One day, an American was driving, too fast, in the west of Ireland when he was pulled over by a police officer. “what would happen if you were to run into Mr Fog?" the officer asked angry in his thick Irish accent. Annoyed by the police officer’s manners, the American replied,”【小题1】” The officer stared at him strangely and said,” I said fog.”

For one moment, the American, who happens to be anthropology(人类学家), thought he had come across those who liked personifying aspects of the weather.【小题2】

People in Britain do not usually say “I appreciate it,” have a hard time, reach out to other people, stay focused, ask to be given a break, refer to the bottom line or get blown away. The word ”scary,” as opposed to “frightening “or "alarming " sounds childish to British ears.【小题3】This is a term which, if banned in America, would cause airplanes to fall from the sky.

The phrase "to feel comfortable with" is typically American. Using the word "agreesive" positively also sounds strange across the Atlantic. The habit of using the word "like" every four seconds, widespread among American youth, has now caught on in Brain as well. Perhaps it has to do with an expectation of not sounding dogmatic(教条的).

Americans tend to say "Excuse me" when they accidentally get in your way, while the British say "Sorry.” Americans say "Excuse me" even when they are 10 paces away from you, since they are accustomed to a lot more space than people are in Europe.【小题4】

Brits and Americans, in short, are stranger to each other than they usually imagine. Every now and then, an American will reveal that he or she does not understand the word "fortnight(两周), has never used a teapot or does not know how to boil an egg.

Language as a System of Symbols (符号)

Of all systems of symbols, language is the most highly developed. It has been pointed out that human beings, by agreement, can make anything stand for anything. Human beings have agreed, in the course of centuries of mutual dependency, to let the various noises that they can produce with their lungs, throats, tongues, teeth, and lips systematically stand for certain happenings in their nervous systems. We call that system of agreements language.

There is no necessary connection between the symbol and that which it stands for. Just as social positions can be symbolized by feathers worn on the head, by gold on the watch chain, or by a thousand other things according to the culture we live in, so the fact of being hungry can be symbolized by a thousand different noises according to the culture we live in.

However obvious these facts may appear at first glance, they are actually not so obvious as they seem except when we take special pains to think about the subject. Symbols and the things they stand for are independent of each other, yet we all have a way of feeling as if, and sometimes acting as if, there were necessary connections. For example, there are people who feel that foreign languages are unreasonable by nature; foreigners have such funny names for things, and why can’t they call things by their right names? This feeling exhibits itself most strongly in those English and American tourists who seem to believe that they can make the natives of any country understand English if they shout loud enough. Like the little boy who is reported to have said, “Pigs are called pigs because they are such dirty animals, ” they feel that the symbol is inherently connected in some way with the things symbolized.

What defines who we are? Our habits? Our tastes? Our memories? I would say it must be my deep-seated sense of right and wrong.

And yet, like many other people who speak more than one language, I often have the sense that I’m a slightly different person in each of my languages — more confident in English, more relaxed in French. Is it possible that my moral compass also points in somewhat different directions depending on the language I’m using?

Several recent psychological studies suggest that when people are faced with moral dilemmas, they do respond differently when considering them in their native and foreign tongue.

In a 2014 paper led by Albert Costa, volunteers were presented with a moral dilemma known as the “trolley problem”: imagine that a runaway trolley is dashing toward a group of five people standing on the tracks, unable to move. You are next to a switch that can shift the trolley to a different set of tracks, thereby sparing the five people, but resulting in the death of one who is standing on the side tracks. Do you pull the switch?

Most people agree that they would. But what if the only way to stop the trolley is by pushing a large stranger off a footbridge into its path? People tend to be very reluctant (不情愿的) to say they would do this. But Costa and his colleagues found that posing the dilemma in a language that volunteers had learned as a foreign tongue dramatically increased their willingness, from fewer than 20% of respondents working in their native language to about 50% of those using the foreign one.

Why does it matter whether we judge morality in our native language or a foreign one? According to one explanation, such judgments involve two separate and competing modes of thinking — one of these, a quick, gut-level “feeling,” and the other, careful deliberation about the greatest good for the greatest number. When we use a foreign language, we unconsciously sink into the more deliberate mode simply because the effort of operating in our non-native language cues our cognitive (认知) system to prepare for strenuous (费力的) activity. An alternative explanation is because our childhood languages change with greater emotional intensity than do those learned in more academic settings. As a result, moral judgments made in a foreign language are less burdened with the emotional reactions.

What then is a multilingual (多语言的) person’s true “moral self”? Is it my moral memories? Or is it the reasoning I’m able to apply when free of such unconscious restrictions? Or perhaps, as the research implies, regardless of how many languages we speak: that our moral compass is a combination of the earliest forces that have shaped us and the ways in which we escape them.