miércoles, 15 de mayo de 2013

The Sapir - Whorf hypothesis



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.  



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