==ARGENTINA==

The relationship between language and reality has been discussed time and again, but a fundamental question remains unanswered: Does a language "create" a world view, or is our understanding of the world independent from our languages? The puzzle is by no means a mere mental exercise; what is at stake is how we perceive our capacity for intercultural communication.
A narrow adherence to linguistic/culture-specific theory would make us regard communication across cultures as a mere ideal and the communities speaking different languages as "linguistic ghettos". If language were considered an imposed grid through which we see and understand only part of the world, we would all too easily conclude that there is just as much of the world and the people in it that we can not see or ever hope to understand.
At the beginning of this century two well-known U.S. linguists, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, theorised that the language we speak determines the way we segment the world. Whorf extended Sapir's view that "the real world is to a large extent unconsciously built upon the language habits of the group" and asserted that "an intellectual system embodied in each language shapes the thoughts of its speakers in a general way" (51). Thus, according to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis reality is not the same for all people, since different speech communities segment the world differently: our vocabulary and grammar would determine what we see and do not see; not having words or structures to name something would prevent us from "seeing" it.
Various arguments have been presented against this position. Noam Chomsky, for one, has said that language is a universal innate capacity that only needs to be developed. This implies that all languages share the same basic conceptual framework -- that there is a universal set of semantic categories from which each language develops its own subset of categories, and that this is what makes languages different (13).
Well-known among the scientific attempts to settle the question are experiments related to colour terms. One of these studies involved Wolof-speaking and French-speaking children. When asked to sort picture cards, the former were expected not to distinguish between red and orange cards, since Wolof has one word to designate both. However, the Wolof-speaking children grouped the cards according to their colour independently from their language distinctions, while the French-speaking children used other criteria (shape or size rather than colour) to classify the pictures. However, when all the children were explicitly asked to classify the cards *according to colour*, the Wolof-speaking children grouped orange and red pictures together and the French-speaking ones separated them into two different groups. The lesson to be derived from this and other experiments involving colour across cultures is that the absence of a lexical distinction does not necessarily prevent people speaking a language from *perceiving* a distinction. Nevertheless, once language is consciously at work, it interferes with our conceptual classification of the world.
If the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis were strictly true, translation from one language into another would be impossible. However, translation is hardly a word-by-word process: whenever the target language lacks a word to express a concept expressed through a single word in the source language, we can always convey its meaning through explanation or paraphrasing. In other words, modification or periphrasis compensate for less than parallel linguistic structuring. If we analyse the relationship between language and world view at the phrase level beyond the constraints of the word, we will see that we can use language to meet most of our needs.
A well-known example used by Whorf to support his idea has also been used to reject his hypothesis. Whorf said that since the Eskimo and The English had a different number of words to name 'snow', we could infer that they saw *snow* differently. However, it has been explained that the fact that we might need a whole phrase to define something that other people name by means of just one word does not mean that we do not see it, but simply *that we do not need this word*. Our languages have developed on the basis of our needs according to the principle of least effort.
If languages were the only vehicles between us and reality, they would act as "mental straitjackets" (Leech, 23) and would prevent us from moving beyond them. Nevertheless, no examples are needed to show that new concepts are constantly entering our language system by means of new lexical items - that we are continually expanding our knowledge of the world and consequently allowing our language to grow. Sometimes new concepts enter our system through derivation from lexical items existing in the language or through borrowing from other languages. This phenomenon signals that new concepts have entered a culture whose language could not meet a new demand.
But the most important proof that language is not a "mental straitjacket" is poetry. Poets break the conceptual bonds by which languages constrain us. As Geoffrey Leech has pointed out, "if one of the major roles of language is to reduce experience to order, to 'prepackage' it for us, then the poet is the person who unties the knot and string. It is in this context that the 'irrational' or 'counterlogical' character of poetry becomes explicable" (25).
It is probably impossible to offer a final answer to our initial question, but we can perhaps say that "although the conceptual system of a language predisposes its users towards certain distinctions rather than others, the extent to which man is 'enslaved' by his language in this respect, is mitigated by various forces of creativity inherent in the system itself" (Leech, 26) through poetry, borrowing and coinage. In other words, lan- guage does impose a grid on us, but we have the means to escape from it and see *beyond*. We just need to be aware of the endless linguistic possibilities offered us. Only then will we be able to free ourselves from any kind of "enslavement".

Bibliography

Chomsky, Noam (1972) Language and Mind. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc.

Isman, Carol M. (1995) Aspects of Language and Culture. Novato, California: Cleanalle and Sharp Publishers Inc.

Kachru, Braj B., ed. (1991) The Other Tongue - English across Cultures. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Leech, Geoffrey (1981, 2nd edn) Semantics - The Study of Meaning. London: Penguin Books Ltd.

Lucy, John A. (1992) Language Diversity and Thought: A reformulation of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.

Sager, Juan C. (1994) Language Engineering and Translation: Consequences of automation. Philadel- phia: John Benjamin Publishing Co.

Scollon, Suzanne, and Scollon, Ron (1995) Intercultural Communication: A Discourse Approach. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell Publishers.