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September 06 2010
By any other name
You make two paper bags and put a rose in each… [Y]ou mark one of the bags “Rose” and the other bag, although it also has roses inside, you label “Mowed Grass”… Then you invite people to sniff each bag… They they have to rate how pleasant the smell is, how sweet the smell is… And it turns out that a rose by another name—Mowed Grass—does not smell as sweet. People overwhelmingly said that the bag marked rose smelled to them, sweeter.
NPR has a fantastic interview with Lera Boroditsky, in which she describes this and a few other experiments she and her students have performed. She’s also written How Does Language Shape the Way We Think?, which goes into more detail (though not about the rose experiment).
(via Lost in Translation)
August 29 2010
The monochrome desert of “its”
[O]nce gender connotations have been imposed on impressionable young minds, they lead those with a gendered mother tongue to see the inanimate world through lenses tinted with associations and emotional responses that English speakers — stuck in their monochrome desert of “its” — are entirely oblivious to.
New York Times Magazine has a superb update on the claims made by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
I lived in France for two years, and like many English speakers, struggled with the gender of nouns. I’ve often wondered whether gender affects perception of the world. It turns out it does, to an extent. The language we speak does affect the way we view the world, but it isn’t a “prison house.”
I also posted this to draw your to the phrase “stuck in their monochrome desert of ‘its’.” It’s just splendid. It sent shivers down my spine.
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