“During the 1930s, Edward Sapir’s student Benjamin Lee Whorf promoted the following ideas, which have come to be known as the tenets of the Sapir-Whorfian hypothesis:
1) The worldviews of a culture are embodied in the language forms of that culture.
2) The syntactic and semantic forms of a language determine thought, and therefore:
3) Differences in thought among cultures are due to differences in the linguistic forms of the cultures in question.”[11]
“The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis theorizes that thoughts and behavior are determined (or are at least partially influenced) by language. Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf brought attention to the relationship between language, thought, and culture, but neither of them formally wrote the hypothesis nor supported it with empirical evidence, but through a thorough study of their writings about linguistics, researchers have found two main ideas. First, a strong theory of linguistic determinism that states that the language you speak determines the way that you will interpret the world around you (or the way one thinks is determined by the language one speaks). Second, a weak theory of linguistic relativity that states that language merely influences your thoughts about the real world (or differences among languages must be reflected in the differences in the worldviews of their speakers).”[12]
There is no enough powerful support for the strong version—the linguistic determinism because people have found that the thought has been formed former than the language, that is to say the thought comes first and there exist the non-verbal thought. For the weak version which is also called linguistic relativity is the more reasonable and can be adopted. “In most cases, they coexist with and influence each other: Human cognitive ability can develop to a very high level and still can be expressed by language. There is no thought that goes beyond the expression of language. Meanwhile, language is by no means passive as it is determined by thought. Instead, it influences people’s modes of thinking to some extent.”[13]
“Therefore, the relationship between thought and language is: language determines thought (linguistic determinism) and there is no limit to the structural diversity of languages (linguistic relativity), as Whorf concluded. He claimed that:
... It was found that the background linguistic system (in other words, the grammar) of each language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself the shaper of ideas, the program and guide for the individual’s mental activity, for his analysis of impressions, for his synthesis of his mental stock in trade. Formulation of ideas is not an independent process, strictly rational in the old sense, but is part of a particular grammar, and differs, from slightly to greatly, between different grammars...” [14]
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