Suppose A Friend Said To You In English Language Essay
Suppose a friend said to you in English, "I'm visiting my uncle." From this sentence alone there's little you can glean about this uncle.
However, if you and your friend spoke Korean and she told you she was visiting her uncle, you'd know several things about him based on what word for "uncle" she used. Let's say she informed you she was visiting Samchon (삼촌). This word alone would inform you that her uncle is her father's unmarried younger brother.
In Korean, as in Chinese, the speaker has no choice but to encode this kind of information into the sentence. The languages require speakers to think about their family relationships when speaking of them.
This is an example of linguistic relativity, or the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which holds that the language we speak shapes how we view the world.
On the 1940's, a linguist named Benjamin Lee Whorf studied the Hopi – a Native American language spoken in northeastern Arizona. Based on his research, he claimed that speakers of Hopi and speakers of English see the world differently because of differences in their language, and that our mother tongue prevents us from understanding concepts outside our language.
Whorf's ideas were later rejected based on his claims that if a
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