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Cause And Effect Essay About Language

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Did you know that the English word ‘face’ is shockingly similar to the French word ‘fesse’, meaning rear end? This is just one example of the numerous ways that language affects our lives. Recent studies have shown that language affects almost every part of your life, and has a much greater influence on you than you think it does. Whether we realize it or not, language affects even the smallest things in our lives that we seldom notice. Language stimulates all parts of the brain, especially altering your perception of color, emotion, and even time!
First of all, language affects our perception of color. For example, many languages don’t have words for certain colors, or consider some colors more basic than others. According to the Business …show more content…

The effect of language on time has been observable in bilinguals and polyglots, in a phenomenon that scientists refer to as code-switching, the unique action of switching between two or more languages unconsciously. [9] This anomaly has opened up another avenue for linguists and neurologists. For example, in English, when using the word down to refer to time, we usually think of something that has passed. But in Mandarin, down is used to describe a coming event. [8] The slight variation in the perception of time in different languages could make a big difference, in this case, it could affect perception of the aging process. A study performed by Professor Athanasopoulos of Lancaster University once again proves the phenomenon of code-switching and its effect on our perception of time. In this experiment, he prompted bilinguals with a word in a certain language and asked them to estimate time as it passed, and the results were crystal clear. When prompted with the English word, bilinguals automatically responded, perceiving time as distance. When prompted with the Spanish, they responded perceiving time as volume. [7] The experiment confirms the fact that speakers of different languages do in fact perceive time differently. The passage of time is perceived in 2 main ways- through distance and volume, and through various experiments, it has been confirmed that this hypothesis is true, along with the discovery that speakers of different languages also perceive the future and past

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Amy Tan's goal has changed slightly. While the Author wants to show the effect language has on one's daily life and how we perceive others who are different, she also wants to show how the language barrier affects our society overall. The first key point I identified after active reading was the sentence beneath the title. "Don't judge a book by its over, or intelligence by her English".

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Color is a huge part of how people view different emotions and feelings. For an example, when people see the color black, they may feel darkness and loneliness. Using color as a description in books can really help the reader better understand what the author is trying to get across. Color can mean so much more than shades and tints, it can show true meaning and emotion. It's proven that warm colors trigger thoughts of happiness, energy, and optimism.

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“Mother Tongue” by Amy Tan is the short story about the importance of language and how it is a key for communication. Tan emigrated from China to Oakland, California and she was a first generation of Asian-American. The author is very fascinated by the language and she believes that the language has the power of emotions, a visual image, a complex idea, and a simple truth. She also believes that there are many different types of “Englishes”.

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Lera Boroditsky, a professor at Stanford, introduces readers to the question of whether a person’s language can shape their thought processes and views of the world around them through her research conducted at Stanford and MIT. Boroditsky explores further into the questioning about a language’s influence in her article “Lost in Translation”. Boroditsky proves to an audience of broad audience of scholars and people interested in cultural psychology that a person’s language not only influences the way a person thinks but can change a person’s perception of the world and media around them. Lera Boroditsky, through her use of rhetorical questions, comparisons, and addressing the counterargument achieves her purpose of proving that language does

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Furthermore time is an observed phenomenon and human construct. Its means of measurement are thus human based also. The only way to know time has passed is through history and the memory of something that has happened. As Memory reflects the passage of time and as time passes an event becomes history. It may seem

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While at a public speaking, Tan realized that she was using all these large words that her audience understood but her mother did not. “I was saying things like, “The intersection of memory upon imagination” and “There is an aspect of my fiction that relates to thus–and-thus…the forms of English I did not use at home with my mother” (Tan 58). Tan’s mother was in the room while Tan was giving the speech and that was when she realized that language could be a powerful tool that can connect each other in different ways. The English language can also bring people together who speak English but not in such a common way. “We were talking about the price of new and used furniture and I heard myself saying this: “Not waste money that way” (Tan 58).

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On the one hand, some argue that language constructs our thoughts. From this perspective, Deborah Tannen, from the language constructs thought community, states that “This is how language works. It invisibly molds our way of thinking about people, actions, and the world around us” (Tannen 14). On the other hand, however, others such as Richard Selzer, might say that language is used to represent our thoughts, but it can fall short. One of his view’s main proponents are, “these extremes of sensation remain beyond the power of language to express” (Selzer 28).

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