B. L. Whorf
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B. L. Whorf
Benjamin Atwood Lee Whorf (; April 24, 1897 – July 26, 1941) was an American linguist and fire prevention engineer best known for proposing the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. He believed that the structures of different languages shape how their speakers perceive and conceptualize the world. Whorf saw this idea, named after him and his mentor Edward Sapir, as having implications similar to those of Einstein's principle of physical relativity. However, the concept originated from 19th-century philosophy and thinkers like Wilhelm von Humboldt and Wilhelm Wundt. Whorf initially pursued chemical engineering but developed an interest in linguistics, particularly Biblical Hebrew and indigenous Mesoamerican languages. His groundbreaking work on the Nahuatl language earned him recognition, and he received a grant to study it further in Mexico. He presented influential papers on Nahuatl upon his return. Whorf later studied linguistics with Edward Sapir at Yale University while working as ...
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Winthrop, Massachusetts
Winthrop is a city in Suffolk County, Massachusetts, Suffolk County, Massachusetts, United States. The population was 19,316 at the 2020 United States Census, 2020 census. Winthrop is an ocean-side suburban town in Greater Boston situated at the north entrance to the Boston Harbor, geographically nearby to the Logan International Airport. It is located on a peninsula, 1.6 square miles (4.2 km2) in area, connected to the city of Revere, Massachusetts by a narrow isthmus and to multiple portions of Boston, Massachusetts, Boston by a bridge over the harbor inlet to the Belle Isle Marsh Reservation in the neighborhood of East Boston, a shared line at the Boston Logan International Airport, and at Deer Island (Massachusetts), Deer Island. Settled in 1630, Winthrop is one of the oldest communities in the United States. It is also one of the smallest and most densely populated municipalities in Massachusetts. It is one of the four municipalities that comprise Suffolk County (the ot ...
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Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis
Linguistic relativity asserts that language influences worldview or cognition. One form of linguistic relativity, linguistic determinism, regards peoples' languages as determining and influencing the scope of cultural perceptions of their surrounding world. Various colloquialisms refer to linguistic relativism: the Whorf hypothesis; the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis ( ); the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis; and Whorfianism. The hypothesis is in dispute, with many different variations throughout its history. The ''strong hypothesis'' of linguistic relativity, now referred to as linguistic determinism, is that language ''determines'' thought and that linguistic categories limit and restrict cognitive categories. This was a claim by some earlier linguists pre-World War II; (a debate between university professors) since then it has fallen out of acceptance by contemporary linguists. Nevertheless, research has produced positive empirical evidence supporting a ''weaker'' version of linguistic rel ...
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Relativism
Relativism is a family of philosophical views which deny claims to absolute objectivity within a particular domain and assert that valuations in that domain are relative to the perspective of an observer or the context in which they are assessed. There are many different forms of relativism, with a great deal of variation in scope and differing degrees of controversy among them. ''Moral relativism'' encompasses the differences in moral judgments among people and cultures. '' Epistemic relativism'' holds that there are no absolute principles regarding normative belief, justification, or rationality, and that there are only relative ones. '' Alethic relativism'' (also factual relativism) is the doctrine that there are no absolute truths, i.e., that truth is always relative to some particular frame of reference, such as a language or a culture (cultural relativism), while linguistic relativism asserts that a language's structures influence a speaker's perceptions. Some forms of ...
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Linguistic Anthropology
Linguistic anthropology is the interdisciplinary study of how language influences social life. It is a branch of anthropology that originated from the endeavor to document endangered languages and has grown over the past century to encompass most aspects of language structure and use.Duranti, Alessandro (ed.), 2004''Companion to Linguistic Anthropology'' Malden, MA: Blackwell. Linguistic anthropology explores how language shapes communication, forms social identity and group membership, organizes large-scale cultural beliefs and ideologies, and develops a common cultural representation of natural and social worlds.Society for Linguistic Anthropology. n.dAbout the Society for Linguistic Anthropology(accessed 7 July 2010). Historical development Linguistic anthropology emerged from the development of three distinct paradigms that have set the standard for approaching linguistic anthropology. The first, now known as " anthropological linguistics," focuses on the documentation ...
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Psycholinguistics
Psycholinguistics or psychology of language is the study of the interrelation between linguistic factors and psychological aspects. The discipline is mainly concerned with the mechanisms by which language is processed and represented in the mind and brain; that is, the psychology, psychological and neurobiology, neurobiological factors that enable humans to acquire, use, comprehend, and produce language. Psycholinguistics is concerned with the cognitive faculties and processes that are necessary to produce the grammatical constructions of language. It is also concerned with the perception of these constructions by a listener. Initial forays into psycholinguistics were in the philosophical and educational fields, mainly due to their location in departments other than applied sciences (e.g., cohesive data on how the human brain functioned). Modern research makes use of biology, neuroscience, cognitive science, linguistics, and information science to study how the mind-brain process ...
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Uto-Aztecan Languages
The Uto-Aztecan languages are a family of native American languages, consisting of over thirty languages. Uto-Aztecan languages are found almost entirely in the Western United States and Mexico. The name of the language family reflects the common ancestry of the Ute language of Utah and the Nahuan languages (also known as Aztecan) of Mexico. The Uto-Aztecan language family is one of the largest linguistic families in the Americas in terms of number of speakers, number of languages, and geographic extension. The northernmost Uto-Aztecan language is Shoshoni, which is spoken as far north as Salmon, Idaho, while the southernmost is the Nawat language of El Salvador and Nicaragua. ''Ethnologue'' gives the total number of languages in the family as 61, and the total number of speakers as 1,900,412. Speakers of Nahuatl languages account for over 85% of these. The internal classification of the family often divides it into two branches: a northern branch including all the languages ...
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Hopi Language
Hopi (Hopi: ) is a Uto-Aztecan language spoken by the Hopi people (a Puebloan group) of northeastern Arizona, United States. The use of Hopi has gradually declined over the course of the 20th century. In 1990, it was estimated that more than 5,000 people could speak Hopi as a native language (approximately 75% of the population), but only 40 of them were monolingual in Hopi. The 1998 language survey of 200 Hopi people showed that 100% of Hopi elders (60 years or older) were fluent, but fluency in adults (40–59) was only 84%, 50% in young adults (20–39), and 5% in children (2–19). Despite the apparent decline, Hopi and Navajo both are supported by bilingual education programs in Arizona, and children acquire the Native American languages as their first language. More recently, Hopi language programs for children on the reservation have been implemented. Teaching and language revitalization efforts The Hopi language has been part of several language revitalization pro ...
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Mesoamerican Languages
Mesoamerican languages are the languages Indigenous peoples of the Americas, indigenous to the Mesoamerican cultural area, which covers southern Mexico, all of Guatemala, Belize, El Salvador, and parts of Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica. The area is characterized by extensive linguistic diversity containing several hundred different languages and seven major language families. Mesoamerica is also an area of high linguistic diffusion in that long-term interaction among speakers of different languages through several millennia has resulted in the convergence of certain linguistic traits across disparate language families. The Mesoamerican sprachbund is commonly referred to as the Mesoamerican Linguistic Area. The languages of Mesoamerica were also among the first to evolve independent traditions of writing. The oldest texts date to approximately 1000 BCE (namely Olmecs, Olmec and Zapotec civilization, Zapotec), though most texts in the indigenous scripts (such as Mayan languages, ...
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Biblical Hebrew
Biblical Hebrew ( or ), also called Classical Hebrew, is an archaic form of the Hebrew language, a language in the Canaanite languages, Canaanitic branch of the Semitic languages spoken by the Israelites in the area known as the Land of Israel, roughly west of the Jordan River and east of the Mediterranean Sea. The term 'Hebrew' was not used for the language in the Hebrew Bible, which was referred to as 'language of Canaan' or 'Judean', but it was used in Koine Greek and Mishnaic Hebrew texts. The Hebrew language is attested in inscriptions from about the 10th century BCE, when it was almost identical to Phoenician language, Phoenician and other Canaanite languages, and spoken Hebrew persisted through and beyond the Second Temple period, which ended in 70 CE with the siege of Jerusalem (70 CE), siege of Jerusalem. It eventually developed into Mishnaic Hebrew, which was spoken until the 5th century. The language of the Hebrew Bible reflects various stages of ...
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Chemical Engineering
Chemical engineering is an engineering field which deals with the study of the operation and design of chemical plants as well as methods of improving production. Chemical engineers develop economical commercial processes to convert raw materials into useful products. Chemical engineering uses principles of chemistry, physics, mathematics, biology, and economics to efficiently use, produce, design, transport and transform energy and materials. The work of chemical engineers can range from the utilization of nanotechnology and nanomaterials in the laboratory to large-scale industrial processes that convert chemicals, raw materials, living cells, microorganisms, and energy into useful forms and products. Chemical engineers are involved in many aspects of plant design and operation, including safety and hazard assessments, process engineering, process design and analysis, modeling and simulation, modeling, control engineering, chemical reaction engineering, nuclear engineering, biologi ...
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Wilhelm Wundt
Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt (; ; 16 August 1832 – 31 August 1920) was a German physiologist, philosopher, and professor, one of the fathers of modern psychology. Wundt, who distinguished psychology as a science from philosophy and biology, was the first person to call himself a psychologist. He is widely regarded as the "father of experimental psychology". In 1879, at the University of Leipzig, Wundt founded the first formal laboratory for psychological research. This marked psychology as an independent field of study. He also established the first academic journal for psychological research, ''Philosophische Studien'' (from 1883 to 1903), followed by ''Psychologische Studien'' (from 1905 to 1917), to publish the institute's research. A survey published in ''American Psychologist'' in 1991 ranked Wundt's reputation as first for "all-time eminence", based on ratings provided by 29 American historians of psychology. William James and Sigmund Freud were ranked a distant second and ...
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Wilhelm Von Humboldt
Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand von Humboldt (22 June 1767 – 8 April 1835) was a German philosopher, linguist, government functionary, diplomat, and founder of the Humboldt University of Berlin. In 1949, the university was named after him and his younger brother, Alexander von Humboldt, a Natural history, naturalist. He was a linguist who made contributions to the philosophy of language, ethnolinguistics, and to the Learning theory (education), theory and practice of education. He made a major contribution to the development of liberalism by envisioning education as a means of potential, realizing individual possibility rather than a way of indoctrination, drilling traditional ideas into youth to suit them for an already established occupation or social role. In particular, he was the architect of the Humboldtian education ideal, which was used from the beginning in Prussian education system, Prussia as a model for its system of public education, as well as in the Un ...
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