The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the idea that a man’s language moulds his perception of reality, or that the world a man inhabits is a linguistic construct. It was created by the Americans Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf; manly Whorf since he was the one who constructed it based on Sapir’s ideas.

Both Sapir and Whorf fully shared the relativism of Boas and his Descriptivist successors, but they were never influenced by the behaviorism of Bloomfield (which was incorporated to Descriptivism later). Since most of the descriptivist followed Bloomfield their ideas tend to conflict with the ones of Sapir-Whorf.

Sapir studied languages of the pacific coast of North America; he took for granted that if one wants to know how a language is structured for its speakers it is appropriate to ask them. Sapir also believed that languages modify themselves in a specific direction.

Benjamin Lee Whorf was a brilliant amateur who discovered the impact of language in persons by reading reports of how fires started in his work; he never left his job until the day he died. He introduced the terms cryptotype (covert category) which describes semantic or syntactic features that do not have morphological implementation, and phenotype (overt category) which is the opposite of a cryptotype.

Sapir said that individuals are at the mercy of a language, Whorf that that speakers of a certain language are in an absolute agreement in visualize the world in a certain way. While it may look like this in the practice it might not be so, since science teaches us not to absolutely trust in conceptual linguistic framework that should turn into a conceptual prison.

For a better understanding of a language it is necessary to have an absolute meaning of the words a speaker is using, for that we will have to translate them in the language we use and know but a perfect match of  every word is impossible, to begin with some languages do not have words to express something other languages could either because they do not know the situation to express or that thing does not exist in their communities, also what they perceive might be different that the users of other languages, an example of this are the colors witch speakers of different languages separate distinctly.  Berlin and Kay were very interested in this matter, their investigation showed that there were 11 universal colors, colors that every language had created name for that matched with other languages, this were red, pink, orange, yellow, brown, green, blue, purple, black, white and grey. Their theory has a lot of flunks since most of their information was second handed. What they did found was that the blue color was very rare to find in nature, invent today it is difficult to create.

Sapir and Whorf never thought of a man capable of breaking the concepts and implied rules other men had create.

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