I am a huge believer in the power of language, a passion I trace back to a terrific College of San Mateo cultural anthropology class I took because I was bored the summer before I started U.C. Santa Cruz. I was amazed to learn about potlatch ceremonies and the common threads that run through very different world cultures. But nothing mesmerized me more than learning about the anthropology of language.
Science Buzz (www.sciencebuzz.org) sums it up: "In the 1930s, anthropologists Benjamin Whorf and Edward Sapir argued that language, thought and experience influenced one another. They believed that not only did a people’s environment shape their language (the ’100 words for snow’ idea), but that language also shaped environment — or, at least, the ways you could think about your environment. According to Whorf, the grammar and vocabulary of a people strongly influence how they see the world — if you have no word for something, you can’t really think about it."
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