Sapir-Whorf hypothesis Concepts

Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

by Guy Deutscher · 29 Aug 2010 · 347pp · 99,969 words

verbs.” Incredible how much a language can change in forty years. It is not difficult to comprehend why the principle of linguistic relativity, or the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,” as it has also come to be known, has sunk into such disrepute among respectable linguists. But there are others—philosophers, theologians, literary critics—who

…

. Can we turn his hazy imagery into something more transparent? I believe we can. But to do so, we need to abandon the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the assumption that languages limit their speakers’ ability to express or understand concepts, and turn instead to a fundamental insight that can be dubbed the

…

consequences for memory, or perception, or associations, or even practical skills. If this all still sounds a little too abstract, then the contrast between the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and the Boas-Jakobson principle can be brought into focus with another example. Chinese may seem to us rather lax in allowing its speakers to

…

Gegenden im Raume. Vorkritische Schriften II. 1757–1777. Das Bonner Kant-Korpus (http://korpora.org/kant/). Kay, P., and W. Kempton. 1984. What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? American Anthropologist 86:65–79. Kay, P., and L. Maffi. 1999. Color appearance and the emergence and evolution of basic color lexicons. American Anthropologist 101

…

, J. 1883. Lazarus Geiger und die Kritik der Vernunft. Wertheim am Main: E. Bechstein. Koerner, E. F. K. 2000. Towards a “full pedigree” of the “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis”: From Locke to Lucy. In Explorations in Linguistic Relativity, ed. M. Pütz and M. H. Verspoor, 1–23. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Komarovaa, N., K. Jameson

The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language

by Steven Pinker · 1 Jan 1994 · 661pp · 187,613 words

famous nonconfession Mistakes were made. One faction seeks to eradicate the verb altogether. And supposedly there is a scientific basis for these assumptions: the famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis of linguistic determinism, stating that people’s thoughts are determined by the categories made available by their language, and its weaker version, linguistic relativity, stating

…

, 1987. Atran, S. 1990. The cognitive foundations of natural history. New York: Cambridge University Press. Au, T. K.-F. 1983. Chinese and English counterfactuals: the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis revisited. Cognition, 15, 155–187. Au, T. K.-F. 1984. Counterfactuals: In reply to Alfred Bloom. Cognition, 17, 155–187. Baillargeon, R. In press. The

…

turn. Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell. Katzner, K. 1977. The languages of the world. New York: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Kay, P., & Kempton, W. 1984. What is the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? American Anthropologist, 86, 65–79. Kaye, J. 1989. Phonology: A cognitive view. Hillsdale, N.J.: Erlbaum. Keenan, E. O. 1976. Towards a universal definition of

The Patterning Instinct: A Cultural History of Humanity's Search for Meaning

by Jeremy Lent · 22 May 2017 · 789pp · 207,744 words

overstated the case, asserting that our native language forces us to think in certain ways and prevents us thinking in other ways. This theory, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, was witheringly attacked in the later twentieth century as researchers showed how people from a particular culture were able to adapt their cognition to culturally

…

different ways of thinking even as adults. More recently, however, a plethora of new evidence has convincingly demonstrated a more refined version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis: that the language we speak from birth—although it doesn't prevent us thinking in different ways—establishes structures of cognition that influence us to

…

do,” Sapir suggested, “because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation.”5 Whorf took this idea, which became known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, to new heights of rhetoric. The grammar of our language, he claimed, affects how we pattern meaning into the natural world. “We cut up and

…

a person's thoughts,” he proclaimed, “are controlled by inexorable laws of pattern of which he is unconscious.” This rhetoric led people to interpret the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as a theory of linguistic determinism, claiming that people's thoughts are inevitably determined by the structure of their language.8 A theory of rigid

…

it. In time, attacking Sapir-Whorf became a favorite path to academic tenure, until the entire theory became completely discredited.9 In place of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis arose what is known as the nativist view, which argues that the grammar of language is innate to humankind. As discussed earlier, the theory of

…

of any kind, and any concept of counting or quantification.11 Psychologist Peter Gordon saw an opportunity to test the most extreme version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis with the Pirahã. If language predetermined patterns of thought, then the Pirahã should be unable to count, in spite of the fact that they show

…

Minds Deutscher, Guy. Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages. New York: Metropolitan Books, 2010. A modern reassessment of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis incorporating the latest research findings. Nakamura, Hajime. Ways of Thinking of Eastern Peoples: India-China-Tibet-Japan. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1964. An insightful

…

, Race, and Human History (New York: Penguin, 2014). 16. See chapter 10, “The Cultural Shaping of Our Minds,” for an in-depth discussion of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and its aftermath. 17. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2003), 3, 145–46. See, in particular, chapter

…

, 163–66 Yoga in, 163–66, 171–73, 176, 185 See also Sanskrit; Upanishads Indo-European languages, 133–34, 137, 140, 162, 205–207, 302 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and, 198–99 Indra, 137, 162 Industrial Revolution, 18, 313, 324–25, 330, 350, 378, 383, 434 inequality agriculture as source of, 110–11, 112

…

, 64, 72, 86, 200 symbolic thought and, 58–61, 203–204, 409 syntax, importance in, 54–56, 59, 64 Taoist view of, 190 See also Sapir-Whorf hypothesis Lao Tzu, 144, 187 Laplace, Pierre-Simon, 357–58 Lascaux cave paintings, 67–68, 79 Lee, Richard, 83, 84, 93, 95 Leibniz, Gottfried, 278, 350

…

Said, Edward, 17 Saint-Simon, Henri, 388 Sanskrit, 133, 136, 137, 165, 496 Santiago theory of cognition, 14 “sapient paradox,” 69–72 Sapir, Edward, 198 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, 22, 34, 198–99, 200, 205 Whorfianism, modern, 22, 201–203, 213, 496 satcitananda, 172 Saul, King, 242–43 Schrödinger, Erwin, 366, 368 Science and

Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing (Writing Science)

by Thierry Bardini · 1 Dec 2000

out, this understanding of what language is and does derives from the work of Benjamin Lee Whorf, and it both mirrors and extends the famous Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: The Whorfian hypothesis states that "the world VIew of a culture is limited by the structure of the language which this culture uses." But there

Talk on the Wild Side

by Lane Greene · 15 Dec 2018 · 284pp · 84,169 words

better thinkers. But Brown did not really show any ambition to replace lesser languages with Lojban; he seemed to be primarily interested in testing the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis by teaching it as a second language. Some Esperantists still believe in the fina venko, or “final victory”, when everyone on earth learns Esperanto. Not

In the Land of Invented Languages: Adventures in Linguistic Creativity, Madness, and Genius

by Arika Okrent · 1 Jan 2009 · 226pp · 75,783 words

unpublished, some written for experts and some for lay audiences—that served as the basis for what came to be called the Whorfian hypothesis (or Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). The science-minded scholars of the 1950s reinterpreted Whorf's incomplete and complicated exploration of various issues having to do with language, thought, and culture

…

before a bright fire to commence what I hoped would be a short paper on the possibility of testing the social psychological implications of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.” He wanted to show that “the construction of a tiny model language, with a grammar borrowed from the rules of modern logic, taught to subjects

…

(Dover Publications, 1957). Michael Silverstein, “Modern Prophets of Language,” University of Chicago, MS, 1993. On Whorf, see: John E. Joseph, “The Immediate Sources of the ‘Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis,’” Historiographia Linguistica 23, no. 3 (1996), pp. 365–404. Penny Lee, The Whorf Theory Complex: A Critical Reconstruction (John Benjamins, 1996). John Lucy, Language Diversity

Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach

by Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig · 14 Jul 2019 · 2,466pp · 668,761 words

thinking about a season or something that goes boing—and if one word can correspond to two thoughts, thoughts can’t be words.” The famous Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (Whorf, 1956) claims that our understanding of the world is strongly influenced by the language we speak. It is certainly true that different speech communities

…

, 1111 Sang, T., 474, 1111 Sanna, R., 836, 1096 Sanskrit, 356, 903 Santorini, B., 880, 903, 1105 SAPA (planning system), 401 Sapir, E., 875, 1111 Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, 270 Saraswat, V., 189, 1115 Sarawagi, S., 906, 1111 Sargent, T. J., 872, 1111 SARSA (state-action-reward-state-action), 853 Sartre, J.-P., 636

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window Into Human Nature

by Steven Pinker · 10 Sep 2007 · 698pp · 198,203 words

replace airy-fairy notions like “beliefs” with concrete responses like words, whether spoken in public or muttered silently. In the form of the Whorfian or Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (named after the linguist Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf), it was a staple of courses on language through the early 1970s, by

Surfaces and Essences

by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander · 10 Sep 2012 · 1,079pp · 321,718 words

fable “The Fox and the Grapes”. Festinger’s book is a classic on cognitive dissonance. The books by Carroll and by Sapir deal with the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, and the volume by Atran and Medin covers the way that culture channels human language and thought. Finally, the books by Flynn and by Sternberg

You Are What You Speak: Grammar Grouches, Language Laws, and the Politics of Identity

by Robert Lane Greene · 8 Mar 2011 · 319pp · 95,854 words

this idea—that a person’s access to reality is conditioned by the language he speaks. Whorf himself became so known for this that the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is often simply known as “Whorfianism”: other writings of Sapir indicate that he wouldn’t have gone as far as Whorf did. Famously, Whorf argued