A brief history of languages and their relations to our success.

By: Mina Ashraf

I have always been keen on contemplation of god’s creation and it always led
me to the same question: what makes humans unique? Every time I attempted
answering this question, I reached a different answer which I found to be
depending on my mood then; consequently, I started doubting my own
perception of reality. What if what I thought was red was your blue and her
green. Would I ever be able to know whether I describe salty correctly or my
salt is your sugar? Searching for answers, I decided to take a radically different
path to tackle this question – linguistics and etymology.

Language, in my opinion, was and still the most underestimated power in

history; its role in helping us survive served the humanity more than modern
medicine did. When we communicated together, we started to warn each other
of possible dangers, describe our dreams, and share ideas. The philosopher
Aristotle marked out our differences over 2,000 years ago. We are "rational
animals" pursuing knowledge for its own sake. We live by art and reasoning, he
wrote.
Our ability to tell stories, gossip, imagine, analyze the past, and predict the
future was affected squarely and deeply by how we confabulated. I personally
think that language relation with thought is both interesting and interchangeable.
For as long as humans existed, both our way of thinking and way of expressing
this thought have affected each other. However, it was of a shock to me when I
started studying other languages that the way I expressed my thoughts and
feelings differed with the language I was thinking in. This got me thinking about
the varying possibilities that would happen if we were born in the same
conditions but with a different mother tongue. Would we have different
personalities and if so does this mean that natives of some languages are more
creative, responsible or more slothful than others? I have divided my work into
three parts that would help us understand languages’ differences and then see if
we would be able to ring down the curtain on my proposed thesis.
 The first part is a thought experiment to understand how vocabulary affects
thinking. To do so let us pretend that the complexity of our universe’s colors
can be simplified into single words. For example, instead of describing the fall
foliage with complicated color combinations names, we would use the word
“orange” instead. Then, imagine if a boy was bornin Antarctica and he never got
the chance to see neither orange nor its derivates and then he was taken to the
united states of America. How would he express this phenomenon? Would he
depend on his cultural background or would he use similar elements of nature to
approximate his feelings towards this color? How would he describe it to a deaf
or a blind person? I never reached an answer to these questions, but I strongly
believe that he wouldn’t be able to describe it at all and he would go with even
more complicated combinations to describe it. His best trial would be less
accurate than the single word “orange” and remember we have simplified
orange from the set of names needed assigned to it. This experiment conceived
me that not only culture affects language, but also the place of birth and the
changing natural phenomena have a hand in it. Moreover, the exact opposite is
valid as the language affected his brain and creativity as he tried to describe the
color.

Second, we would consider a study published by Dr. Francois Grosjean in

(psychology today) where he tried to find out how our personality changes with
languages. He did his experiment on bilinguals, those who are able to speak two
languages equally. Listing here the quotes of three bilinguals will illustrate
whether language affecting personalities is a matter of fact or a hoax.
Bilingual 1: "When I'm around Anglo-Americans, I find myself awkward and
unable to choose my words quickly enough ... When I'm amongst
Latinos/Spanish-speakers, I don't feel shy at all. I'm witty, friendly, and ... I
become very out-going."
Bilingual 2: "In English, my speech is very polite, with a relaxed tone, always
saying "please" and "excuse me." When I speak Greek, I start talking more
rapidly, with a tone of anxiety and in a kind of rude way...".
Bilingual 3: "I find when I'm speaking Russian I feel like a much more gentle,
"softer" person. In English, I feel more "harsh," "businesslike."

Even though their quotes are quite straight forward to drive us to the conclusion
that language affects personality, Dr. Francois stated that different contexts
trigger different behaviors, impressions, and attitudes. What is taken as a change
in personality with language may have nothing to do with the used language
itself. However, in an interesting social experiment done on English and
German monolinguals, it was clear that they both saw the world differently.
Scientists showed them scenes of a woman walking towards a car and a man
cycling towards a supermarket then asked them to describe the scenes.
English monolinguals described those scenes as “A woman is walking” or “a
man is cycling”, while German looked at the event as a whole and tried to
assign both meanings and goals by saying: “A woman walks towards her car”
or “a man cycles towards the supermarket”. Thus, we can say that German
speakers tend to have a holistic worldview while English tend to focus on the
action itself. Therefore, we might expect natives of different languages to have
different ways of tackling problems and when you are surrounded with a
community trying to assign reasons for every action, their subconscious mind
will always be questioning the purpose of every action they are doing, thus
making them more productive.
The final aspect I will consider in my short language study is how a single word
in one language can summarize lines and dozens of words in another one. These
examples will make it crystal clear, for instance, the word (Bakkushan) in
Japanese describes a woman who appears to be a beautiful and attractive from
behind only and is ugly from the front. And the word (sobremesa) in Spanish is
used to describe the time after lunch or dinner that we spend talking to people
you shared the meal with. This made me think that maybe in the Spanish culture
at some point in the past, people spent time together after meals and this
triggered the urge for such a word to evolve in order to make everyday life
easier to express which was the purpose of language.

Therefore, we could say that some languages enjoy features missing from
others, and some make their speakers more criticizing, judgmental, creative, or
funnier. And due to the fact that the differences between them are limitless, each
language will be better in an aspect than others, this depends on their place of
origin and thus we can say that our best options would be learning as much
languages as possible. At the end I would like to state that no language is better
than the other and each one is unique and has its distinctive features. Speakers
of the language are the only determining factor of how great a language is. And
always remember the Chinese proverb that says (学一门语言，就是多一个观
察世界的窗)** 😉

**To learn a language is to have one more window from which to look at
the world.