Quotes About Linguistic relativity

There are nine different words in Maya for the color blue...but just three Spanish translations, leaving six butterflies that can be seen only by the Maya, proving beyond doubt that when a language dies, six butterflies disappear from the consciousness of the earth.

Linguista sum, linguistici nihil a me alienum puto.

Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.

The idea that the language people speak controls how they think—linguistic determinism—is a recurring theme in intellectual life.

Among Whorf's "kaleidoscopic flux of impressions

Jules Feiffer once drew a strip cartoon in which the down-at-heel character observed that first he was called poor, then needy, then deprived, then underprivileged, and then disadvantaged, and concluded that although he still didn't have a dime he sure had acquired a fine vocabulary. There is something in that. A rich vocabulary carries with it a concomitant danger of verbosity

the names we use for things bear no inherent relation to the things themselves.

Language shapes the way we think, and determines what we can think about.