SapirWhorfhypothesis萨丕尔沃尔夫假说

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis 萨丕尔-沃尔夫假说

1、

The philosophical basis of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is empirical and the theoretical background is

structuralism、

萨丕尔与沃尔夫就是语言相对论思想的集大成者。

2、

While we reject the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, its weaker version is generally accepted by

most scholars

、

尽管我们反对萨丕尔-沃尔夫假设的强假设，而大部分学者却普遍接受了其弱假设。

Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, proclaimed that the structure of

the language people habitually use influences the ways they think

and behave, i、e、different languages offer people different ways of

expressing the world around, they think and speak differently, this is

also known as linguistic relativity、

Sapir and Whorf believe that language filters people s perception and

the way they categorize experiences、This interdependence of

language and thought is now known as Sapir-Whorf

Hypothesis、

Strong version & weak version

Strong version believes that the language patterns determine people

s thinking and behavior;

Weak version holds that the former influence the latter、

——The study of the linguistic relativity or SWH has shed two important

insights:

There is nowadays a recognition that language, as code, reflects

cultural preoccupations and constrains the way people think、

More

than in Whorf s days, however, we recognize how important context is

in complementing the meanings encoded in the language、

Much was made of the Inuit language where there is no precise equivalent to

the single English word "snow 、"

Because snow is such an important part of survival of people of the north, they

had nineteen different words that varied according to the condition of snow 、

At first, some argued that this was only a matter of what sizes and shapes of

boxes are the words we use in which to put experiences 、

In English, however, we have no single word meaning the chemical, di-hydrogen oxide (H

2O)、

If you want to object and say, "But we have the word 'water,'" let me

point out that the word "water" does not apply to conditions of H

2O

when it is frozen, crystallized or vaporized, for which we have other words (ice,

snow, steam, fog, clouds, humidity) 、

From the time we are born, we are inundated with thousands of bits of

information per second, as sound, smell, touch, temperature and sight、

They are many and random 、 In themselves, they have no meanings

It is only through our interaction with other human beings that we begin to apply

meaning, and we start to put a range of different information bits into the same

categories, words 、

Those words, or categories of large numbers of information bits, differ from

language to language