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/lit/ - Literature

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1087608 No.1087608 [Reply] [Original]

In recent years, various experiments have shown that grammatical genders can shape the feelings and associations of speakers toward objects around them. In the 1990s, for example, psychologists compared associations between speakers of German and Spanish. There are many inanimate nouns whose genders in the two languages are reversed. A German bridge is feminine (die Brücke), for instance, but el puente is masculine in Spanish; and the same goes for clocks, apartments, forks, newspapers, pockets, shoulders, stamps, tickets, violins, the sun, the world and love. On the other hand, an apple is masculine for Germans but feminine in Spanish, and so are chairs, brooms, butterflies, keys, mountains, stars, tables, wars, rain and garbage. When speakers were asked to grade various objects on a range of characteristics, Spanish speakers deemed bridges, clocks and violins to have more “manly properties” like strength, but Germans tended to think of them as more slender or elegant. With objects like mountains or chairs, which are “he” in German but “she” in Spanish, the effect was reversed.

In a different experiment, French and Spanish speakers were asked to assign human voices to various objects in a cartoon. When French speakers saw a picture of a fork (la fourchette), most of them wanted it to speak in a woman’s voice, but Spanish speakers, for whom el tenedor is masculine, preferred a gravelly male voice for it. More recently, psychologists have even shown that “gendered languages” imprint gender traits for objects so strongly in the mind that these associations obstruct speakers’ ability to commit information to memory.

>> No.1087612

ITT: linguistic relativism!
inb4 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis flamewar.

>> No.1087618

That is a lot of chocolate.

>> No.1087629

>>1087608
Nobody eats chocolate like that

>> No.1087636

>>1087629
You'd break your fucking teeth. That slab's gotta be an inch and a half thick.

>> No.1087647

Isn't that the fatbitch who wrote Twilight?

>> No.1087658
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1087658

>>1087647

>> No.1087676

tl;dr: '"the limits of my language mean the limits of my world.' (Ludwig Wittgenstein)

>> No.1087681

>>1087612
>Implying we're supposed to know what the fuck you're talking about without explanation

>> No.1087709
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1087709

>>1087681
The original (strong) Sapir-Whorf hypothesis states that language determines, or sets the boundaries of thought (linguistic determinism). Tribes with no word for "left" and "right", for example, also tend not to have a concept for it, and as a result orient themselves in comparison to the cardinal directions and have great senses of direction. The trouble was that Sapir and Whorf believed that a person's thought was fully determined by their language, and could not conceptualize anything that wasn't encoded in it, which is not supported by evidence. New jargons spring up to describe things for which there are no words, and people whose languages have no word for "blue" can still tell the difference between "blue" and "green". People still like to argue about it, though.
OP's excerpt is an example of the weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or linguistic relativity. Language informs perception, but does not fully control cognition.

>> No.1087710
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1087710

>>1087681
>He doesn't know about linguistic relativity