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How does our language shape the way we think?
Several controversial questions are involved in this field: Does language shape culture or vice versa?
In stark form, the debate was: Does language shape what we perceive, a position associated with the late Benjamin Lee Whorf, or are our perceptions pure sensory impressions, immune to the arbitrary ways that language carves up the world?
Acknowledging its debt to Stephen O Murray and Will Roscoe's sociology book Boy-Wives and Female Husbands, the play considers how rhetoric and language shape thinking around homosexuality. "Somebody says," is a constant refrain.
It is easy to understand why the article — published on Aug. 29 under the headline "Does Your Language Shape How You Think?" — was so popular: it was one of those interesting science stories that capture the attention of the general reader without bogging down too heavily in scholarly detail.
So how does language shape our own ideas about or our relationship with history?
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Language shapes our patients' experiences.
The theory that language shapes thought is sometimes called the Whorf hypothesis, after the anthropologist Benjamin Lee Whorf.
Kin terminology, as an aspect of language, was thought to demonstrate how language shaped social categories and hence actual practices.
As cognitive linguistics inspired by the work of Benjamin Lee Whorf suggests, language shapes our worldview, an idea first mentioned by Wilhelm von Humboldt.
To summarise, gesture, generated at the interface of action and language, shapes the way we think and we speak.
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Justyna Jupowicz-Kozak
CEO of Professional Science Editing for Scientists @ prosciediting.com