WHORF

The relationship between language, thought and reality

has fascinated linguist and philosophers for centuries.
In recent times, the person whose name is most closely
associated with investigations of the relationship between
language and thought is BENJAMIN LEE WHORF.
Whorf- was an anthropological linguist who began his
career as a chemical engineer working for a fire insurance
company.
He first investigated the Native American
Language as a hobby, but later studied with
Edward Sapir at Yale University, in the course of
processing insurance claims, he noticed that the
particular words selected to described or label
objects often influenced people's perceptions
and behavior.
Example:
Frank: Don't throw your cigarette butts in
there. It's dangerous.
Bill: Why not? The label says 'empty' .
Frank: Well there's no gasoline in there but
there's plenty of explosive vapor -so watch
out.
Linguistic
Determinism
The medium is the message
Sapir -whorf hypothesis generally labelled as Linguistic Determinism this
hold that people from different cultures think differently because of
differences in their language.
A native speaker of Hopi, whorf claimed, perceives reality differently from a
native speaker of English because she uses a different language.
Few sociolinguists would accept such a strong claim, but most accept the
weaker claim of Linguistic Relatively this language influences perception,
thought and at least potentially behavior.
We observe that languages differ and conclude that the thought
patterns of their speakers also differ. But the only evidence we
have that their thought patterns differ is the language they use.
So investigating the relationship between language and thought
is a real challenge because the most obvious way to access
thought is through language. Some ingenious experiments have
been devised to test the Sapir whorf hypothesis. If whorf is
right , it should be difficult to identify colour which your
language does not have a name.
For example

The dani is a New Guinea tribe, use only two colour terms (corresponding to
black and white or more accurately, dark and light, it was found that they
could recognized and distinguished between subtle shades of colours that
their language had no names .

This suggested that the strong form of the hypothesis cant be maintained.
Other experiments suggest, that people remember colours that are coded in
their language more easily than those which are not, and they tend to classify
together coloured by their language, even if objective measures like
wavelength suggest that they are different.
Some language have linguistic categories which take account of the shape
of the object
Example:
The Navajo verbs, sometimes determined by the shape and object
(long, short, thin or thick, round or not etc., Navajo-speaking children are
typically much faster tahn english speaking children in categorising blocks
by shapes.
And given a choice of ways of putting objects into groups, Navajo children
tend to group them according to shape, while english speaking children
group them according to colours. These interesting findings based on
experiments with colours and shapes all support the weaker principle of
linguistic relatively the categories provided by a language may make it
easier to draw certain conceptual distinctions.