Do speakers of different language think in different ways?

Compare and contrast three grammatical features of Chinese and English. Using these as evidence, state whether you agree with the opinion that speakers of different language think in different ways. Justify your opinion.

This question will be approached from two aspects, first to elaborate the similarities and differences on some grammatical features of Chinese and English, and then to justify if there is a systematic relationship between the grammatical categories of the language a person speaks and how that person both understands the world and behaves in it.

Comparing and contrasting languages is not easy task. This essay will look at the two languages from their tone, sentence structure, and grammatical tense.

To begin with, Chinese is tonal, i.e. different tones distinguish words otherwise pronounced alike. The number of tones varies in different forms of Chinese, but Mandarin has four tones: a high tone, a rising tone, a tone combining a falling and a rising inflection, and a falling tone. However, English is a stress-timed language, i.e., certain syllables in each word get a relative loudness during pronunciation while the others do not.
Furthermore, Chinese is analytic. Analytic languages often express abstract concepts using independent words and have stricter and more elaborate syntactic rules. Comparing the Chinese to the English, one sees that while English itself is fairly analytic, for example,

"My friends all want to eat eggs."
我 所有 的 朋友 都 要 吃 鸡 蛋
wǒ suǒyǒu de péngyou dōu yào chī jī dàn
I all possessive friend(s) all want eat chicken egg(s)

Lastly, English use a grammatical tense to express the time at which an event is described by a sentence. However, Chinese lacks inflection to indicate tense, i.e. tense is not expressed anywhere in the verb. When needed for comprehension, suffixes may be used to denote some of this feature. For example, the suffix –le is a sign of the perfect tense of the verb.

Now the differences have been shown between Chinese and English, whether it affects speakers’thinking way will be discussed next. Language is obviously a form of communication. But what is it exactly? Communication, by definition, involves two participants at least, i.e. two brains. Thus, it is a process between two brains with a purpose of transmitting a pattern. The pattern could be a scene or a story, if we are “telling” something, or it could be a brief, if we are trying to “convince” of something, or a concept, if we are “explaining” something, but anyway, the pattern already exists in our brain. Language is just a tool which is used to transmit the pattern and with grammatical features for clearer expression. So that’s why all people have occasional difficulty expressing themselves due to constraints in the language (constrains of “tool”), and are conscious that the language is not good for what they mean. Perhaps they say or write something, and then think “that’s not quite what I meant to say” or perhaps they cannot find a good way to explain a concept they understand. This makes it clear that thinking way is not a speaking way, because one can understand a concept without being able to express it in words, and language cannot change thought. In one word, that speakers think in different ways is not because they speak in different languages. It maybe because of the different personal experiences, or knowledge, but it’s beyond the scope of this essay to discover in depth.

Bibliography

C. C. Chu (1983), A Reference Grammar of Mandarin Chinese for English Speakers; http://www.answers.com/topic/Chinese-language;
J. F. De Francis (1984), The Chinese Language, http://www.answers.com/topic/Chinese-language;
English grammar, http://www.answers.com/topic/english-grammar;
Piero Scaruffi (1998), Thinking about Thought, http://www.thymos.com/tat/;
Jim Waldo (2004), Thinking about Objects, http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=85308