PORTFOLIO TASK 8 (linguistic relativity)

Having watched the talks by Lera Boroditsky, which should help you to focus more closely on
the issue of linguistic relativity, please describe and exemplify THREE ways (language specific
lexical or grammatical way of describing / dividing the world) in which you think your being
bilingual (Croatian – and English) makes you attend to reality in two different ways - an
'English specific way' and a 'Croatian specific way'. In other words, I am after examples
where one and the same world reality (observable) has been cut out (categorized) differently
by the two languages (English and Croatian) in order to speak about the world (the classical
example is HAND – RUKA, which are usually thought to be equivalents but are not). Or,
another good example, is the fact that Croatian marks gender on nouns (table i.e. stol is
masculine, chair i.e. stolica is feminine), while English does not. When you test Croatian
speakers and ask them to describe nouns, masculine nouns usually get described with
'stronger' adjectives than feminine nouns (this thing does not happen in English native
speakers when tested on English nouns).
FOR ERASMUS STUDENTS, of course, rather than working on the Croatian-English pair of
languages, you will consider your first language in combination with English.
Croatians see body parts and what is felt in them differently than English speaking people.
Similarly to the hand – ruka example, Croatians do not distinguish leg from foot in most
everyday situations, either. The word stopalo, although used a bit more often, is very similar
to šaka. For example, if you were to translate wash feet into Croatian, you would probably
say prati noge, rather than prati stopala.
There is also the example of the word kosa, which is used in singular and stands for any
amount of hair. The word is used to refer to human hair growing from the top of the head,
whereas everything else is referred to as dlaka (which can be used in singular or in the plural
form dlake). In contrast, English has only one word hair.
Another thing is that Croatian does not need to have its subject specified, rather, it is implied
within the context. The language follows the standard SVO structure but it is not too strict
with its sentence structure; Clauses in English generally have a subject, although occasionally
they can have an implied subject as well.
Example: (ja) Kuham ručak.  (I) Am cooking dinner.
(implied S) + V+O