In a very recent New Yorker article, Adam Gopnik questions Whorfianism, a theory named after the author, Benjamin Lee Whorf, an amateur linguist. Whorfianism came to mean the idea that our language forces us to see the world a certain way, and that different languages impose different world views on their speakers. Gopnik says from Word Magic: How much really gets lost in translation? BY Adam Gopnik, The New Yorker, May 26, 2014 (full-text not available on line to non-subscribers)In truth, language seems less like a series of cells in which we are imprisoned than like a set of tools that help us escape: some of the files are rusty; some will open any door; and most you have to jiggle around in the lock. But sooner or later, most words work.
Languages that have evolved in distant times or places may differ extensively in their resources for dealing with one or another range of phenomena. What comes easily in one language may come hard in another, and this difference may echo significant dissimilarities in style and value. But examples like these, impressive as they occasionally are, are not so extreme but that the changes and the contrasts can be explained and described using the equipment of a single language. Whorf, wanting to demonstrate that Hopi incorporates a metaphysics so alien to ours that Hopi and English cannot, as he puts it, "be calibrated," uses English to convey the contents of sample Hopi sentences. Kuhn is brilliant at saying what things were like before the revolution using -what else? -our post-revolutionary idiom. Donald Davidson, On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme
ooo, I loved that article. I wanted to post it here a couple days ago, but it's one of the locked online articles. humanodon, you would like it, if you get the chance.
I've also heard the hypothesis that those different world views affect problem-solving. For example, might it be easier to solve a particular math problem while thinking in German rather than Farsi? The Sapir–Whorf hypothesis makes dying languages all the more tragic.different languages impose different world views on their speakers
Absolutely. It's impossible to even imagine the particular view of the world encompassed in a language. In the quote below, living in another language is described as being immersed in an alternate universe: "The more advanced second language learner often finds herself immersed in a sort of alternate universe. . . Part of what makes learning a second language so difficult is precisely this: the commitment one made early on in life to a particular cutting up of the world at its joints is hard to see as merely one possible commitment among many, and just as it is hard to see, it is hard to let go of.
- Louder than Words, Benjamin K. Bergen