8.

Language and thought, Sapir Whorf hypothesis

Humans communicate with one another using an amazing array of languages, and each language differs
from the text in innumerable ways.

For example, to say that, ' the elephant ate the peanuts' in English, we must include tense- the fact that
the event happened in the past. In Mandarin and Indonesian, indicating when the event occured will be
optional and couldn't be included in the verb. In Russian, the verb would need to exclude tense and also
whether the peanut- eater was male or female ( though only in the past tense), and whether said
peanut- eater ate all the peanuts' or just a portion of them. In Turkish, on the other hand , one would
specify( as a suffix ok the verb) whether the eating of the peanuts was witnessed or if it was hearsay. It
appears that speakers of different languages have to attend to and encode strikingly different aspects of
the world in order to use their language properly. ( Sapir, 1921)

Language affects

Space, time, substance and objects

Lera Boroditsky

Follow me to Pormpuraaw, a small Aboriginal community on the western edge of Cape York, in northern
Australia. I came here because of the way the locals, the Kuuk Thaayorre, talk about space. Instead of
words like "right," "left," "forward," and "back," which, as commonly used in English, define space
relative to an observer, the Kuuk Thaayorre, like many other Aboriginal groups, use cardinal-direction
terms — north, south, east, and west — to define space.1 This is done at all scales, which means you
have to say things like "There's an ant on your southeast leg" or "Move the cup to the north northwest a
little bit." One obvious consequence of speaking such a language is that you have to stay oriented at all
times, or else you cannot speak properly. The normal greeting in Kuuk Thaayorre is "Where are you
going?" and the answer should be something like " Southsoutheast, in the middle distance." If you don't
know which way you're facing, you can't even get past "Hello."

The result is a profound difference in navigational ability and spatial knowledge between speakers of
languages that rely primarily on absolute reference frames (like Kuuk Thaayorre) and languages that rely
on relative reference frames (like English).2 Simply put, speakers of languages like Kuuk Thaayorre are
much better than English speakers at staying oriented and keeping track of where they are, even in
unfamiliar landscapes or inside unfamiliar buildings. What enables them — in fact, forces them — to do
this is their language. Having their attention trained in this way equips them to perform navigational
feats once thought beyond human capabilities.

To test this idea, we gave people sets of pictures that showed some kind of temporal progression (e.g.,
pictures of a man aging, or a crocodile growing, or a banana being eaten). Their job was to arrange the
shuffled photos on the ground to show the correct temporal order. We tested each person in two
separate sittings, each time facing in a different cardinal direction. If you ask English speakers to do this,
they'll arrange the cards so that time proceeds from left to right. Hebrew speakers will tend to lay out
the cards from right to left, showing that writing direction in a language plays a role.3 So what about
folks like the Kuuk Thaayorre, who don't use words like "left" and "right"? What will they do?
Instead of arranging time from left to right, they arranged it from east to west. That is, when they were
seated facing south, the cards went left to right. When they faced north, the cards went from right to
left. When they faced east, the cards came toward the body and so on. This was true even though we
never told any of our subjects which direction they faced. The Kuuk Thaayorre not only knew that
already (usually much better than I did), but they also spontaneously used this spatial orientation to
construct their representations of time.

Different languages divide up the color continuum differently: some make many more distinctions
between colors than others, and the boundaries often don't line up across languages.

To test whether differences in color language lead to differences in color perception, we compared
Russian and English speakers' ability to discriminate shades of blue. In Russian there is no single word
that covers all the colors that English speakers call "blue." Russian makes an obligatory distinction
between light blue (goluboy) and dark blue (siniy). Does this distinction mean that siniy blues look more
different from goluboy blues to Russian speakers? Indeed, the data say yes. Russian speakers are quicker
to distinguish two shades of blue that are called by the different names in Russian (i.e., one being siniy
and the other being goluboy) than if the two fall into the same category.

For English speakers, all these shades are still designated by the same word, "blue," and there are no
comparable differences in reaction time.

In fact, you don't even need to go into the lab to see these effects of language; you can see them with
your own eyes in an art gallery. Look at some famous examples of personification in art — the ways in
which abstract entities such as death, sin, victory, or time are given human form. How does an artist
decide whether death, say, or time should be painted as a man or a woman? It turns out that in 85
percent of such personifications, whether a male or female figure is chosen is predicted by the
grammatical gender of the word in the artist's native language. So, for example, German painters are
more likely to paint death as a man, whereas Russian painters are more likely to paint death as a
woman.

Sapir Whorf:

The hypothesis of linguistic relativity, a part of relativism, also known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis /sə
ˌpɪər ˈwɔːrf/, the Whorf hypothesis, or Whorfianism is a principle suggesting that the structure of a
language affects its speakers' world view or cognition, and thus people's perceptions are relative to their
spoken language. The idea was however not created by Edward Sapir or Benjamin Lee Whorf, but
imported from German humanistic thinking by various American authors

The idea is often stated in two forms: the strong hypothesis, now referred to as linguistic determinism,
was held by some of the early linguists before World War II,[4], while the weak hypothesis is mostly held
by some of the modern linguists.[4]
The strong version, or linguistic determinism, says that language determines thought and that linguistic
categories limit and determine cognitive categories. For instance, if a language lacks a word to define a
certain concept, a linguistic determinist would infer that speakers of that language would not be capable
of understanding that concept.

One of Whorf’s best known arguments for linguist determinism stems from his study of the Hopi
Indians, a Native American tribe from Arizona. Whorf believed that the tribe spoke without using
phrases that referred to time, omitting past or future tenses. This lack of time terminology led him to
believe that the tribe lived their life without abiding by the concept of time at all.

However, it was later determined that Whorf’s theory of the Hopi people speaking without tense
phrases was incorrect.

Take the word schadenfreude, for example. The term is German, and means to take pleasure in
another’s unhappiness. There is no translatable equivalent in English, but it wouldn’t be true to say
English speakers had never experienced or would not be able to comprehend this emotion.

So, just because there is no word for schadenfreude in the English language, doesn’t mean English
speakers are “restricted,” or less-equipped in their ability to feel or experience what that word
describes. This logic seems to disprove Whorf’s theory.

This version is generally agreed to be false by modern linguists.[5]

The weak version says that linguistic categories and usage only influence thought and decisions. In the
first half of the 20th century, language was seen as important in shaping our perception of reality. This
was mostly due to Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf who said that language predetermines what we
see in the world around us. In other words, language filters reality - we see the real world only in the
categories of our language. Conversely, if a person spoke a language that had multiple definitions for
one concept, linguistic determinists would argue that he or she must have a better understanding of
what’s being defined.

As Guy Deutscheraug points out in a 2010 New York Times Magazine article, this is especially true for
languages that attach genders to inanimate objects.

Deutscheraug references a study done that looks at how German and Spanish speakers view different
objects based on their gender association in each respective language. The results showed that in
describing things that are referred to as masculine in Spanish, speakers of that language graded them as
having more manly characteristics.

These same items, which used feminine phrasings in German, were seen by German speakers as
containing effeminate characteristics.

The findings suggest speakers of each language have developed preconceived notions of something
being more masculine or feminine, not due to the objects’ appearance or characteristics, but because of
the way they categorize them in their native language.