Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

Last night I attended Jackie's class again. I admit it's not for everyone, but her anthropology and linguistic background can make her insights extremely interesting. Not every time, mind you, but it was very interesting last night. This is the question she discussed yesterday.

Why do Spanish speakers say "se me olvido la cartera" instead of "me olvide la cartera"

I'm paraphrasing from her notes: 

In Spanish culture, accidents happen and they don't take responsibility for them.

In contrast, in English, we're quick to point out who is responsible for dropping, forgetting, spilling and losing things, even when it's an accident: I dropped it.

Though, we don't take responsibility for the cause of our feelings: You make me mad, You make me happy. You made me sad.

Jackie went on to discuss the research of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf who hypothesized  that language constrains thoughts and experiences. In English, we constrain our emotional experience when we say the other person causes us to feel an emotion.

In Spanish, we constrain responsibility for the physical cause and effect of unexpected, unintended and accidental occurrences. Things just happen by themselves sometimes.

The important takeaway from the hypotheses is that language shapes our internal experience of the world and affects our expectations of how the world/society/relationships should operate. Language plays a big role in how we structure, organize and predict, well, pretty much everything! And that affects not just us as individuals but whole societies and how we organize our families, our work, our institutions, our economies and our government. 

I promise I won't be offended if you stopped reading at 'hypothesis', but I just found this really interesting.