The question of whether languages shape the way we think

go back centuries; Charlemagne proclaimed that “to have a second 【M1】__________

language is to have a second soul”. But the idea went out of favor to 【M2】__________

scientists when Noam Chomsky’s theories of language gained popularity

in the 1960s and 1970s. Dr. Chomsky proposed that there was a 【M3】__________

universal grammar for all human languages—essentially, that languages

don’t really differ from one another in significant ways. And because

languages didn’t differ from one another, the theory went, it made none 【M4】__________

sense to ask whether linguistic differences led to differences in thinking.

The search for the linguistic universals yielded interesting 【M5】__________

data on languages, and after decades of work, not a single 【M6】__________

proposing universal has withstood scrutiny. Instead, as linguists probed 【M7】__________

deeper into the world’s languages (7,000 or so, only a fraction of them

analyzed), innumerable predictable differences emerged. 【M8】__________

Of course, just because people talk differently doesn’t necessarily

mean they think differently. In the past decade, cognitive scientists

have begun to measure not just how people talk, also how they think, 【M9】__________

asking whether our understanding of even such fundamental domains of

experience like space, time and causality could be constructed by 【M10】_________

language.

【M9】