Language Shapes The Way We Think
There are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world -- and they all
have different sounds, vocabularies and structures. But do they shape
the way we think? Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky shares examples of
language -- from an Aboriginal community in Australia that uses
cardinal directions instead of left and right to the multiple words for
blue in Russian -- that suggest the answer is a resounding yes. "The
beauty of linguistic diversity is that it reveals to us just how
ingenious and how flexible the human mind is," Boroditsky says. "Human
minds have invented not one cognitive universe, but 7,000."
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