🚀 go-pugleaf

>On 22 Apr 1996, Ross Thompson wrote:
>> Oh, man, won't this myth ever die?  The notion that people's thoughts
>> are limited by the language that they speak has been debunked for
>> decades, and yet you still see it being quoted every month or so.  The
Debunked? What cave have you been living in? Anyone who speaks more than one 
language, especially languages from different language groups, will tell you 
that language shapes the way you think. Sometimes it's limiting, sometimes 
it's mind-expanding. For instance, there is no genderized pronoun in Thai. You 
can't tell if someone is talking about a man or a woman, unless the person 
says the name of whom they are talking about. On the other hand, in formal 
Thai a man ends every sentence with the word "kraap" and a woman ends every 
sentence with the word "ka". So even in writing, you always know if something 
is being said by a man or woman - something which is not a feature of English. 
This time, in English, if you don't know the name of the author, you have no 
idea if it's a man or woman.

To my way of thinking, these are limitations which language places on the 
people speaking those languages.

Chinese, Thai and Malaysian/Indonesian all have a strict sentence structure. 
Adjectives *always* follow nouns, never preceed them. Adverbs *always* follow 
verbs, they never come before a verb. In English, one of the more common 
tricks in comedy is to build up a string of adjectives, get the audience to 
expect a particular noun, and then switch to a different noun. It can be 
hillarious, but it can't be done in Chinese.

So what gave you the idea that language doesn't limit thought?



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