Learning About Grammatical Animacy
<p>When I was younger, I thought different languages were just different lexicons that you could interchangeably slap concepts into. But of course, different languages of the world have such vastly different grammars and ways of describing the world that I always get my mind blown when I learn about a new grammatical framework in a language unrelated to English (e.g. not German or most Romance languages).</p>
<p>If you’ve read <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17465709-braiding-sweetgrass" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank"><em>Braiding Sweetgrass</em></a> (Robin Wall Kimmerer), you may recall the chapter about indigenous language as a different lens for seeing the world. (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">Obligatory link to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis</a>.) I highly recommend the entire book, but here’s <a href="https://www.bloomindoom.com/lifestyle/animacy-reshape-relationship-nature" rel="noopener ugc nofollow" target="_blank">a quick independent summary of that chapter</a> if you’re unfamiliar.</p>
<p><a href="https://rhetoricize.medium.com/learning-about-grammatical-animacy-317fc3ac0c51"><strong>Read More</strong></a></p>