A. drop B. affect C. aware D. differ E. reality F. reveals G. involves H. brilliant l. recognize J. influence K. continuous |
ls It Possible to Think About Something Even If There's No Word for It?
Though people think in language much of the time, it is likely that people think about something even if they don't have a word for it.
Take colors, for example. There are an infinite number of colors that don't all have their own names. If you have a can of red paint and add blue to it very slowly, each will change the color slightly, but there is no one moment when it will stop being red and become purple. The color spectrum (色谱) is . Our language, however, isn't continuous. Our language makes us break the color spectrum up into "red", "purple", and so on.
The language of the Dani of New Guinea only two basic color terms, one for "dark" colors (including blue and green) and one for "light" colors (including yellow and red). Their language breaks up the color spectrum differently from ours. But that doesn't mean they can't see the difference between yellow and red; a study that they can see different colors just as English speakers can.
So our language doesn't force us to see only what it gives us words for, but it can how we put things into groups. One of the jobs of a child learning language is to which things are called by the same word. After learning that the family's St. Bernard is a dog, the child may see a cow and say dog, thinking that the two things count as the same. Or the child may not be that the neighbor's chihuahua also counts as a dog. The child has to learn what range of objects is covered by the word dog. We learn to group things that are similar and give them the same label, but what counts as being similar enough to fall under a single label may in languages.
In other words, the of language isn't so much on what we can think about, or even what we do think about, but rather on how we break up into categories and label them. And in this, our language and our thoughts are probably both greatly influenced by our culture.