Red, white and blue with emotion

摘要

In 1969, the linguistic community comprised of Brent Berlin and Paul Kay believed it wasn't fair to argue that there was a striking difference between the color idioms of various languages, or that one could conclude that every language had worked out its own system in a totally arbitrary way. There has been much talk in the language world of "linguistic relativity," which looks at how the structure of a language can alter the method by which its users envisage the world, and the idea of language determining thought. This is called the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. The current view is of a more balanced notion of linguistic relativity, namely that language influences certain kinds of cognitive processes in nontrivial ways, but that other processes are better seen as subject to universal factors.