9 quotes
Freedom of speech does not exist anywhere, for every community on earth forbids the use of certain sounds, words, and sentences in various speech situations.
Word Play (1974)
Each language encourages its speakers to tell certain things and to ignore other things.
Word Play (1974)
The colors that a speaker "sees" often depend very much on the language he speaks, because each language offers its own high-codability color terms.
Word Play (1974)
Thinking is language spoken to oneself. Until language has made sense of an experience, that experience is meaningless.
Word Play (1974)
Whorf's brilliant analysis... seemed to support the view that man is a prisoner of his language.
Word Play (1974)
Time is said to be wasted or saved... their economic systems emphasize wages paid for the amount of time worked, rent for the time a dwelling is occupied, interest for the time money is loaned.
Word Play (1974)
Wilhelm von Humboldt... stated that the structure of language expresses the inner life of its speakers: "Man lives with the world about him, principally, indeed exclusively, as language presents it."
Word Play (1974)
Experiments... have shown that at least one aspect of human thought—memory—is strongly influenced by language.
Word Play (1974)
The weakness of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis... the impossibility of generalizing about entire cultures and then attributing these generalizations to the language spoken ...is to leave numerous facts about culture unexplained.
Word Play (1974)