:: Dusts off Anthro ::
For those of you wondering:
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis talks about the relationship between culture and language.
Named for Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf, the theory states that, to a degree, our culture and views are shaped by our language. Different laguages lead their speakers to think about things in different ways.
For instance, the third person singular pronouns of English (he, she, him, her, his, hers) distinguish gender, whereas those of the Palaung, a small tribe in Burma, do not. Gender exists as a feature of English grammar, although a fully developed noun-gender and adjective-agreement system, as in French and other romance languages (la belle fille, le beau fils), does not. The S-W hypothesis therfore might suggest that English speakers can't help paying more attention to differences between males and females than do the Palaung and less than do French or Spanish speakers.
English grammar also divides time into past, present, and future. Hopi, a language of the Pueblo region of the Native American Southwest, does not. However, Hopi distinguishes between events that exist or have existed (what we use past and present to discuss) and those which don't or don't yet exist (our future events, alont with imaginary and hypothetical events). Whorf argued that this difference gives English and Hopi speakers different perceptions of time and reality.
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