To what extent does language shape our knowledge of the world?

Analyse with 2-3 examples from a subject you study. Is it linguistic determinism or linguistic realism? Linguistic relativism (often called the Sapir Whorf hypothesis) is the idea holding that different languages carve up and name the world differently, thus different language structures lead us to see and interpret the world in different ways. Linguistic determinism is the extreme form of relativism holding that our language determines how we see the world. In Mathematics, expressing time is an important issue. Hopi indian language lacks terms for expressing how long or short the time period is. For instance they do not have terms for talking for a long time or short period of time. These terms are basic parts of European languages. The explanation for this is that for a European person the important thing is for how long his/her house will be building, but for a hopi indian person the importance is that the house will be ready and the sequence of events about the building shall be okay. This is a significant difference in their thinking and their view of the world, so it is related to linguistic determinism. In Mathematics the other important issue is expressing the amount of things. In other words expressing numbers is necessary to count. In Brazil for example, tribe piraha have only three terms of numbers: one, two, lot of. Peter Gordon showed with an experiment that this concept of numbers has effect on their thinking. Their task was to put out as many pebbles and wooden sticks as they were shown before. Their result was satisfactory in case of one, two and three objects. But the more objects (above three) were they shown, the more different result (from the good result) they produced. In another task they were unable to distinguish between objects which were ordered in four rows and which were ordered in five rows. They imitated stamping till they were shown three times, but they were unable to imitate four and five stampings. Lack of concept of numbers has an effect on their thinking so it is linguistic realism. In Mathematics, space is also an important issue. There are three types of perspectives in languages. One of theme is relative, the second is the intrinsic and the third is the absolute. Relative perspective is that the person correlates to his/her own location. (e.g. on the right side of me) The absolute is that the person defines locations independent from his/her own location and from subjects. (e.g. north, west) If the system of the perspective of the given language has an effect on the thinking of the user of the language, then users of the different languages with different system of perspectives do location-related tasks in different ways. Levison tested dutch and tzeltal people (mayas who live in Mexico). Tzeltal people use only the absolute perspective, while dutch people use mostly relative perspective. During the experiment, the people sat at a table; in front of them was a pencil on the table which faced to the left or to the right. Then the people were rotated by 180 to another table and in front of them on the table there were two pencils facing to the left and the right correlated to the person. They were told to determine to which direction the pencil faced before. As it was suggested, dutch people used the relative perspective when they gave the answer, and tzeltal people used the absolute perspective when they gave the answer. To sum up, we can state that language shape our knowledge of the world in terms of linguistic relativism and linguistic determinism.