Funeralyn Magan The Power Of Language

Although many argue that language shapes the way we think because they think our brand is set to think differently in different languages. What this means is that depending on the language our mind is set to think a certain way. For example, languages like Spanish, French, Russian, and Arabic have words in feminine and masculine. Grammar and tenses also play a part in language and how the brain processes the information included in different languages. “In Russian, you would have to mark tense and also gender, changing the verb if Mrs. Dumpty did the sitting. You would also have to decide if the sitting event was completed or not” (Boroditsky 469). Geralyn Magan shares her experience of language in her article “The Power of Language to Change

She states in her article, “we’re often unaware of how our language affects others. In fact, many of us think we’re sending positive messages to older adults when we’re actually using words that reveal our negative attitudes about aging” (Magan). Because we associate young as being good and old is to bad, it shapes the way we speak with others depending on their age. “When we blame things on age, it reflects the fact that we have internalized this notion that our older self is less valuable, less attractive, less active, than our younger self, and that is terribly self destructive. Everytime we say something deprecatory about ourselves or someone else on the basis of age, it undermines our self-esteem and our self-image”

Guy Deutscher states in his essay, “So different languages certainly make us speak about space in very different ways. but does this necessarily mean that we have to think about space differently?” The region where the most striking evidence for the impact of language on thought is exposed to the language of space — how we portray the orientation of the world around us. “Differences in how people think about space don’t end there. People rely on their spatial knowledge to build many other more complex or abstract representations including time, number, musical pitch, kinship relations, morality and emotions” (Boroditsky 471). If someone asks us for directions we have two ways to tell them, “The first uses egocentric coordinates, which depend on our own bodies: a left-right axis and a front-back axis orthogonal to it. The second system uses fixed geographic directions, which do not rotate with us wherever we turn” (Deutscher 450). But this doesn’t shape our way of thinking, because we use what we are most comfortable using. All these statements on how language shapes our brain to think a certain way can be proven