Nydia Paola Rodriguez 142098

The Whorf Hypothesis

The Whorf hypothesis, or the hypothesis of linguistic relativism, is the contrary

proposition; namely, that the worldview of a culture is subtly conditioned by the structure of

its language. Benjamin Lee Whorf, suspected that the relationship between language and

worldview went far beyond word association and involved the structure of the language.

Whorfs great contribution to the hypothesis of linguistic relativism was his attempt to work

out the interrelationship between language and worldview of a non-Western group, and to

compare it with the Standard Average European (SAE) worldview and linguistic categories.

Color Terms

The color words of languages have long been used as examples of how each language

imposes its own categorization on the world and how these categorizations can differ. Brent

Berlin and Paul Kay experimentally investigated the color terms of twenty languages. For

each language, they listed the basic color words, color words that every speaker knows and

that have essentially the same reference for all speakers; such words tend to be offered at the

beginning of lists of color terms, they are not used only for certain objects, they are not

included in the range of another color word, and they do not have meanings predictable from

the meanings of their parts. Though controversial, the Berlin-Kay findings provide a

relatively clear case in which similar physical stimuli are categorized differently by speakers

of different languages.