When I was young my mother would constantly divulge me in a scary story of the chupacabra. It’s grisly and always frightened me into being obedient. The description of the chupacabra is a mixture between a bear, goat, and man with spikes running along the back. The chupacabra, which translates to “goat-sucker”, drained the blood of living creatures, goats specifically. As I grew I’d share with my friends the chupacabra myth only to discover that they had no idea what I was talking about. Why didn’t they know about the chupacabra? The most probable reason would be that their culture has different stories and fairytales than mine. This is because culture dramatically affects the way someone perceives the world.
Culture is frequently passed down through family generations which include various traditions, fashion styles, and personality/behavior. For example, in the short story EveryDay Use by Alice Walker it states “We sat down to eat and right away he[Hakim-a-barber] said he didn’t eat
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Because “a concept that is easy to convey in one language may be impossible in another, simply because the vocabulary isn’t there” as stated in the interview Does Language Shape The Way We See The World? spoken by Guy Deutscher. To get a better understanding of what he said, in the article How Does Our Language Shape The Way We Think? by Lera Boroditsky she talks about a sentence and states “Suppose you want to say, ‘Bush read Chomsky’s latest book.’ Let’s focus on the verb, ‘read.’ To say this sentence in English, we have to mark the verb for tense; in this case, we have to pronounce it like ‘red’ not like ‘reed.’ In Indonesian you need not (in fact you can’t) alter the verb to mark tense”. So yes, language probably could alter the way someone understands something that is being said but it won’t completely change the way someone sees the