8 years ago
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How Morality Changes in a Foreign Language
What defines who we are? Our habits? Our aesthetic tastes? Our memories? If pressed, I would answer that if there is any part of me that sits at my core, that is an essential part of who I am, then surely it must be my moral center, my deep-seated sense of right and wrong. And yet, like many other people who speak more than one language, I often have the sense that I’m a slightly different person in each of my languages—more assertive in English, more relaxed in French, more sentimental in Czech.
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+1Submitted 8 years ago by sashinator
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+1Submitted 8 years ago by sashinator
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Psycholinguistics is a fascinating topic in general, and mostly scientists and researchers are split down whether language induces thought or is an expression of thought.
As far as I can tell, language, at the very least, influences thought even for things we take for granted or intuition like color (see 'Colour is int the eye of the beholder' related link - members of a Namibian tribe with a different linguistic taxonomy for color from western languages struggle to pick out certain shades of blue among greens even though they can easily pick out slight shades of green among similar greens because they have different words for them)
In my own native tongue (Serbian/Croatian), the word 'law' is synonymous with 'right', 'justice' and 'rule' (pravo, pravda, pravilo), while 'governance' (vlada) is a separate word. In my adopted language of English, 'law' is synonymous with 'rule' which in turn is synonymous with 'governance'. These concepts definitely influence how these 2 cultures approach both governance and law. English-speakers, I find are far more pragmatic, while my native tongue speakers are far more prone to emotional bursts (which can lead to public revolt and even civil war in the case of governance).