CL1.102 - Introduction to Linguistics - 2 | ITL2 Lecture 5 notes

with Prof. Aditi Mukherjee
Jun 02, 2021 - Wednesday
Written by: Pratyaksh Gautam

Language and the Mind

Language is more than just a medium for communication, it also imposes a structure on our reality, since language. This is a view held by many, but at the same time, there also exist arguments against it, stating that perhaps the structure already exists at some level below language in our minds. Language might simply give us the means to articulating these structures, it is not necessary that in the process of articulating it, the structures themselves are affected.

Berlin and Kay

In English, Berlin and Kay classified the spectrum of colour into 11 basic colour terms. If we consider the mapping between “laal” in Hindi and words in English that talk about the “same colours”

laal - red, crimson, vermillion, scarlett

Red, crimson, etc. however are slightly different colours. We still call them the same in Hindi most of the time. Does this mean that Hindi-speakers perceive less colours than English-speakers? This is not true.