‎Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short article that set in motion one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the 20th century.

Sure, the speech-thought debate is usually relegated to the land of linguistics, neuroscience, anthropology, and dense Continental philosophy (who doesn’t love to curl up with some Derrida tome after a long day at work?), but the question is more than a mere intellectual fad. This example highlights the “everydayness” of this question:

Suppose I say to you in English that “I spent yesterday evening with a neighbor.” You may well wonder whether my companion was male or female, but I have the right to tell you politely that it’s none of your business. But if we were speaking French or German, I wouldn’t have the privilege to equivocate in this way, because I would be obliged by the grammar of language to choose between voisin or voisine; Nachbar or Nachbarin. These languages compel me to inform you about the sex of my companion whether or not I feel it is remotely your concern.

"...if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about."

And it talks about geographic language for 2-3 pages, which is an interesting topic but can be explained in fewer words.

Tags: language, universality, geographic,

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