The Moon and Her Gentle Light

In many languages in the world, inanimate things are sometimes assigned feminine gender in a figurative way to highlight their gentle or generous qualities.

The moon cast her gentle light on the fields.

We sometimes marvel at nature and her abundance.

However, there are some languages that always view such things as either masculine or feminine. For example, the French language inherently considers the moon - 'la lune' - feminine while in German it's masculine: 'der Mond'. Is it that the moon always impresses French speakers with its mildness above everything else? What is it then that the Germans see as masculine in the moon? It's rather unlikely that the German forefathers could understand the moon's barren harshness in those pre-scientific days when these linguistic pattens took shape.

Both these languages portray nature as feminine: 'la nature' in French and 'die Natur' in German. When it comes to other concepts, though, there seem to be differences so fundamental that even the choice of words may not be the same.

To take one distinct case, 'motherland' is a concept that should essentially be feminine in English due to its association with 'mother'. The corresponding term in French, 'la patrie', is feminine too, so we can assume that the French aren't very far from this conception themselves. The Germans, on their part, call their homeland 'das Vaterland' - the fatherland. Although those familiar with German would know that the word itself is linguistically neuter because of its base word 'das Land', there's no denying that the core concept has more to do with the masculine nature of a father.

So it could well be that not everybody around us notices the same version of the world as we do, with this type of influence coming from their mother tongues. (Now that's another thing on which the French and the Germans seem to see eye to eye: 'mother tongue' is feminine in both their views - 'la langue maternelle' in French and 'die Muttersprache' in German. There's some harmony among neighbours after all!)

(Image credit: Johan J.Ingles-Le Nobel)

         

What Happens When You Drop a Cup?

They say there's something called reality. But our perception of reality isn't always the same. The way people see what's happening around them – or how they happen – could sometimes be so varied that an incident may look quite different when you hear it described by two individuals.

OK, this is nothing new; we know it's human nature. It's well known that how someone interprets reality is influenced by that person's background and past experience. And it seems that the language we speak also plays a certain role in this regard.

One clear example happens to be the way speakers of different tongues tend to visualize the act of inadvertently 'dropping' something. We know it happens to all of us. We pick up a cup to drink something – or perhaps to wash it – but we somehow lose the grip. The next thing you know, the cup lies in pieces on the ground.

Obviously, hardly anybody does it intentionally. But the English language depicts it as something done by the person handling the cup: ‘I dropped the cup’, ‘He/She dropped the cup’… are among the standard sentences one would use to describe the happening. Even though no one probably means that it was done on purpose, there still seems to be a thinly veiled apportioning of some responsibility to the person involved.

Other languages, however, happen to view the same event somewhat differently. Both German and French have expressions that say ‘I let the cup fall’, i.e. ‘Ich habe die Tasse fallen lassen’ and ‘J’ai laissé tomber la tasse’ respectively. Now you might argue that ‘dropping something’ and ‘letting something fall' would be the same thing. Maybe yes, but for my part I still feel a slightly higher nuance of responsibility in the English way.

Then come Spanish and many Asian languages that have a distinctly different way of talking about such a thing. Spanish speakers generally would say ‘Se me cayó la taza’ – which roughly translates as ‘The cup fell from me’. So in this case there's no denying the lessened sense of responsibility on the part of the human being. The object has rather fallen of its own free will. 

It looks as if our mother tongue influences, without even our knowledge, how we think of what takes place in our world. Some even claim that this simple example illustrates a fundamental difference in the world view of people speaking these different languages. It's said that English speakers are conditioned by their language itself to assume more personal responsibility for things happening around them while speakers of languages like Spanish are allowed to see them more as a result of destiny. The latter is true of many Asian languages too.

Though this laid-back attitude of Spanish-speaking Latin Americans, for example, has been blamed by some US sociologists for the general backwardness of the South American countries, its opposite present in the English language probably explains the higher rates of neuroticism observed in US society too. Asians were also considered that way by the Westerners some time back, but the current developments in the Asian region show that its residents aren't quite letting destiny decide everything for them.

(Image credit: Gunjan Karun)