You Say Up, I Say Yesterday

Hi,
As it has been mentioned, in this post we will continue and make the second step in our journey through the three texts.

The second text, “You Say Up, I Say Yesterday” by Joan O’C. Hamilton has its main focus on the difference between languages, how people express their ideas in a specific language and how this way of talking can influence their thoughts and perception of the world. Lera Boroditsky has completed a series of studies in which she analysed how some phrases differ from one language to another and how the way in which the phrase is said can influence what people focus on in that situation. The studies proved that in Spanish or Japanese for example the intention of doing something matters when talking about a specific action and that this can shape the way people remember the incident. Also, the fact that depending on the language the same object can be considered either feminine or masculine is mentioned and this counts as another major difference of how people perceive objects around them based on what language they speak. Other pieces of evidence that people think differently depending on the language came from studying mandarin speakers which compared to English speakers that see time on a horizontal axis, are perceiving time as flowing in both vertical and horizontal directions. Boroditsky performed these studies knowing that her University Teacher used to tell his students that whoever will investigate these kinds of things would be considered insane. She also found out that in different languages people are not using the terms left or right but use the “absolute directions” and that in different languages people might perceive colour differently by having different names for the shades of a colour as for example instead of having only light blue and dark blue, having a range of light blue shades and/or a range of dark blue shades.
This text can be easily compared to some of the texts that have been covered in class. One of them would be “Me Talk Pretty One Day” by David Sedaris where the author goes through a moment of confusion caused by one of the aspects mentioned in the text “You Say Up, I Say Yesterday” as he cannot understand how to “to assign a gender to an inanimate object” in French. Mostly, the text is in a relationship with the other material studied because it is related to the way language is used and how languages differ from each other and shape our identities accordingly. As it was mentioned in “You Say Up, I Say Yesterday” language may change the way we think and it can have a big impact on the things we see around us. Some may remember an incident based on who took part in it, others on the location and so on. The possibilities are as varied as the spread of different languages around the Globe.