Фома, не я преувеличиваю. Вот вам несколько цитат :
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/relat ... ment2.html" In a paper published in 1929 Sapir tells us:
Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection (1929, p. 209).
Our language affects how we perceive things:
Even comparatively simple acts of perception are very much more at the mercy of the social patterns called words than we might suppose. …
We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely
as we do because the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation (p. 210)."
Возможно вам будет ближе мнение Т.Парсонса, крупнейшего американского социолога, к сожалению мне быстро не найти цитату, но вот очень сжато :
"Parsons used the term "gloss" to describe how the mind constructs reality, "filtering" the data coming from our senses. This "filtering" is largely unconscious, and is affected by factors such as cultural constructs including language, personal experience, belief systems, and so forth. Different cultures create different glosses, all called reality by the members of those societies. Failure to recognize "glossing," then, may explain what happens when cultures collide."
Или вот : "
A gloss is a total system of perception and language. For instance, this room is a gloss. We have lumped together a series of isolated perceptions--floor, ceiling, window, lights, rugs, etc.--to make a totality. But we had to be taught to put the world together in this way. A child reconnoiters the world with few preconceptions until he is taught to see things in a way that corresponds to the descriptions everybody agrees on.
The world is an agreement."
И это соглашение достигается посредством языка, поскольку других средств у человека нет попросту. На языке составляется описание о том, как воспринимается мир (привет антропологу). Не владеющий этим описанием вынужден социализироваться, либо остаться за бортом той группы людей, языковую картину мира которых он не в состоянии принять.
Теория Сепира-Уорфа находится в некоем прошлом, это ясно, современные представления по этому вопросу мне неизвестны, надо читать.