What Languages Tell Us About the Structure of the Human Mind

Languages seem to fall into three communicative types. They all talk about reality, but they do not understand it in the same way: (1) some (Russian, Chinese and Hindi) talk about the situation common to the speaker and the hearer, (2) others (Georgian, Turkish and Bulgarian) about the speaker’s experience of that situation and (3) still others (Danish, Swedish and English) also involve the hearer’s experience of it. The choice among a third-person, a first-person or a second-person perspective is a semiotic choice, but it appears that the same kind of choice is made at other areas relating to perception and cognition. If one collects the three linguistic descriptions of ‘our world’, one gets access to the way in which our mind is organized and how it functions: people seem to have two different kinds of vision, and visual stimuli are processed in three stages corresponding to input (experience), intake (understanding) and outcome (a combination of what was experienced and what was understood).