Psycholinguistics

 

There is no coincidence that English people are known by privacy, Polish people by honesty and Japanese by respect for the others. The differences between peoples come from the first language: structure, grammar, words. In the book "Through the Language Glass. How Worlds Colour Your Wold” dr Guy Deutscher states that the language we speak creates in our brain certain schemes and evaluation of reality. Therefore, the word "bridge" for Spanish is associated with strength, but for Germans with elegance. In most European languages, not just people, but the words have a specific gender and phenomena that influence our perception. Death in Polish is feminine, so death’s imagine is an old woman with a scythe in hand, while in German is masculine (der Tod), in English, there is no gender, so it looks like skeleton. The importance of gender things show cartoons, dubbed in different languages, for example in French fork will be dubbed by a woman, while in Polish by a man. That shows that by learning languages we don’t only discover different cultures. Moreover, that’s the best key to understanding the world.

Source: nesweek.pl