In sy skrywe van 25 Februarie (Denke en taal) verwys Angus na prof. Lera Boroditsky en haar navorsing oor die effek wat taal op denke het. Ek het op ‘n fassinerende artikel afgekom, waar sy in leketaal beskryf watter geweldige impak taal het op hoe die mens dink. Sy noem die artikel “How does our language shape the way we think?” en dis te lees by http://edge.org/conversation/how-does-our-language-shape-the-way-we-think.
Sy begin die artikel met die vraag of mense wat verskillende tale praat, verskillend dink oor dieselfde dinge. Hierna kom sy, na aanleiding van empiriese navorsing tot die volgende gevolgtrekking:
“What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world. Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our experience of being human.”
Hierna beskryf sy die uitgebreide veld-navorsing én laboratorium-navorsing wat hulle gedoen het op tientalle verskillende taalgroepe wat haar tot die gevolgtrekking in die vorige paragraaf gebring het. Een van die talle navorsingsprojekte is gedoen onder die Aborigines in Australië. Ek haal, met erkenning aan prof Boroditsky, die volgende aan uit die artikel, aangesien baie verlore sou gaan indien ek dit in eie woorde sou omsit. Sy is hier aan die woord:
“Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of words like "right," "left," "forward," and "back," which, as commonly used in English, define space relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space.1 This is done at all scales, which means you have to say things like "There's an ant on your southeast leg" or "Move the cup to the north northwest a little bit." One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is "Where are you going?" and the answer should be something like " South-southeast, in the middle distance." If you don't know which way you're facing, you can't even get past "Hello."
The result is a profound difference in navigational ability and spatial knowledge between speakers of languages that rely primarily on absolute reference frames (like Kuuk Thaayorre) and languages that rely on relative reference frames (like English).2 Simply put, speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are much better than English speakers at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings. What enables them — in fact, forces them — to do this is their language. Having their attention trained in this way equips them to perform navigational feats once thought beyond human capabilities. Because space is such a fundamental domain of thought, differences in how people think about space don't end there. People rely on their spatial knowledge to build other, more complex, more abstract representations. Representations of such things as time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality, and emotions have been shown to depend on how we think about space. So if the Kuuk Thaayorre think differently about space, do they also think differently about other things, like time? This is what my collaborator Alice Gaby and I came to Pormpuraaw to find out.
To test this idea, we gave people sets of pictures that showed some kind of temporal progression (e.g., pictures of a man aging, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. If you ask English speakers to do this, they'll arrange the cards so that time proceeds from left to right. Hebrew speakers will tend to lay out the cards from right to left, showing that writing direction in a language plays a role.3 So what about folks like the Kuuk Thaayorre, who don't use words like "left" and "right"? What will they do?
The Kuuk Thaayorre did not arrange the cards more often from left to right than from right to left, nor more toward or away from the body. But their arrangements were not random: there was a pattern, just a different one from that of English speakers. Instead of arranging time from left to right, they arranged it from east to west. That is, when they were seated facing south, the cards went left to right. When they faced north, the cards went from right to left. When they faced east, the cards came toward the body and so on. This was true even though we never told any of our subjects which direction they faced. The Kuuk Thaayorre not only knew that already (usually much better than I did), but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to construct their representations of time.”
Prof Boroditsky verwys in die artikel verder na onder andere Engels, Turks, Russies, Mandaryns, Indonesies, Spaans en hoe die taalverskille mense anders laat dink. Engelssprekendes dink bv “horisontaal” oor tyd. Tyd lê bv “voor” jou of “agter” jou, terwyl in Mandaryns daar “vertikaal” oor tyd gedink word. Volgend maand is “bo” en laas maand is “onder, ens. Verder beskryf sy hoe verskillende tale “dink” oor tyd, spasie, voorwerpe, geslag en nog heelwat meer. Ek wil almal wat in hierdie onderwerp belangstel, aanraai om die artikel te gaan lees by die webadres heel bo in my skrywe genoem. Sy kom tot die volgende slotsom: “Taken together, these results show that linguistic processes are pervasive in most fundamental domains of thought, unconsciously shaping us from the nuts and bolts of cognition and perception to our loftiest abstract notions and major life decisions. Language is central to our experience of being human, and the languages we speak profoundly shape the way we think, the way we see the world, the way we live our lives.”
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