![]() ![]() ![]() What does it mean to “see” the world? How can we measure the ways people perceive reality? In order to try to find an answer, we’ll take a trip through time to look at the ways researchers have tried to approach the idea over the past century. One of the central problems with assessing the extent to which language affects how we see the world is that the concept is so vague and hard to quantify. Unsurprisingly, the idea has created some very heated discussions among linguists. It could also be used to explain why people who speak other languages seems so different from us. ![]() ![]() This concept, the fundamental idea behind the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (you’ll learn all about it below), has been around for a very long time, and it’s appealing because it’s so tempting to think our language can change the way we process the world. Let’s start with a famous quote by Ludwig Wittgenstein that you’ve probably heard before: “The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.” While slightly taken out of context, this perfectly summarizes an idea that comes up again and again in the study of language, which is that the language you speak can change your worldview. ![]()
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