IndexHow language shapes the way we thinkConclusionReferencesLanguage shapes the way we think and determines what we can think about. – Benjamin Lee Whorf Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Everything we do shapes the way we think. It's called the 'butterfly effect'. Even the smallest of changes can cause the biggest situations, such as catastrophes. Who we are, technically, is just a construct made of every situation we've been in and every person we've ever met. Everything that happens to us changes our brain on a chemical level. The way other languages ​​sound also influences the way we think. Different sounding languages ​​might trigger different associations, meaning you'll get different ideas by randomly browsing through the verbal junk your brain creates, which, again, makes you think differently. So in this essay we will explore how language shapes our way of thinking? Some languages ​​are harder to understand by reading, which means, for example, that you will read less if it is very difficult to do so. The less knowledge your brain contains, the less it can think. How language shapes the way we think If you've ever read George Orwell's 1984, then you know the idea behind Newspeak: create a language with limited grammar and vocabulary, the political party wants to limit freedom of thought, decrease the quantity of “thought crimes” that occur. “From thoughts to words, from words to deeds”. You can't think about freedom if there isn't a word for freedom in your language. Erase the concept of freedom from history and no one will ever question your authority. The human brain struggles to understand things for which we have no words. For example, ancient peoples - ancient China, ancient Greece and Rome - did not even have the word "blue" in their languages. There was no blue, it couldn't be distinguished from green or darker shades. Their literature describes the world as a predominantly black and white place with some red and yellow inclusions. This makes us think that perhaps the ancients saw the world as a dark place, devoid of almost any color. To this day, Amazonian tribes do not distinguish blue as a different color, but they have many shades of green. The same words in different languages ​​can differ drastically, as language transfers cultural history. An example of this would be jargon. Otherwise neutral, translated words can suddenly become inappropriate. The only example that comes to mind right now is the fact that blue in Russian means homosexual, which Russians usually don't like very much. For Poles the alternative word means “hot”, which at first glance is no easier to understand than “blue”. Simply not knowing the country's history can severely limit your understanding of words. The blue meaning of homosexual comes from the nobility (the so-called blue-blooded people) who practice this. It makes more sense now, right? Another example of how language shapes the way we think and determines what we can think about is jokes, puns, and puns as a whole. Almost every bilingual person most likely knows that it is extremely difficult to translate a joke so that it is accurate 100% of the time. This is because many jokes rely on puns. Have you ever heard something random, but the words used make you see a joke in the sentence? It happens to me all the time. So I'm usually the type of person who laughs for no apparent reason. For example, the.