In Howard Rheingold's 1988 book, They Have a Word for It, he writes about the Whorfian Hypothesis. Apparently this hypothesis (and I am sure that Zmj will know more about this), proposes that differences in language actually cause the differences in the way linguistic communities think. This hypothesis hasn't been proven or disproven (at least in 1988 when the book was written), though there has been some interesting research that has supported the hypothesis. For example, they investigated people from cultures who have names for certain colors and those from cultures that don't. As would be expected from this hypothesis, those subjects who had a name for a color tended to discriminate more quickly between 2 similar colors than those who had no name for the color.
Interesting! What do some of you know about this hypothesis? What has recent research shown?
The Wikipedia article has a rather good explanation of it. Linguists usually call it the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis after the two people who wrote seminal articles on it: linguistics professor (Edward Sapir) and his popularizing pupil, amateur linguist and insurance inspector (Benjamin Whorf). It's a controversial hypothesis. Folks that don't have words for different colors or animals can still perceive the difference between them. This gets tangled up with the N Words for Snow in Esquimeaux meme. The color words study, which Rheingold is referring to, is also controversial. (See Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, Basic Color Terms, their Universality and Evolution'; there's a follow-up book from the '90s, but the title escapes me.) I had the pleasure to take a class (in semantics and co-taught by Charles Fillmore) from one of the authors, Paul Kay. My objections at the time were how the number of words for different colors were chosen was a bit fuzzy and vague. They had the number of words for breaking up the color spectrum going through a pattern: if only two primary words, they were black/dark and white/light. If three, red gets specified, then blue or green, etc. (It's the whole spectrum that gets divided like this.)
[Corrected some spelling.]This message has been edited. Last edited by: zmježd,
You can also make a distinction between the Strong and Weak Whorf-Sapir hypothesis. The strong version is that all thought is dependent on language. The weak version states that thought is influence by language. The latter is widely accepted, and the former widely rejected, for what are, at least to me, obvious reasons.
I too have seen studies where the color hypothesis was tested, and generally results are mixed. Clearly the idea of the spectrum, Black/White, then red, etc., is accurate, but that people can't actually distinguish between two colors which share the same word is doubtful. Asking a person to describe two different hues and getting the response "blue" for both doesn't mean that the person can't distinguish between they, they just can't be distinguished linguistically.
On an interesting historical note, Whorf was a student of Sapir, who was mentored by Franz Boas.
Zmj, I can see now why you like Wikipedia. That article was excellent, though a bit over my head in places. I see your point, Sean, that the weak version is easier to believe. I do think language has some influence on thought and behavior.
that people can't actually distinguish between two colors which share the same word is doubtful.
Agreed, but let's carry it further. Suppose two like objects, let us say a living room and a dining room, each painted, are in somewhat different shades of blue. A viewer recognizes them as being different but, lacking distinct words, calls each of them a "blue" room. He is not quizzed on the difference or asked to describe it.
A few hours later he is shown a picture of a third "blue" room and asked which of the two previously-seen rooms it matches. Will he recall? Will he be less likely to recall than is the person who had used two different terms for the first two rooms' colors?
In other words, even if the lack of linguistic terms does not affect immediate experience, does it affect recall of that experience for future processing?
As I remember the experiment, the informants were shown a color chip chart, showing pretty much the whole spectrum (it is included with the book), and asked to circle areas that they would classify as being of X color. The color names were known before hand because they needed to determine whether they were primary or secondary color words.
