I was reading something yesterday about how many people consider Sanskrit a very special and spiritually advanced language-- something about the resonance and pervasiveness of certain sounds. You may or may not believe there is something to this. But regardless, I was wondering if there was any evidence to suggest that societies that tend to exhibit certain sounds in their language behave in ways [passiveness, belligerence, etc.] that resemble other groups that tend to have the same sounds in their languages.
In short, I’m asking if there is any evidence that language and the aural components of a language have any correlation to the behavior of its speakers.
Well I’ve heard it said that learning language actually causes significant changes in brain structure (sorry no cite, it was ages ago).
And I believe I’ve heard that after a certain age, if a person has not acquired language skills by a certain point in life that they never will. I think this supports the idea that malleability of the brain may be necessary for, at least initially, developing language skills.
If this is the case I certainly think it’s possible that this could have ancillary effects in personality or behavior.
Maybe it’s the other way around; for example, maybe we perceive languages like German and Japanese as “martial” sounding because that’s how we see their people, historically?
LarryS: *But regardless, I was wondering if there was any evidence to suggest that societies that tend to exhibit certain sounds in their language behave in ways [passiveness, belligerence, etc.] that resemble other groups that tend to have the same sounds in their languages. *
If there were, it would be difficult to explain in light of the fact that languages frequently drop or add various sounds, sometimes more rapidly than the basic customs of their speakers’ culture change. (Consider Sanskrit itself, which apparently picked up retroflex consonants from the influence of non-Indo-European languages in the Indian subcontinent, in the course of at most a few hundred years. And what kind of behavioral changes would the fricativization of consonants in post-classical Greek correspond to?)
