i202 Fall 2010 School of Information, UC Berkeley

Guy Deutscher writes an interesting article asking "how our mother tongue really shapes our experience of the world". He inquires about categories in the most abstract sense, by exploring whether our mother tongues "oblige" us to think in a certain way because of the constraints of the mother tongue itself. For instance, people speaking "gendered languages" such as French "imprint gender traits for objects so strongly in the mind that these associations obstruct speakers’ ability to commit information to memory", but, that doesn't mean that they "fail to understand that inanimate objects do not really have biological sex".

I know people who speak languages "that rely primarily on geographical coordinates" and sometimes when we speak, there is often confusion and then a request for clarification. Imagine a native english speaker trying to figure out which room in the house is the north-west room!

What habits of mind have you developed as a direct result of your mother tongue?