changing ways of life guided reading answers

If George read only part of the book, you'd use a different form of the verb than if he'd diligently plowed through the whole thing. In Russian you'd also have to include in the verb information about completion. So if it was Laura Bush who did the reading, you'd use a different form of the verb than if it was George. In Russian you would have to alter the verb to indicate tense and gender. Suppose you want to say, 'Bush read Chomsky's latest book.' Let's focus on just 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' and not like 'reed.' In Indonesian you need not (in fact, you can't) alter the verb to mark tense. And a lot! Let's take a (very) hypothetical example.

Most questions of whether and how language shapes thought start with the simple observation that languages differ from one another. But are languages merely tools for expressing our thoughts, or do they actually shape our thoughts?

But what would your life be like if you had never learned a language? Could you still have friends, get an education, hold a job, start a family? Language is so fundamental to our experience, so deeply a part of being human, that it's hard to imagine life without it. You can have friends, you can get an education, you can hold a job, you can start a family. Yet if you lose (or are born without) your sight or hearing, you can still have a wonderfully rich social existence. Almost never do any of them spontaneously say that the faculty they'd most hate to lose is language. Once in a while, a wisecracking student might pick her sense of humor or her fashion sense. I often start my undergraduate lectures by asking students the following question: which cognitive faculty would you most hate to lose? Most of them pick the sense of sight a few pick hearing. Appreciating its role in constructing our mental lives brings us one step closer to understanding the very nature of humanity. Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our experience of being human. What we have learned is that people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world. We have collected data around the world: from China, Greece, Chile, Indonesia, Russia, and Aboriginal Australia. Research in my labs at Stanford University and at MIT has helped reopen this question. For a long time, the idea that language might shape thought was considered at best untestable and more often simply wrong. Yet despite nearly constant attention and debate, very little empirical work was done on these questions until recently. They have engaged scores of philosophers, anthropologists, linguists, and psychologists, and they have important implications for politics, law, and religion. These questions touch on nearly all of the major controversies in the study of mind. Do the languages we speak shape the way we see the world, the way we think, and the way we live our lives? Do people who speak different languages think differently simply because they speak different languages? Does learning new languages change the way you think? Do polyglots think differently when speaking different languages? Humans communicate with one another using a dazzling array of languages, each differing from the next in innumerable ways. LERA BORODITSKY is an assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience, and symbolic systems at Stanford University, who looks at how the languages we speak shape the way we think. HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK?

Changing ways of life guided reading answers