Language, Thought, and Reality - 4Th Issue

Language is the most massive and inclusive art we know, a mountainous and anonymous work of unconscious generations.

- Edward Sapir -

 

***

Dear Reader,

Please allow me to start this fourth issue of "Oddities & Curiosities" with a huge THANK YOU. Since October, when the 3rd issue landed in your inboxes, several exciting milestones have been achieved, and I’m delighted to share them with you.

During the past few weeks:

- The number of (mostly organic) visitors to Mudita’s website has nearly doubled;

- Mudita’s blog has been listed by Feedspot among the “Top 45 Consulting Blogs, Websites & Influencers in 2020”;

- Mudita’s readership is more globalized and culturally diverse than ever :)
 

Good news aside, exciting changes are planned for the New Year :

- The catalog of existing courses will expand;

- I will officially start accepting guest post contributions (on a related note, if you wish to be featured on Mudita’s blog please feel free to get in touch and tell me a little about yourself and your work);

- The feature “Advertise with us” will be launched, and made available to those businesses and independent consultants who might have something interesting to offer to Mudita’s amazing readers (please subscribe to the newsletter and/or keep an eye on the blog for updates);

- Mudita’s courses - available on a PWYW scheme by the end of the year - will either be offered at a fixed price per user or as part of a membership bundle (again, please subscribe to the newsletter and/or keep an eye on the blog for updates).

Finally, from a content perspective, the upcoming posts will be about cultural relativism — the idea that "civilization is not something absolute, but (...) relative, and (...) our ideas and conceptions are true only so far as our civilization goes" —, as well as about the related notions of marketing relativism (briefly introduced here) and linguistic relativism (Sapir-Whorf hypothesis); these are parts of a wider conversation on intercultural communication on which I will regularly keep adding content.

“Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. Even comparatively simple acts of perception are very much more at the mercy of the social patterns called words than we might suppose. …We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.” (Edward Sapir)

 

 

In anticipation of what’s coming next, I’m going to leave you with a link to the amazing Ted Talk of cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky on “How language shapes the way we think”.

Enjoy!

Maria