Today’s New York Times has a wonderful feature article on how
language shapes our perception of the world. The infamous Sapir-
Whorf hypothesis claimed that our understanding was limited by
language and has long been used as an example of a ‘dead theory’
but new evidence is suggesting that certain aspects of a
language can indeed influence how we think The NYT piece is a
wonderfully engaging look at the studies which have shown how
our perceptions are biased by language and is written by
linguist Guy Deutscher. Some 50 years ago, the renowned linguist
Roman Jakobson pointed out a crucial fact about differences
between languages in a pithy maxim: “Languages differ
essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may
convey.” 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…. In recent ye