[00:05.27]2004

[00:07.59]The relation of language and mind

[00:09.70]has interested philosophers for many centuries.

[00:13.13](1)

[00:13.88]that the structure of language had some connection

[00:16.61]with the process of thought,

[00:18.42]which took root in Europe long before people realized

[00:21.16]how diverse languages could be.>

[00:23.67]Only recently did linguists begin the serious study of languages

[00:28.31]that were very different from their own.

[00:30.95]Two anthropologist-linguists,

[00:33.06]Franz Boas and Edward Sapir,

[00:35.48]were pioneers in describing many native languages

[00:38.62]of North and South America

[00:40.24]during the first half of the twentieth century.

[00:43.07](2)

[00:44.44]because some of these languages have since vanished,

[00:47.27]as the peoples who spoke them died out or became assimilated

[00:50.70]and lost their native languages.>

[00:53.22]Other linguists in the earlier part of this century,

[00:56.14]however, who were less eager to deal with bizarre data

[00:59.44]from "exotic" language, were not always so grateful.

[01:03.11](3)

[01:04.72]were often so strikingly different

[01:06.95]from the well studied languages

[01:08.39]of Europe and Southeast Asia

[01:10.22]that some scholars even accused Boas and Sapir

[01:13.19]of fabricating their data.>

[01:15.51]Native American languages are indeed different,

[01:18.43]so much so in fact that Navajo

[01:20.68]could be used by the US military

[01:23.02]as a code during World War II

[01:24.94]to send secret messages.

[01:27.13]Sapir's pupil, Benjamin Lee Whorf,

[01:29.92]continued the study of American Indian languages.

[01:33.24](4)

[01:36.87]Whorf developed the idea

[01:38.17]that the structure of language determines

[01:40.39]the structure of habitual thought in a society.>

[01:43.53]He reasoned that

[01:44.21]because it is easier to formulate certain concepts

[01:47.54]and not others in a given language,

[01:49.65]the speakers of that language think along one track

[01:52.37]and not along another.

[01:54.09](5)

[01:55.97]linguistic determinism which,

[01:57.98]in its strongest form,

[01:59.30]states that language imprisons the mind,

[02:01.82]and that the grammatical patterns

[02:03.43]in a language can produce far-reaching consequences

[02:06.36]for the culture of a society.>

[02:08.57]Later, this idea became to be known

[02:10.57]as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,

[02:13.08]but this term is somewhat inappropriate.

[02:15.70]Although both Sapir and Whorf emphasized

[02:18.12]the diversity of languages,

[02:19.85]Sapir himself never explicitly supported

[02:22.55]the notion of linguistic determinism.