ANT102H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 18: Benjamin Lee Whorf, Edward Sapir, Franz Boas
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ANT102H5 Full Course Notes
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Document Summary
Boas was originally a physicist and went to observe arctic water, but became interested in the people of this area instead. He noticed that these people had their own language which had different terms than the english language. For example, they had terms for male seals versus female seals; they even had a term for seals in the sun. Boas had two students: edward sapir, benjamin lee whorf, edward sapir was a huge name in anthropology. In other words, he was interested in how some terms are extremely elaborated in some languages and vice versa: benjamin lee whorf was originally a chemical engineer and contributed to linguistic anthropology. The structure (nature) of a language influences how we think, how we act, and how we see the world. Language is a way of modelling the universe. The physical, social, and supernatural universes we live in. When you learn a language, you are learning an encoded version of the universe.
