ABSTRACT
Hypothesis developed by B.L.Whorf (1897-1941) and based on the linguistic approach of his teacher, E.Sapir (1884-1939), which, in its strongest form claims that a language determines the thought and perception of its speakers. Whorf himself called this view the ‘linguistic relativity principle.’ In other words, just as time, space, and mass (according to Einstein) can be defined only in terms of a system of relationships, human knowledge similarly arises only in relation to the semantic and structural possibilities of natural languages. Through his work with Native American languages, whose vocabularies and grammatical structures deviate considerably from the regularities of Indo-European languages, Whorf came to the conclusion that ‘people who use languages with very different grammars are led by these grammars to typically different observations and different values for outwardly similar observations’ (Whorf 1956:20). Whorf s main interest at the time was the Hopi language and culture. He worked especially with the linguistic channels for space-time conceptualization in Hopi, with plural formation and peculiarities of counting, and from these observations derived the hypothesis that Hopi has no physical concept of time. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis stands in accord with von Humboldt’s theory of a ‘world view’ of languages, as is clearly seen in the title of his work on the Kawi languages of Java: On language: the diversity of human languagestructure and its influence on the mental development of mankind. However, Sapir and Whorf make no explicit reference either to von Humboldt or to contemporary parallel views. The continuing discussion of the function of language in cognitive processes tends increasingly towards assuming a reciprocal relationship between language and thought. For refutation of the strong form of this hypothesis, see Berlin, Berlin and Kay (1969).
