Becoming literate in more than one language can be quite a challenging undertaking for many. As many struggle to learn English as a second language the misuse of many terms in inevitable. Problems can arise as the connotations of meanings are distorted. For example one person learning the language may say” I had a massage on my answering machine” instead of I had a message on my answering machine” These are quite different messages for the mistaken “ e” for an “a”.
This serves as a funny example of one of the mistakes that are made when a person learns a second language that is not their native tongue. Learning the second language as a child is easier as the pre-reading and speaking skills become more natural as the child grows. As an adult many patterns are already innate and are more difficult to change in the brain. As different methodologies are used to teach the languages, teachers globally struggle with language inconsistencies.
Linguistic relativity is a view that language is affected by cognitive processes in important ways. One way is the process beyond linguistics to include anthropology, philosophy, and sociology along with other disciplines. Color perception, for example, can be counter intuitive to linguistic studies and as people are taught color perception the cross language barrier are evident . Russian speakers are better able to distinguish the various shades of blue than English speakers.
There are many political and religious implications in linguistic relativity that will be examined. Pseudoscientific language comparison takes two or more languages and compares them to similarities in sound and meaning. These words are often misleading as the sheer volume of language sounds and words makes the comparison so difficult to manage. This study of the language is often used in Biblical studies as a method of proving a particular point of view. Hebrew linguistics experts may want to define a particular Biblical word in one context while another may give the Bible word a Greek meaning. This often alters the message. An example could be in the word, British, which claims to be “Hebrew” word meaning covenant. This supported the proof that the British people are covenant people of God. .
People who speak in different languages have a different world view. Bilingual speakers have an alternative vision of the world, as many social scientists will concurrent that the thinking perspectives go back and forth. The linguistic differences seem to influence how a person sees an event. People make sense of objects and events around them by classifying them into categories.. The amount of influence that language affects this is the fluency that a person has with each language. An example in this study is how the Germans perceive a motion study. The German language brain sees a bicycle ride as goal oriented process and if two or more actions were involved. The German speakers matched ambiguous motions to a goal oriented scene. For example a woman walking down the street was going to a car, a shop, a park. She was not just walking to the Germans. This happened as responses in about 40% of the German participants in the study. The English speaking people only saw a goal in about 25% of the cases.
Another instance of the language differences is in the use of pronouns. To the English speaker, pronouns are male and female gender. In some European languages there are pronouns that refer to inanimate objects. Experiments in linguistics suggest that English as native speakers think of an object in terms of no formal gender. The thinking for speaking beliefs suggests that speakers organize their thinking during speech to meet the requirements of their language.
The methods to understand the nuances in language and culture are not clear cut guidelines. Through the development of society they have become intertwined in a possible tangle of ideologies and beliefs. Language acquisition as a young child is an easier study than those of the adults who have acquired a setoff culture mores along with the language skills. Adolescents and adults who engage in language socialization do so whenever they go into a new domain of study. Every social interaction for them is mediated by language, does not matter whether it is nonverbal or spoken
Conclusion
Languages differ in the way they convey. Take for example the story of the Australians giving directions using north and west instead of left and right. To an American these directions are just about useless . If you were born into a language that thinks of male and female verbs one might be more inclined to think in terms of gender. The kind of information that you are processing may make a difference though in the amount of information that the mind tends to process in this manner. Perhaps the aspects of gender are not as important in the natural language as it tends to be more realistic than the newly developed language. More details just may be necessary to convey the same meaning in one language versus another.
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