The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: Language, Culture And Society
Language, Culture and Society
Midterm Assignment
Date: May, 04 2015
By: 000799251
Lecturer: Dr. Orly Idan
The Sapir Whorf Hypothesis is also know as the hypothesis of linguistic relativity, and it states that cognitive development of each human being is influenced by the language they speak. In its most extreme form, this hypothesis assumes that the mode of expression determines the way of thinking.
In the paper written by Paul Kay and Willet Kempton, “What Is The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis” the authors try to analyze the concept of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis with several experiments.
The authors begin with an historical background, in the 19th century Franz Boas, Sapir’s teacher, ran into Native American languages from different language
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The principle is often defined to include two versions: the strong one and the weak one. The strong variant says that language decides thought, and that semantic classes restrict and focus psychological classifications, while the weak version says just that etymological classes and utilization impact thought and certain sorts of non-phonetic conduct.
Whorf analyze this idea more precisely by examining the specific mechanisms by which grammatical thought influenced language.
The paper continues by describing the experiments in which English and Tarahmara speaker has to show their way of describing colors with the use of stimuli, the result of this paper shows that different languages have different way of how to handle a description process, the hypothesis is reevaluated in the light of these results.
This hypothesis is also supported by the paper of Lera Borodisky, “How Language Construct Time”, in which the author analyze how human beings construct they mental representation of time. Even if our world make us experience the physical world more then the abstract one, one possible solution is that representation of what is not
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