导读： 一般地人们认为，是命题（即词语的组合）体现了人类认识的成果，实际上是词语本身是最大的体现。 一个民族在文明上的缺陷，就是他的语言缺陷。不仅是他的文明缺失了什么，而且是他的语言缺失了什么。 理性的基础是语言，然而语言的水平又如何呢？ 语言的边界，就是思维的边界。语言不能局限我们向别的民族学习什么，但是完全局限一个民族能够创造出什么新的思想。 下面这篇文章以语言中的性别问题和定位问题为例，说明语言和思维方式的密切联系。 语言反映了人的思维习惯，而人是习惯的奴隶。 案例有世界上比较重要的语言如英语、德语、法语，也有一些稀奇的语言。 Does Your Language Shape How You Think? 语言对思维的约束 By GUY DEUTSCHER Published: August 26, 2010 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?src=meref=general （学术上前人的贡献） in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short article that set in motion one of the trendiest intellectual fads（fashion) of the 20th century. the title, Science and Linguistics ,the magazine, M.I.T. s Technology Review . the author, a chemical engineer who worked for an insurance company and moonlighted as an anthropology人类学 lecturer at Yale University , was an unlikely candidate for international superstardom. And yet Benjamin Lee Whorf let loose释放 an alluring吸引 idea about languages power over the mind, and his stirring搅动 prose seduced a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we are able to think . In particular, Whorf announced , Native American美洲土著 languages impose on their speakers a picture of reality that is totally different from ours, so their speakers would simply not be able to understand some of our most basic concepts, like the flow of time or the distinction between objects (like stone) and actions (like fall). For decades, Whorfs theory dazzled迷惑 both academics and the general public alike. In his shadow, others made a whole range of imaginative claims about the supposed power of language, from the assertion that Native American languages instill灌输 in their speakers an intuitive understanding of Einsteins concept of time as a fourth dimension to the theory that the nature of the Jewish religion was determined by the tense system of ancient Hebrew . Eventually, Whorfs theory crash-landed急转到 on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired泄露 that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims . The reaction was so severe that for decades, any attempts to explore the influence of the mother tongue on our thoughts were relegated降级，被轻视 to the loony 怪诞的 fringes of disrepute. But 70 years on, it is surely time to put the trauma挫折、失误 of Whorf behind us. And in the last few years, new research has revealed that when we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways. Whorf, we now know, made many mistakes . The most serious one was to assume that our mother tongue constrains our minds and prevents us from being able to think certain thoughts. The general structure of his arguments was to claim that if a language has no word for a certain concept, then its speakers would not be able to understand this concept. If a language has no future tense, for instance, its speakers would simply not be able to grasp our notion of future time. It seems barely comprehensible that this line of argument could ever have achieved such success, given that so much contrary evidence confronts you wherever you look. When you ask, in perfectly normal English, and in the present tense, Are you coming tomorrow ? do you feel your grip on the notion of futurity slipping away? Do English speakers who have never heard the German word Schadenfreude find it difficult to understand the concept of relishing欣赏 someone elses misfortune? Or think about it this way: If the inventory of ready-made words in your language determined which concepts you were able to understand, how would you ever learn anything new? SINCE THERE IS NO EVIDENCE that any language forbids its speakers to think anything, we must look in an entirely different direction to discover how our mother tongue really does shape our experience of the world . Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences between languages in a pithy精炼 maxim: Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey .（翻译：不同语言的本质区别，在于它基本意思，不在于它的扩展意思。） This maxim offers us the key to unlocking the real force of the mother tongue: if different languages influence our minds in different ways, this is not because of what our language allows us to think but rather because of what it habitually obliges us to think about . （每个词语在功能上应该有他的极限。） (on GENDER in French and Germany) Consider this example. Suppose I say to you in English that I spent yesterday evening with a neighbor . You may well wonder whether my companion was male or female, but I have the right to tell you politely that its none of your business. But if we were speaking French or German, I wouldnt have the privilege to equivocate含糊 in this way, because I would be obliged by the grammar of language to choose between voisin or voisine ; Nachbar or Nachbarin . These languages compel me to inform you about the sex of my companion whether or not I feel it is remotely your concern. This does not mean, of course, that English speakers are unable to understand the differences between evenings spent with male or female neighbors, but it does mean that they do not have to consider the sexes of neighbors, friends, teachers and a host of other persons each time they come up in a conversation, whereas speakers of some languages are obliged to do so. On the other hand, English does oblige you to specify certain types of information that can be left to the context in other languages. If I want to tell you in English about a dinner with my neighbor, I may not have to mention the neighbors sex, but I do have to tell you something about the timing of the event: I have to decide whether we dined , have been dining , are dining , will be dining and so on. Chinese, on the other hand , （应该错误，汉语是有时态的。）does not oblige its speakers to specify the exact time of the action in this way, because the same verb form can be used for past, present or future actions. Again, this does not mean that the Chinese are unable to understand the concept of time. But it does mean they are not obliged to think about timing whenever they describe an action. When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive注意 to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world. BUT IS THERE any evidence for this happening in practice? Lets take genders again. Languages like Spanish, French, German and Russian not only oblige you to think about the sex of friends and neighbors, but they also assign a male or female gender to a whole range of inanimate无生命 object s quite at whim古怪. What, for instance, is particularly feminine about a Frenchmans beard ( la barbe )? Why is Russian water a she, and why does she become a he once you have dipped a tea bag into her? Mark Twain famously lamented such erratic飘忽 genders as female turnips蔓菁 and neuter maidens in his rant叫嚷 The Awful German Language. But whereas he claimed that there was something particularly perverse about the German gender system, it is in fact English that is unusual, at least among European languages, in not treating turnips and tea cups as masculine or feminine. Languages that treat an inanimate object as a he or a she force their speakers to talk about such an object as if it were a man or a woman . And as anyone whose mother tongue has a gender system will tell you, once the habit has taken hold, it is all but impossible to shake off. When I speak English, I may say about a bed that it is too soft, but as a native Hebrew speaker, I actually feel she is too soft. She stays feminine all the way from the lungs up to the glottis声门 and is neutered only when she reaches the tip of the tongue. In recent years, various experiments have shown that grammatical genders can shape the feelings and associations of speakers toward objects around them. In the 1990s, for example, psychologists compared associations between speakers of German and Spanish. There are many inanimate nouns whose genders in the two languages are reversed . A German bridge is feminine ( die Brcke ), for instance, but el puente is masculine in Spanish; and the same goes for clocks, apartments, forks, newspapers, pockets, shoulders, stamps, tickets, violins, the sun, the world and love. On the other hand, an apple is masculine for Germans but feminine in Spanish, and so are chairs, brooms, butterflies, keys, mountains, stars, tables, wars, rain and garbage. When speakers were asked to grade various objects on a range of characteristics, Spanish speakers deemed bridges, clocks and violins to have more manly properties like strength, but Germans tended to think of them as more slender or elegant. With objects like mountains or chairs, which are he in German but she in Spanish, the effect was reversed. In a different experiment, French and Spanish speakers were asked to assign human voices to various objects in a cartoon. When French speakers saw a picture of a fork ( la fourchette ), most of them wanted it to speak in a womans voice, but Spanish speakers, for whom el tenedor is masculine, preferred a gravelly male voice for it. More recently, psychologists have even shown that gendered languages imprint gender traits for objects so strongly in the mind that these associations obstruct speakers ability to commit information to memory. Of course, all this does not mean that speakers of Spanish or French or German fail to understand that inanimate objects do not really have biological sex a German woman rarely mistakes her husband for a hat, and Spanish men are not known to confuse a bed with what might be lying in it. Nonetheless, once gender connotations have been imposed on impressionable young minds, they lead those with a gendered mother tongue to see the inanimate world through lenses tinted渲染 with associations and emotional responses that English speakers stuck in their monochrome单色 desert of its are entirely oblivious to. Did the opposite genders of bridge in German and Spanish, for example, have an effect on the design of bridges in Spain and Germany? Do the emotional maps imposed by a gender system have higher-level behavioral consequences for our everyday life? Do they shape tastes, fashions, habits and preferences in the societies concerned? At the current state of our knowledge about the brain, this is not something that can be easily measured in a psychology lab. But it would be surprising if they didnt. （空间，参照系，COORDINATES) The area where the most striking evidence for the influence of language on thought has come to light is the language of space how we describe the orientation of the world around us. Suppose you want to give someone directions for getting to your house. You might say: After the traffic lights, take the first left, then the second right, and then youll see a white house in front of you. Our door is on the right. But in theory, you could also say: After the traffic lights, drive north, and then on the second crossing drive east, and youll see a white house directly to the east. Ours is the southern door. These two sets of directions may describe the same route, but they rely on different systems of coordinates. The first uses egocentric自我中心 coordinates , which depend on our own bodies: a left-right axis and a front-back axis orthogonal矩形 to it. The second system uses fixed geographic directions , which do not rotate with us wherever we turn. We find it useful to use geographic directions when hiking in the open countryside, for example, but the egocentric coordinates completely dominate our speech when we describe small-scale spaces . We dont say: When you get out of the elevator, walk south, and then take the second door to the east. The reason the egocentric system is so dominant in our language is that it feels so much easier and more natural. After all, we always know where behind or in front of us is. We dont need a map or a compass to work it out, we just feel it, because the egocentric coordinates are based directly on our own bodies and our immediate visual fields. But then a remote Australian aboriginal 土著 tongue, Guugu Yimithirr , from north Queensland, turned up, and with it came the astounding吃惊 realization that not all languages conform to what we have always taken as simply natural. In fact, Guugu Yimithirr doesnt make any use of egocentric coordinates坐标 at all. The anthropologist John Haviland and later the linguist Stephen Levinson have shown that Guugu Yimithirr does not use words like left or right, in front of or behind, to describe the position of objects. Whenever we would use the egocentric system, the Guugu Yimithirr rely on cardinal directions. If they want you to move over on the car seat to make room, theyll say move a bit to the east. To tell you where exactly they left something in your house, theyll say, I left it on the southern edge of the western table. Or they would warn you to look out for that big ant just north of your foot. Even when shown a film on television, they gave descriptions of it based on the orientation of the screen. If the television was facing north, and a man on the screen was approaching, they said that he was coming northward. When these peculiarities of Guugu Yimithirr were uncovered, they inspired a large-scale research project into the language of space. And as it happens, Guugu Yimithirr is not a freak怪物 occurrence; languages that rely primarily on geographical coordinates are scattered around the world , from Polynesia to Mexico, from Namibia to Bali. For us, it might seem the height of absurdity for a dance teacher to say, Now raise your north hand and move your south leg eastward. But the joke would be lost on some: the Canadian-American musicologist Colin McPhee, who spent several years on Bali in the 1930s, recalls a young boy who showed great talent for dancing. As there was no instructor in the childs village, McPhee arranged for him to stay with a teacher in a different village. But when he came to check on the boys progress after a few days, he found the boy dejected沮丧 and the teacher exasperated激怒. It was impossible to teach the boy anything, because he simply did not understand any of the instructions. When told to take three steps east or bend southwest, he didnt know what to do. The boy would not have had the least trouble with these directions in his own village, but because the landscape in the new village was entirely unfamiliar, he became disoriented and confused. Why didnt the teacher use different instructions? He would probably have replied that saying take three steps forward or bend backward would be the height of absurdity. So different languages certainly make us speak about space in very different ways . But does this necessarily mean that we have to think about space differently? By now red lights should be flashing, because even if a language doesnt have a word for behind, this doesnt necessarily mean that its speakers wouldnt be able to understand this concept. Instead, we should look for the possible consequences of what geographic languages oblige their speakers to convey. In particular, we should be on the lookout for what habits of mind might develop because of the necessity of specifying geographic directions all the time. In order to speak a language like Guugu Yimithirr, you need to know where the cardinal directions are at each and every moment of your waking life. You need to have a compass in your mind that operates all the time, day and night, without lunch breaks or weekends off, since otherwise you would not be able to impart the most basic information or understand what people around you are saying. Indeed, speakers of geographic languages seem to have an almost-superhuman sense of orientation. Regardless of visibility conditions, regardless of whether they are in thick forest or on an open plain, whether outside or indoors or even in caves, whether stationary or moving, they have a spot-on现场 sense of direction. They dont look at the sun and pause for a moment of calculation before they say, Theres an ant just north of your foot. They simply feel where north, south, west and east are, just as people with perfect pitch feel what each note is without having to calculate intervals. There is a wealth of stories about what to us may seem like incredible feats of orientation but for speakers of geographic languages are just a matter of course. One report relates how a speaker of Tzeltal from southern Mexico was blindfolded and spun around more than 20 times in a darkened house. Still blindfolded and dizzy, he pointed without hesitation at the geographic directions. （少年若天成，习惯成自然） How does this work? The convention of communicating with geographic coordinates compels speakers from the youngest age to pay attention to the clues from the physical environment (the position of the sun, wind and so on) every second of their lives, and to develop an accurate memory of their own changing orientations at any given moment. So everyday communication in a geographic language provides the most intense imaginable drilling in geographic orientation (it has been estimated that as much as 1 word in 10 in a normal Guugu Yimithirr conversation is north, south, west or east, often accompanied by precise hand gestures). This habit of constant awareness to the geographic direction is inculcated教诲 almost from infancy: studies have shown that children in such societies start using geographic directions as early as age 2 and fully master the system by 7 or 8. With such an early and intense drilling, the habit soon becomes second nature, effortless and unconscious. When Guugu Yimithirr speakers were asked how they knew where north is, they couldnt explain it any more than you can explain how you know where behind is. But there is more to the effects of a geographic language, for the sense of orientation has to extend further in time than the immediate present. If you speak a Guugu Yimithirr-style language, your memories of anything that you might ever want to report will have to be stored with cardinal directions基本方向 as part of the picture. One Guugu Yimithirr speaker was filmed telling his friends the story of how in his youth, he capsized迷糊 in shark-infested出没 waters. He and an older person were caught in a storm, and their boat tipped over. They both jumped into the water and managed to swim nearly three miles to the shore, only to discover that the missionary for whom they worked was far more concerned at the loss of the boat than relieved at their miraculous escape. Apart from the dramatic content, the remarkable thing about the story was that it was remembered throughout in cardinal directions: the speaker jumped into the water on the western side of the boat, his companion to the east of the boat, they saw a giant shark swimming north and so on. Perhaps the cardinal directions were just made up for the occasion? Well, quite by chance, the same person was filmed some years later telling the same story. The cardinal directions matched exactly in the two tellings. Even more remarkable were the spontaneous hand gestures that accompanied the story. For instance, the direction in which the boat rolled over was gestured in the correct geographic orientation, regardless of the direction the speaker was facing in the two films. Psychological experiments have also shown that under certain circumstances, speakers of Guugu Yimithirr-style languages even remember the same reality differently from us . There has been heated debate about the interpretation of some of these experiments, but one conclusion that seems compelling is that while we are trained to ignore directional rotations when we commit information to memory, speakers of geographic languages are trained not to do so. （A CASE, A SAME OR NOT SAME HOUSE) One way of understanding this is to imagine that you are traveling with a speaker of such a language and staying in a large chain-style hotel, with corridor upon corridor of identical-looking doors. Your friend is staying in the room opposite yours, and when you go into his room, youll see an exact replica of yours: the same bathroom door on the left, the same mirrored wardrobe on the right, the same main room with the same bed on the left, the same curtains drawn behind it, the same desk next to the wall on the right, the same television set on the left corner of the desk and the same telephone on the right. In short, you have seen the same room twice. But when your friend comes into your room, he will see something quite different from this, because everything is reversed north-side-south. In his room the bed was in the north, while in yours it is in the south; the telephone that in his room was in the west is now in the east, and so on. So while you will see and remember the same room twice, a speaker of a geographic language will see and remember two different rooms. It is not easy for us to conceive how Guugu Yimithirr speakers experience the world, with a crisscrossing十字交叉 of cardinal directions imposed on any mental picture and any piece of graphic memory. Nor is it easy to speculate about how geographic languages affect areas of experience other than spatial orientation whether they influence the speakers sense of identity, for instance, or bring about a less-egocentric outlook on life. But one piece of evidence is telling: if you saw a Guugu Yimithirr speaker pointing at himself, you would naturally assume he meant to draw attention to himself. In fact, he is pointing at a cardinal direction that happens to be behind his back. While we are always at the center of the world, and it would never occur to us that pointing in the direction of our chest could mean anything other than to draw attention to ourselves, a Guugu Yimithirr speaker points through himself, as if he were thin air and his own existence were irrelevant. (about color) IN WHAT OTHER WAYS 还有哪些方面，might the language we speak influence our experience of the world? Recently, it has been demonstrated in a series of ingenious巧妙 experiments that we even perceive colors through the lens of our mother tongue. There are radical variations in the way languages carve up the spectrum of visible light; for example, green and blue are distinct colors in English but are considered shades of the same color in many languages . And it turns out that the colors that our language routinely obliges us to treat as distinct can refine our purely visual sensitivity to certain color differences in reality, so that our brains are trained to exaggerate the distance between shades of color if these have different names in our language. As strange as it may sound, our experience of a Chagall painting actually depends to some extent on whether our language has a word for blue. （一切都是说不清的，不可言说） In coming years, researchers may also be able to shed light on the impact of language on more subtle areas of perception. For instance, some languages, like Matses in Peru, oblige their speakers, like the finickiest 讲究of lawyers, to specify exactly how they came to know about the facts they are reporting. You cannot simply say, as in English, An animal passed here. You have to specify, using a different verbal form, whether this was directly experienced (you saw the animal passing), inferred (you saw footprints), conjectured推测 (animals generally pass there that time of day), hearsay or such. If a statement is reported with the incorrect evidentiality, it is considered a lie. So if, for instance, you ask a Matses man how many wives he has, unless he can actually see his wives at that very moment, he would have to answer in the past tense and would say something like There were two last time I checked . After all, given that the wives are not present, he cannot be absolutely certain that one of them hasnt died or run off with another man since he last saw them, even if this was only five minutes ago. So he cannot report it as a certain fact in the present tense. Does the need to think constantly about epistemology in such a careful and sophisticated manner inform the speakers outlook on life or their sense of truth and causation ? When our experimental tools are less blunt, such questions will be amenable to empirical study. （mother tongue as prison house） For many years, our mother tongue was claimed to be a prison house that constrained our capacity to reason. Once it turned out that there was no evidence for such claims, this was taken as proof that people of all cultures think in fundamentally the same way . But surely it is a mistake to overestimate the importance of abstract reasoning in our lives. After all, how many daily decisions do we make on the basis of deductive logic compared with those guided by gut肚肠 feeling, intuition, emotions, impulse or practical skills? The habits of mind that our culture has instilled in us from infancy shape our orientation to the world and our emotional responses to the objects we encounter, and their consequences probably go far beyond what has been experimentally demonstrated so far; they may also have a marked impact on our beliefs, values and ideologies. We may not know as yet how to measure these consequences directly or how to assess their contribution to cultural or political misunderstandings . But as a first step toward understanding one another, we can do better than pretending we all think the same. (about the author) Guy Deutscher is an honorary research fellow at the School of Languages, Linguistics and Cultures at the University of Manchester. His new book, from which this article is adapted, is Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages , to be published this month by Metropolitan Books. var articleToolsShareData = {"url":"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2010\/08\/29\/magazine\/29language-t.html","headline":"Does Your Language Shape How You Think?","description":"The idea that your mother tongue shapes your experience of the world may be true after all.","keywords":"Language and Languages,Research,Psychology and Psychologists,Memory,Spanish Language,German Language,French Language,Geography,Guugu Yimithirr","section":"magazine","sub_section":null,"section_display":"Magazine","sub_section_display":null,"byline":"By GUY DEUTSCHER","pubdate":"August 26, 2010","passkey":null}; function getShareURL() { return encodeURIComponent(articleToolsShareData.url); } function getShareHeadline() { return encodeURIComponent(articleToolsShareData.headline); } function getShareDescription() { return encodeURIComponent(articleToolsShareData.description); } function getShareKeywords() { return encodeURIComponent(articleToolsShareData.keywords); } function getShareSection() { return encodeURIComponent(articleToolsShareData.section); } function getShareSubSection() { return encodeURIComponent(articleToolsShareData.sub_section); } function getShareSectionDisplay() { return encodeURIComponent(articleToolsShareData.section_display); } function getShareSubSectionDisplay() { return encodeURIComponent(articleToolsShareData.sub_section_display); } function getShareByline() { return encodeURIComponent(articleToolsShareData.byline); } function getSharePubdate() { return encodeURIComponent(articleToolsShareData.pubdate); } function getSharePasskey() { return encodeURIComponent(articleToolsShareData.passkey); }
最近我脸红了许多次，主要是发现网络评论标题动辄用让谁脸红，看到这个题目我就脸红。让谁脸红成为网络流行用语，显露评论语言词汇贫乏、单调，使得评论成了快餐式的东西。让谁脸红竟然成了八股标题，一旦某名人说了一句话或做了一件事，就立即套用标题， **** 让谁脸红？ 看看下面我列举的标题，你会发现单是温总理就让我们红了许多次脸。总理的言行的确值得我们仿效和学习，评论作者也想让那些没脸的人士面对此情此景脸红一次，殊不知某些人的脸皮是久经考验（或酒精考验）的老脸皮，再说老是让某些人脸红，这些人的脸皮就会越来越厚，不再脸红了。红脸的只有那些关心国计民生的网评作者了。 看来让谁脸红只能让网评作者脸红了。 以下是在 google 中输入让我脸红时搜到的部分标题： l 温总理强调要做事不要做官让谁脸红 l 总理外访不过夜 让谁脸红 ？_ l 温总理的回忆 让谁脸红 ？_ l 温总理25 年没有节假日 让谁脸红 l 温家宝总理的亲笔致歉信 让谁脸红 ？ l 温总理在老师面前永远是学生 让谁脸红 l 温总理 满手泥水清理废墟 让谁脸红 ？ l 温总理 指出教材错误 让谁脸红 l 温家宝 总理 的更正信 让谁脸红 ？ l 温家宝 总理 的教师节 让谁脸红 ？ l 温总理 的直言 让谁脸红 ? l 温总理 的内疚说 让谁脸红 ？-- l 胡锦涛主席简朴出访 让谁脸红 ？-- l 小偷求你别偷了的告示 让谁脸红 ？ l 宋祖英靠啥成名的？说了 让谁脸红 ？ l 千所学校缺水停课 让谁脸红 _ 光明观察
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