How often do we assume ladybugs are female?

Recalling Chapter 4 on the spoken language, we learnt that language affects the way we see the world. Focusing on this point, I went to dig around the Internet, and found several studies which I thought were really interesting.


1. Language shapes colour perception

"Different languages divide up the color continuum differently: some make many more distinctions between colors than others, and the boundaries often don't line up across languages."

You might have experienced this quite often. Like how I would describe our UB tee as blue, but my friend who studied design comes waltzing in and tells me it's navy, or palatinate, or cobalt. Or something.



"BLUE. Why are you being so picky about this?!"


But that is just English. What about languages that have lesser terms for colours?

Example. Here be colours.



To most of us, we know that they are orange, pink and red respectively. But to people from the Himba tribe, they call all these "serandu". To put this into perspective, give them a red card, they say it's "serandu". Give them an orange card, and it's "serandu" as well. They can see that they are different if you put them next to each other, but show them separately, and they might confuse them to be the same card.

To make things more interesting, if you teach them new names for the colours, they are able to learn how to identify the different shades in the future even without any comparison.

Let's go back to different shades of blue (again, haha). To an English speaker, all shades of blue are called "Blue". But in Russian, there is no such single term that categorises all shades we term as blue. They have this different terms between light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). Due to having more words for different shades of blue, Russians are better than English speakers in visually discriminating shades of blue.


Nooooooo they are all blueeeeeeeee.


2. Language determines your navigational ability

If I tell you to give me directions, you would often use words like, "left", "right", "in front", "behind" etc. Most of these terms are relative to us. A typical string of directions would be, "turn left (from where you are) at the end of the block", "go forward (from here) and then turn right at the corner"

But for Aboriginal people, they give directions with Naughty Elephant Spray Water cardinal-direction terms aka North South East West. For everything. Directions become "Go southwest, then head Northeast to the west". Telling them that they have something on one of their legs, and you have to say "There's something on your southeast leg."

Tell them to come over and sit with you, and it will be "Hey, take your bags and come sit to the northnorthwest."

This means that for Aboriginal people, they must stay oriented at all times without the help of a compass or a smartphone with 3G capability. English speakers rely on language that uses relative reference frames (i.e. Your left is my right), whereas Aboriginal people uses absolute reference frames (North will always be North. Turn 180 degrees from North, and it's South) This results in Aboroginal people being better navigators than English speakers, even in unfamiliar territory, because they are just so much better at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are.

Now for another interesting bit: Imagine if you never had a "left" in your vocabulary. Will it still affect the way you navigate?

The answer is yes.

A group of deaf schoolschildren invented their own sign language in the 1970s. In the early stages of developing this language, they did not have terms for "left" and "right". Even though all their senses function the same as us, not only they are having extreme difficulty explaining space, they have difficulty figuring out where things are too. In a study, an item was placed at the corner of a room, and they were told to direct a fellow person to the item. The result was that because of the lack of certain linguistic codes for space such as "left of", they have more difficulty internalising a mental map of the room and orientate themselves properly.

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In several of these links, they mentioned that language shape how we perceive space, time, colors, and objects. If you search around, studies have found that language can also affect people in more profound ways such as "constructing events, reason about causality, keep track of numbers, understand material substance, perceive and experience emotion, reason about other people's minds, choose to take risks, and even in the way they choose professions and spouses." (Google around. Examples are everywhere!)

This all ties back to how language is arbitrary, how it shapes the way we think and view the world, and even our lifestyle. They all support the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in which it suggests that the structure of a language affects the ways in which its speakers are able to conceptualize their world, like how the ability to recognise colours comes with having names for them. It brings a whole new deep meaning to the point in our slides that says, "Language is a kind of knowledge."


This is the end of my long-winded entry. For those who are bored, I give you some fun. This has got nothing to do with communications, but well..

Munsell Hue Test

My eyes just died. But at least I have a victory.




I took ages completing this. Glad that this doesn't have a timer. I had to keep leaning back and forth. Blue-Green row was the hardest for me; I was working on the blue side, then by the time I reached the green bit, they all looked the same to me HAHAHA.