18 Facts About Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

The idea is often stated in two forms: the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, now referred to as linguistic determinism, was held by some of the early linguists before World War II, while the weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is mostly held by some of the modern linguists.

Term "Sapir–Whorf Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" is considered a misnomer by linguists for several reasons: Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf never co-authored any works, and never stated their ideas in terms of a Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

The distinction between a weak and a strong version of this Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a later development; Sapir and Whorf never set up such a dichotomy, although often their writings and their views of this relativity principle are phrased in stronger or weaker terms.

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis espoused the viewpoint that because of the differences in the grammatical systems of languages no two languages were similar enough to allow for perfect cross-translation.

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis further noticed that while no employees smoked cigarettes in the room for full barrels, no-one minded smoking in the room with empty barrels, although this was potentially much more dangerous because of the highly flammable vapors still in the barrels.

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Sapir-Whorf hypothesis concluded that the use of the word empty in connection to the barrels had led the workers to unconsciously regard them as harmless, although consciously they were probably aware of the risk of explosion.

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis argued that in contrast to English and other SAE languages, Hopi does not treat the flow of time as a sequence of distinct, countable instances, like "three days" or "five years, " but rather as a single process and that consequently it has no nouns referring to units of time as SAE speakers understand them.

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis proposed that this view of time was fundamental to Hopi culture and explained certain Hopi behavioral patterns.

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis argued that Whorf's English descriptions of a Hopi speaker's view of time were in fact translations of the Hopi concept into English, therefore disproving linguistic relativity.

Where Brown's weak version of the linguistic relativity Sapir-Whorf hypothesis proposes that language influences thought and the strong version that language determines thought, Fishman's "Whorfianism of the third kind" proposes that language is a key to culture.

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis argued that language is often used metaphorically and that languages use different cultural metaphors that reveal something about how speakers of that language think.

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis described four parameters on which researchers differed in their opinions about what constitutes linguistic relativity:.

Kay ultimately concluded that "[the] Whorf Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is supported in the right visual field but not the left".

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis's findings show that accounting for brain lateralization offers another perspective.

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis concluded that this was related to the way in which counter-factuality is marked grammatically in Chinese.

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis concluded that cognitive differences between the grammatical usage of Swedish prepositions and Finnish cases could have caused Swedish factories to pay more attention to the work process while Finnish factory organizers paid more attention to the individual worker.

Examples of such languages designed to explore the human mind include Loglan, explicitly designed by James Cooke Brown to test the linguistic relativity Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, by experimenting whether it would make its speakers think more logically.

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis's Turing Award lecture, "Notation as a Tool of Thought", was devoted to this theme, arguing that more powerful notations aided thinking about computer algorithms.