Peer Editing to Rodrigo -- EnglishtextsM

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Date Posted: 19:40:34 06/18/07 Mon
Author: Daniela
Subject: Peer Editing to Rodrigo

Language And The Way Of Thinking

Can we assume that the language we speak form [Wvf] our way of thinking? People have been raising this question for millennia and [P] nowadays [P] linguists have been paying special attention to it. A well renowned American linguist [P] named Benjamin Lee Whorf [P] studied Hopi, a Native Indigenous language spoken in southern United States and he stated that Hopi [V] and speakers of English [Be] understand differently the same things because of language differences. As we could depict, the resolution to this issue is [P] in some sense [P] complicated. The main point in this problem is the fact that human beings do not have only languages [P] but they have culture, traditions, habits and a lot of other factors that shapes their cognitive system.

As we know, there are languages that not have similar synonymous, [P]for example [P] in Brazilian Portuguese [P] there are a lot [V] technology terminology [Q] from another [Ww] languages that are not translated to Portuguese and even sometimes [X] when one is rendered [P] we have difficulties to understand the meaning. In general, the problem is not only with words. In languages like English [P] for instance [P] the tense, aspect and modality system are hugely different from Romance languages, [P] a good and simple example are these tiny phrases (In quotation marks): �You know it� have a meaning completely different from �I knew it�. In Portuguese, this kind of difference is phonologically marked and these phrases are rendered as �Voc� sabe isso.� and �Eu sabia isso.� or even in a intonational level these phrases are rendered as �Voc� sabe isso?� and �Eu sabia isso?� in interrogatives. Whorf [R]�believed that because of this kind of difference, Hopi speakers and English speakers think about events differently, with Hopi speakers focusing more on the source of the information and English speakers focusing more on the time of the event.� Semantic features change their values from [V] language to another; [P] in English [P] for example [P] the feature feminine rarely is marked phonologically.

Whorf stated that English treats time as �being broken up into chunks that can be counted�three days, four minutes, half an hour�English speakers tend to treat time as a group of objects�seconds, minutes, hours�instead of as a smooth unbroken stream.� In other side [We] Hopi people do not understand time in this way, so they imagine about it differently [X]; for them it is �a continuous cycle�. This fact does not mean that languages are forced a certain view of time on us [R]; it could also be that our notion of time is reflected in our language, or that the way we deal with time in our culture is reflected in both our language and our thoughts. It seems likely [R] that language, thought, and culture form three levels of cognitive interaction.

In some sense [P] people think in [Ww] language much [Ww] of the time [P] but not always. We can easily retrieve mental images and sensations that would be impossible to be explained in words. We can think about the sound of an instrumental band, like Jazz bands, the contours of a draw, or the smell of foods [Q] and [P] as know [P] no one [Ww] of these thoughts require language technique.

The human beings have a natural skill to think about something even when this thing does not have a lexical representation. The colors, for example. �There are an infinite number of different colors, and they don't all have their own names. If you have a can of red paint and slowly add blue to it, drop by drop, it will very slowly change to a reddish purple, then purple, then bluish purple. Each drop will change the color very slightly, but there is no one moment when it will stop being red and become purple. The color spectrum is continuous.� Our language, however, has few names to depict this large set of colors.

In our language [P] we trend [Ww] to put things into groups, mainly when we are in a process of acquiring language (when we are children). One of the jobs of a child learning language is to figure out which things are called by the same word. For example, after learning that a wagon car is a vehicle, the child may see a tractor and say car, thinking that the two things count as the same. Or the child may not realize that a coupe (like a Ferrari, with two places to sit, driver and passenger) also counts as a car. The child has to learn what range of objects is covered by the word car. We learn to group things that are similar and give them the same label.

To sum up, the influence of language is not so much on what we can think about, or even what we do think about, but rather on how we break up reality into categories and label them. And in this, our language and our thoughts are probably both greatly influenced by our culture. And another important element is that learning a different language [P] which is very different from your own [P] may give us some insight into another culture and another way of life.

Comments:

Rodrigo, your essay is good, but I think that it�s necessary some changes, besides the ones that I�ve marked. Firstly, you should write, in the 5� paragraph, the reference from which you remove the quotation and, in my opinion, you should join the 4� and 5� paragraphs. Secondly, you might make the paragraphs more connected because I think they are free in the essay, without a connection between them. Thirdly, in an argumentative essay you have to convince people who are reading your essay, and I think you didn�t write trying to convince them. Maybe you can rewrite some sentences, in a persuasive way.

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