1. By: Corelle Gwyn Catane

2.  Language
is more than just a means of
communication.

3. Note: value refers
to the lightness or
darkness of a
color. High value
is light and low
value is dark.

4. Sapir and Whorf interpreted these data as
indicating that colors are not objective,
naturally determined segments of reality.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis can be stated in this
way.
 1. Structural differences between language
systems will, in general, be paralleled by
nonlinguistic cognitive differences, of an
unspecified sort, in the native speakers of the
two languages.
 2. The structure of anyone's native language
strongly influences or fully determines the
world-view he or she will acquire while learning
the language.

5. The hypothesis has two parts:
 1. Linguistic determinism – language
determines thought
 2. Linguistic relativity – difference in
language equals difference in thought
Extreme version – linguistic categories
determine world-view and perception
Moderate version – linguistic categories
influence world-view and perception

6.  Languages
differ in the way they split up
the range of possible colors by means of
color terms. Possible effect of color vocab
on perception - English and Tarahumara
(Kay & Kempton 1984)
 English: green and blue; Tarahumara:
single term for both colors, siyóname.

7.  Experiment
I: Subjects were shown three
close colors in the blue-green range, and
asked to choose the one that's most
different from the other two. For
example:
 English speakers biased to group colors
according to the words "green" and
"blue," Tarahumara speakers were not:
Even when the middle color B was
objectively closer to A than to C, an
English speaker often would identify BC
as the closest pairing if they both could
be described by the same word. This
happened only when the differences were
subtle.

8. Anthropologists have found that learning about
how people categorize things in their
environment provides important insights into
the interests, concerns, and values of their
culture. Field workers involved in this type of
research refer to it as ethnoscience.
These ethnoscientists have made a useful
distinction in regards to ways of describing
categories of reality.

9. Ethnoscientists define these two different
approaches as being etic and emic
Etic categories
- This is the approach of biology in using the
Linnaean classification system to define new
species. It assumes that ultimately, there is an
objective reality and that is more important
than cultural perceptions of it.

10. Emic categories
involve a classification according to the way in
which members of a society classify their own
world. It may tell us little about the objective
reality but it is very insightful in understanding
how other people perceive that reality through
the filter of their language and culture.

11. Emic and etic are terms used by
anthropologists and by others in
the social and behavioural sciences to
refer to two kinds of data concerning
human behavior. In particular, they are
used in cultural anthropology to refer to
kinds of fieldwork done and viewpoints
obtained

12. The emic approach investigates how local
people think" (Kottak, 2006): How they
perceive and categorize the world, their
rules for behavior, what has meaning for
them, and how they imagine and explain
things

13. The etic (scientist-oriented) approach shifts
the focus from local observations,
categories, explanations, and
interpretations to those of the
anthropologist.
The etic approach realizes that members of
a culture often are too involved in what
they are doing to interpret their cultures
impartially.
When using the etic approach,
the ethnographer emphasizes what he or
she considers important.

14.  Semiotics
approaches meaning by
studying the signs that make up language
systems.
 In semiotics, the meaning of a sign is its
place in a sign relation, in other words,
the set of roles that it occupies within a
given sign relation.

15.  Defined
in these global terms, the
meaning of a sign is not in general
analyzable with full exactness into
completely localized terms, but aspects of
its meaning can be given approximate
analyses, and special cases of sign
relations frequently admit of more local
analyses.

16. Connotative Relation
- The connotative relation is the relation
between signs and their interpretant
signs.
Denotative Relation
- The denotative relation is the relation
between signs and objects.

17. An arbitrary association exists between
the signified and the signifier.
 For
example, a US salesperson doing business
in Japan might interpret silence following an
offer as rejection, while to Japanese negotiators
silence means the offer is being considered.
This difference in interpretations represents a
difference in: semiotics

18.  In
one domain, language determines
perception: phonetics (speech sounds).
Learning your native language takes away
the ability to perceive phonemic contrasts
that are present in other languages.

19.  In
the domain of cultural perceptions and
world-view, it is also quite possible that
language may somewhat influence
thought. However, such influence is
extremely difficult to test scientifically.

20. In any case, the assumption of this
influence is behind the efforts of the
feminist movement to change the
vocabulary of job-labels and other
gender-specific
into
gender-neutral
language.

21. The effort has been largely successful in
the realm on nouns
 chairman -> chairperson
 freshman -> first year student
And largely unsuccessful in the realm of
pronouns
ze/zer?? - but English already has a
gender-neutral pronoun! (they)

22. Liu, Y. Language, Culture and Thought
from a Perspective of English Teaching.
Springer Berlin Heidelberg. China. (2012)
https://www.udel.edu/anthro/budani/Cult
ure%20and%20Language.pdf
people.brandeis.edu/~smalamud/ling100/f
08-outline-thought-culture.pdf
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emic_and_etic