When the Viaduct de Millau opened in the south of France in 2004, this tallest bridge in the world won worldwide accolades. German newspapers described how it “floated above the clouds” with “elegance and lightness” and “breathtaking” beauty. In France, papers praised the “immense” “concrete giant.” Was it mere coincidence that the Germans saw beauty where the French saw heft and power? Lera Borodisky thinks not. In a series of clever experiments guided by pointed questions, Boroditsky is amassing evidence that, yes, language shapes thought. The effect is powerful enough, she says, that “the private mental lives of speakers of different languages may differ dramatically,” not only when they are thinking in order to speak, “but in all manner of cognitive tasks,” including basic sensory perception. “Even a small fluke of grammar”—the gender of nouns—“can have an effect on how people think about things in the world,” she says.
As in that bridge, in German, the noun for bridge, Brucke, is feminine. In French, pont is masculine. German speakers saw prototypically female features; Frenchspeakers, masculine ones. Similarly, Germans describe keys (Schlussel) with words such as hard, heavy, jagged, and metal, while to Spaniards keys (llaves) are golden, intricate, little, and lovely. Guess which language construes key as masculine and which as feminine? Grammatical gender also shapes how we construe abstractions. In 85 percent of artistic depictions of death and victory, for instance, the idea is represented by a man if the noun is masculine and a woman if it is feminine, says Boroditsky. Germans tend to paint death as male, and Russians tend to paint it as female. Language even shapes what we see. People have a better memory for colors if different shades have distinct names—not English?s light blue and dark blue, for instance, but Russian?s goluboy and sinly. Skeptics of the language-shapes-thought claim have argued that that?s a trivial finding, showing only tha
A.Language does not shape thoughts in any significant way
B.The relationship between language and thought is an age-old issue
C.The language we speak determines how we think and see the world
D.Whether language shapes thought needs to be empirically supported