Sapir- Whorf hypothesis Free Essay Example.
It’s easier to prove or disprove a hypothesis in a well-defined area of experience that can be readily compared across languages. That’s why a lot of scholars interested in Benjamin Lee Whorf’s ideas focused their research on color. Because color is a physical property, determined by the wavelengths of light that are reflected or absorbed by an object, you might assume that all languages.
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis can be divided into two basic components: Linguistic Determinism and Linguistic Relativity. The first part, linguistic determinism, refers to the concept that what is said, has only some effect on how concepts are recognized by the mind.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is captured in the following passage from Sapir:1 Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which.
Soon, Sapir had a student who picked up on the idea of linguistic determinism and really made it his own. Whorf coined what was once called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which is more properly referred to as the Whorf hypothesis. This states that language is not simply a way of voicing ideas, but is the very thing which shapes those ideas.
Most critics favor the theory of linguistic relativity (also known as the “weak” version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis) over the hard-set determinism. Linguistic determinism states that society is in some way confined by its language, that language actually determines thought and culture (Language Files, p696).
Sapir Whorf Hypothesis suggests that languages affect cultures. Certainly existence of ideas-words in a language affects what kind of thoughts people might or might not have.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was developed by Benjamin Whorf and Edward Sapir. According to this hypothesis, our language influences and shapes our cultural reality by limiting our thought processes. The term culture refers to the beliefs, norms, and values exhibited by a society. An example of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is how sexist language.