Linguistic relativity hypothesis
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Another statement of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
The weak linguistic relativity hypothesis claims that a culture's language has a significant impact on how the members of the culture perceive things. For example, concepts or ideas that are prevalent in the culture may be stated in concise ways (using one or a few words), whereas concepts or ideas that are foreign to the culture are more difficult to express (requiring many words.) Similarly, separate words may exist to express distinctions considered important in that culture, or distinctions concerning matters the culture considers important, whereas the same word may serve to refer to what is in a different culture considered several different concepts.
The strong linguistic relativity hypothesis claims that a culture's language can express concepts unique to that culture that are impossible to express in the language of another culture. This form of the hypothesis has few adherents. It is generally argued that while some concepts may be easier to express in some languages than others, any concept can be expressed by any language with a sufficiently large vocabularly (i.e. any language used as a first language by human beings, as opposed to e.g. trade jargons containing a very limited vocabulary), possibly in conjunction with suitable extralinguistic information. (e.g. the language of a culture that does not know of cats may not have a word for cats, but one could still say in it something like "this type of animal here, even though we don't have a word for it (yet).") Indeed, when a culture comes into significant contact with a different culture, it invariably either borrows words from that culture's language to express concepts alien to it, or coins new words with native origins to refer to the foreign concepts.
Laadan was created to explore the weak linguistic relativity hypothesis.
