Is it possible that the language you learn at birth determines

>>9100837
>As in they say "my North hand" instead of "my left hand" is they are facing East
Oops, West*

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>>9100837
I would say that it's a tradeoff between abstraction and situational ease of use. Some abstractions allow for better comprehension of some topics, but they also make the language more complex and difficult to learn.

Your example of the Aboriginals is one example. The most used spoken languages all use "left hand" or something similar, but then you add the complexity of "my left your right" and "why do mirrors flip left and right??"

Some of my language teachers have also noted similar cases regarding gender. My language does not differentiate pronouns for genders. Then comes along a foreigner kid, and they allegedly have to know the gender of every living person or animal in a text just to express it in their heads, even though the language they are learning does not need it.

Clearly in both examples one language is situationally better than another and in some situations worse, as the abstraction also conveys less information. However, generally there should be no large obstacles for comprehension, as spoken languages are all very extendable. Words for directions and gender-neutral pronouns can be defined if necessary. For raising superhumans, I guess you'd want to teach them various different languages.

Yes, of course. The brain is plastic and if reinforce the learning of some "paradigm" from early on, the brain becomes really good at working within that paradigm.

>>9100837
>and they allegedly have to know the gender of every living person or animal in a text just to express it in their heads

Then they're a brainlet who is incapable or unwilling to alter how they think enough to actually use a new language without translating from their own.

>>9100877
You're responding to wrong person, also they're not a brainlet they were just trained differently. We can have all this brainlet talk if you want to be simple minded but brain as the other anon said brain plasticity at a young age is extremely important. It's hard to make massive changes to the brain when you're old without good external help, this is a scientific fact.

>>9100837
I'm bilingual. Spanish is my first language, English obviously my second. I do believe that based on a few differences in English and Spanish that sometimes allow me to comprehend certain situations better simply because one language might have a word for the situation that the other language might not.

>>9100900
Thanks for this post anon I made a thread about that exact topic asking that exact question a few months ago and nobody had and good responses. Damn I need to learn a second language, did Spanish in high school for 3 years but forgot it