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Guy Deutscher

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The text is title Does Your Language Shape How You Think? by Guy Deutscher was published in The New York Times online on August 26th 2010. This online newspaper article is about how language impacts the way an individual’s mind functions. First of all, Deutscher takes a claim made by Benjamin Lee Whorf, a chemical engineer, who essentially stated that our native language constrains our mind and we are unable to grasp concepts that are not given words to, in our language. He said that when a language does not have a particular word for a concept, the concept itself cannot be understood by the speaker. Deutscher argues that Whorf did not have any evidence to substantiate this theory and that his claim is wrong on so many levels. He gives an …show more content…
Most countries would describe directions with terms we are familiar with using everyday such as left, right, behind, and ahead but in some parts of the world such as remote Aboriginal Australia or Bali, they use cardinal directions on an everyday basis, so everything we describe with terms like left, right, they substitute with east and west. They know their directions everywhere because they are accustomed to using geography to assess where north is where ever they are.
There are various other aspects where language comes into play such as colours where two different colours in English would be shades of the same colour in another; there are also certain languages where what you say has to be completely empirical or otherwise stated, so one would have to say whether they directly saw an animal or saw footprints of an animal, simply to indicate that and animal was there
Deutscher concludes his article by saying that our native language does affect our logical, intuitional and emotional outlook on the world but it does not mean that it limits how much we can learn, or alter our comprehension of concepts that are not familiar in our

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