LING 100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Edward Sapir, Linguistic System, Benjamin Lee Whorf
3 Feb 2015
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Document Summary
Edward sapir had claimed that perceptions of the world are built on linguistic habits. Benjamin lee whorf went further (though ideas are imputed to him that he never actually held) by stating that the linguistic system in our minds organizes our observations of the world. Thus speakers have different world views language affects thought. On a physical level, light at different frequencies activates cones and rods in the visual tract. But that does not mean that every colour is perceptually salient to every speaker everywhere. For example, ancient greek made no distinction between black and blue. A focal point within a colour makes it more salient. Kay"s more recent work shows a lot of similarity among languages in respect of colour terms near certain perceptually salient points. This is true of eleven colours and there"s a pecking order to these: thus if a language has only two colour terms, they will be black and white .
