Complex Numbers

Tongue-Tied

Something interesting I found at BBC Future:

    The weird way language affects our sense of time and space  

It's also a book ad:

In our new book, we explore the many internal and external factors that influence and manipulate the way we think – from genetics to digital technology and advertising. And it appears that language can have a fascinating effect on the way we think about time and space.

And I'll do my usual pointing out that this isn't settled science.

But a growing number of experts believe language can influence how we think just as our thoughts and culture can shape how language develops.

Honestly, I'd kind of figured that was the case. I think in words, myself. Usually English ones. But I've asked other people, and some say they don't.

I imagine kids these days think in emoji.

For example, we know that people remember things they pay more attention to. And different languages force us to pay attention to an array of different things, be it gender, movement or colour.

I'm still just focused on getting French pronunciation close to correct.

Linguists, neuroscientists, psychologists and others have spent decades trying to uncover the ways in which language influences our thoughts, often focusing on abstract concepts such as space and time which are open to interpretation.

I hope they took into account my anecdotal evidence about not everyone thinking in words.

There follows a good bit of examples of the science people did to investigate this. I could probably nitpick some of the methods, but I don't feel like it today.

This is the part that most interested me, as someone trying to be bilingual:

Things start to get really strange, however, when looking at what happens in the minds of people who speak more than one language fluently. "With bilinguals, you are literally looking at two different languages in the same mind," explains Panos Athanasopoulos, a linguist at Lancaster University in the UK. "This means that you can establish a causal role of language on cognition, if you find that the same individual changes their behaviour when the language context changes."

While it is true that I complained about how bad this year's Beaujolais Nouveau was (it was really bad), and joked about how that means I'm turning French, that doesn't mean I'm turning French. When you learn a new language at my advanced age, things go a lot slower.

We aren't necessarily prisoners to thinking a certain way, though. Intriguingly, Casasanto has shown that you can quickly reverse people's mental time representation by training them to read mirror-reversed text, which goes in the opposite direction to what they're used to.

This refers to a part I didn't quote, which stated that people generally conceive of time moving in the same direction as their language writing. In contrast to language learning, I taught myself how to read mirror-reversed text (and upside-down, and upside-down mirror-reversed) when I was a kid, and I still conceive of time's arrow as moving left to right.

Maybe that's a case of just because I can do it doesn't mean I've internalized the connection to conception of time.

There's a whole lot more to the article, but I'll skip to near the end:

As this body of research grows, it is becoming increasingly clear that language is influencing how we think about the world around us and our passage through it.

Again, though, I wouldn't take it as settled science but more of a working hypothesis.

And while being multilingual won't necessarily make you a genius, we all can gain a fresh perspective and a more flexible understanding of the world by learning a new language.

A reasonable assertion, I think. One reason to actually learn a language rather than relying entirely on smartphone apps for translation.