本科英语专业毕业论文(5)
It is hypothesized that the unique organization of the universe that is embodied in each language might act as a determining factor in the shaping of the individual’s mode of thinking. As Edward Sapir puts it:
Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. The fact of the matter is that the "real world" is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation (Encyclopedia Britannica Deluxe, 2005).
This idea is further developed, by Sapir’s student Benjamin Lee Whorf into what is known as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Whorf (1963) points out that, in Hopi, words referring to units of time (e.g., “day,” “week,” etc.) differ from other nouns in that they have no plural forms; furthermore, they cannot be counted with the cardinal numerals (e.g., “one,” “two,” etc.) but only with the ordinals (e.g., “first,” “second,” etc.). From this he (1963) infers that when the English speaker speaks of “ten days,” as if the days were all aggregate of separate units, the Hopi speaker, on the other hand, thinks in terms of the cyclic recurrence of a single phenomenon. As Whorf (1963) states, the Hopi belief is diametrically opposed to the English proverb that “tomorrow is another day”.
In cross-cultural communication, language vocabulary affects, more or less, the cognition of speakers of other languages. For example, the English sentence “you should talk to my uncle in the corner” has no absolute Chinese equivalent, for there is no corresponding word of “uncle” in Chinese that can mean both “叔叔” (father’s brother) and “舅舅” (mother’s brother). Likewise, this sentence can not be easily rendered into Japanese, where there are several second person pronouns. When Japanese talk to other people, their choice of second person pronouns is based upon the interlocutors’ social status, age, gender, their interlocutory occasions, etc. Besides, “corner” is an ambiguous word to Japanese because in the Japanese language, “corner” is divided into “an internal angle” and “an external angle”. Therefore, vocabulary differences between two languages call affect our definition of the objective reality, just as Bassnett (2004) claims that “language is a guide to social reality”.
