Influence On Culture
According to research by Lera Boroditsky, grammatical genders are among the aspects of languages that shape how people think (a hypothesis called "linguistic relativity"). In one study by Boroditsky, in which native speakers of German and Spanish were asked to describe everyday objects in English, she found that they were more likely to use attributes conventionally associated with the genders of the objects in their native languages.
For instance, German-speakers more often described German: Brücke, (f.) "bridge" with words like 'beautiful', 'elegant', 'fragile', 'peaceful', 'pretty', and 'slender', whereas Spanish-speakers, which use puente (m.) used terms like 'big', 'dangerous', 'long', 'strong', 'sturdy', and 'towering'.
Also according to Boroditsky, the gender in which concepts are anthropomorphized in art is dependent, in 85% of all cases, on the grammatical gender of the concept in the artist's language. Therefore, in German art Tod (m.) "death" is generally portrayed as male, but in Russian Смерть (f.) "death" is generally portrayed as a female.
Read more about this topic: Grammatical Gender
Famous quotes containing the words influence on, influence and/or culture:
“The improvements of ages have had but little influence on the essential laws of man’s existence: as our skeletons, probably, are not to be distinguished from those of our ancestors.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It behooves every man to see that his influence is on the side of justice, and let the courts make their own characters.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Cynicism makes things worse than they are in that it makes permanent the current condition, leaving us with no hope of transcending it. Idealism refuses to confront reality as it is but overlays it with sentimentality. What cynicism and idealism share in common is an acceptance of reality as it is but with a bad conscience.”
—Richard Stivers, U.S. sociologist, educator. The Culture of Cynicism: American Morality in Decline, ch. 1, Blackwell (1994)