Schleiermacher and Deutscher

Deutscher’s reading was very interesting because this allowed me to think about language in a different way and to realize how languages interact with people’s personalities. He mentioned “Languages that treat an inanimate object as a he or a she force their speakers to talk about such an object as if it were a man or a woman.” as one of the examples and that was very interesting because I’ve always wondered why french assign sex to objects but I’ve never linked those to their ways of thinking and personalities. I believe that it is the same as Japanese because there are many words that cannot be described perfectly in English and also have different ways of saying the same thing such as the word “you.” The fact that Japanese has many different ways of expressing similar or same feeling might be affecting how I feel about things and the way I think might be different compared to English speakers even in the same situation. I do believe that language is a huge part of your identity so it definitely affects our personalities to a certain extent. Even though English is my second language, I sometimes feel that English also contributed when forming my current personality. One thing that was interesting in  Schleiermacher’s reading was that he defined two different methods of translating, which are moving the readers towards the author or moving the author towards the reader. I never thought about bringing the author towards the reader so I thought that was interesting to read.  

Mitsy