Does Language Shape Thought? A Test in Colour and Space

Franz Boas noticed that every grammar quietly forces its speakers to specify certain things and lets them ignore others. His student Edward Sapir, and Sapir's student Benjamin Lee Whorf, pushed the observation into a question that has been argued over ever since: if your language obliges you to notice something every time you open your mouth, does that change what you notice when your mouth is shut? Neither man ever wrote the tidy “Sapir–Whorf hypothesis” that carries their names — later scholars assembled it from scattered remarks. Below you can run the question as an experiment. Cut one spectrum six ways, walk a speaker around a table until left stops meaning anything, then move the dial and see how much of the claim survives.