This hypothesis says that a man´s language moulds his
perception of reality, or that a world a man inhabits is a linguistic
construct, has become associated with the names of Americans Edward Sapir and
Benjamin Lee Whorf.
Sapir and Whorf fully shared the relativism of Boas
and his Desctiptivist successors, with its emphasis on the alienness of exotic
languages, while never being influenced by the behaviorism of Bloomfield. There
was a conflict between the ideas summarized as the Sapir-Whorf htpothesis and
the ideas of other Descsriptivists.
Sapir studied languages of the Pacific coasts of North
America and took it for granted that if one wants to know how a language is
structured for its speakers it is appropriate to ask them. Sapir thought, there
was a long- term tendency for that language to modify itself in some particular
direction.
Edward Sapir
and his pupil Benjamin Lee Whorf heirs to a tradition in European thought
mediated in all by Franz Boas which development of structuralism.
The
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, as it is usually presented as “Language determines
thought”. In the extreme version of Sapir-Whorf hypothesis may be put as
follows:
a) We
are, in all our thinking and forever, “at mercy of the particular language
which has become the medium of expression for (our) society”, because we cannot
but see and hear and otherwise experience in terms of the categories and
distinctions encoded in language.
b) The
categories and the distinctions encoded in one language system are unique to
that system and incommensurable with those of other systems.
The weaker
version of the hypothesis says that the structure of one´s language influences
perception and recall.
All this says
that the language of a speaker determines completely the way it conceptualizes,
memorize, and classify the reality around him. For example Boas had already
made the point that, for instance, where English has the one word snow Eskimo
has separate basic roots for snow falling, snow on the ground, drifting snow,
and so forth; at this relatively concrete level disparities between the
conceptual schemes of different language are familiar.
Another example
is the Berlin and Kay who being investigating the color terminologies of twenty
languages from widely scattered areas of the world, using native-speakers´
judgments of how to a label various portions of a large standard color chart. Berlin
and Kay identify eleven smallish areas of the chart as “universal colors”: red, pink, orange, yellow, brown, green,
blue, purple, black, white, grey.
ACTIVIDAD
No hay comentarios:
Publicar un comentario