Do different languages shape people’s different perceptions of the world ?

Xin

Imagine that there are a group of people who have various, distinct linguistic repertoires. Then an apple is showed in front of them with a question “What’s this?”. There is no doubt that everyone who has eaten or seen apples before will agree that it’s an apple, right? But what if they are represented with a picture of colour or a record of sound? Will they reach an agreement as well? Probably not. For example, Himba people use the word “zoozu” to refer to a wide variety of colors in English such as dark blue, dark green, dark brown, dark purple, dark red or black (Oaster, 2017). And for Candoshi, the indigenous people from Upper Amazon, there might be no terms for colors in their language (Surralles, 2016). It’s interesting to notice that representation of color is part of the objective reality, but people’s perceptions towards it may vary largely.

The perception differential is also true of how people perceive the sound. For example, how the word “bus” is transcripted into Chinese and Korean is quite different. Chinese people use the word “巴士”, which perceives the sound /ʌ/ as /ɑː/, while Korean say “버스”, which perceives the sound /ʌ/ as /ɔː/. Another interesting example is that animal sounds may differ in different language. “Wong”, “Guk”, “Meong”, “Haap”, “Hev” are all onomatopoeia of dog’s bark in different languages (Cantonese, Indonesian, Korean, Persian and Turkish respectively). These differentials make me wonder that is it just a consequence of phonetic difference in different languages or a result of perception discrepancy of sounds? In other words, does the perception difference exist before language difference or otherwise? Do you think different languages shape people’s different perceptions of the world ? Can you think of other aspects besides color and sound where language may cause difference in people’s perception ?

References

Oaster, B. (2017, May 19). Did You Know Your Language Changes How You See Color? Retrieved from https://www.daytranslations.com/blog/2017/05/language-changes-color-blue-green-distinction-8768/

Surrallés, A. (2016). On contrastive perception and ineffability: Assessing sensory experience without colour terms in an amazonian society. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 22(4), 962-979.