eye-opener speech by Lera Boroditsky, 2017 about how encoding/decoding language could influence how we perceive our world.
Hi Rania,
The time and culture thing is very fascinating to me as well! It was also so interesting to see how people from cultures where locations are described relative to overall direction should actually be considered as the most consistent, as they always organized arrangement from East to West. Very impressive to be able to understand direction so well in any setting, I am lost without the mountains to guide me North!