HOW LANGUAGE CAN SHAPE THINKING ABOUT THE FUTURE (COMMENT).

HOW LANGUAGE CAN SHAPE THINKING ABOUT THE FUTURE (COMMENT). I have posted several times about the controversies among linguists over whether it is possible for language to affect how you think. I am a Whorfian; that is, I think it is possible that language can shape thought. For example, I posted here about Anna Wierzbicka’s argument that the English language provides tools for qualifying the strength of belief in a statement. Dick Weisfelder commented on that post that the Southern Bantu family of languages provides circumlocutions that permit avoidance of undue directness. Keith Chen has a theory which explains the results of his statistical study. He says: ” “If you speak a language that doesn’t distinguish strongly between the present and the future [such as Chinese, German, and Japanese], you save a lot more because the future feels closer. If you speak a language that separates present and future events [such as English, Greek and Italian], the future feels more distant, which makes it harder to do things to care for your future self like save money, exercise, and eat better.”