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The principle of linguistic relativity and the relationship between language and thought has also received attention in varying academic fields, including philosophy, psychology and anthropology. It has also influenced works of fiction and the invention of constructed languages .
The concept of linguistic relativity concerns the relationship between language and thought, specifically whether language influences thought, and, if so, how.This question has led to research in multiple disciplines—including anthropology, cognitive science, linguistics, and philosophy.
Whorf considered allophones to be another example of linguistic relativity. The principle of allophony describes how acoustically different sounds can be treated as reflections of a single phoneme in a language. This sometimes makes the different sound appear similar to native speakers of the language, even to the point that they are unable to ...
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis branches out into two theories: linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity. Linguistic determinism is viewed as the stronger form – because language is viewed as a complete barrier, a person is stuck with the perspective that the language enforces – while linguistic relativity is perceived as a weaker form of the theory because language is discussed as a ...
The results showed that they perform quite differently from, for example, an English speaking person who has a language with words for numbers more than two. For example, they were able to represent numbers 1 and 2 accurately using their fingers but as the quantities grew larger (up to 10), their accuracy diminished.
In 1959, philosopher Max Black published a critique of Whorf's arguments in which he argued that the principle of linguistic relativity was obviously wrong because translation between languages is always possible, even when there are no exact correspondences between the single words or concepts in the two languages.
Whorf’s principle of linguistic relativity was very much used as material for science fiction novels. For example, it appeared in Philip José Farmer’s Prometheus, in which the protagonist, at one point, suggested teaching different groups of aliens different languages, to test the Whorf hypothesis. As pointed out by Meyers,
The concept of linguistic relativity postulates a relationship between the language a person speaks and how that person understands the world. The conclusions about the significance of Pirahã numeracy and linguistic relativity in Frank et al. (2008) are quoted below. In short, in this study the Pirahã were – by and large – able to match ...