The relation of language and mind has interested philosophers for many centuries. Two anthropologist-linguists, Franz Boas and Edward Sapir, 【A1】________pioneers in describing many native languages of North and South America during the first half of the twentieth century. We are obliged【A2】________them because some of these languages have since vanished, as the peoples who spoke them died out or became assimilated and lost their 【A3】 ________languages. Other linguists in the earlier part of this century, however, 【A4】________were less eager to deal with bizarre data from “exotic” language, were not always so grateful. The newly described languages were often so strikingly different from the well-studied languages of Europe and Southeast Asia 【A5】 ________ some scholars even accused Boas and Sapir of fabricating their data. Native American languages are indeed different, so much so in fact that Navajo could be used by the US military as a 【A6】________during World War II to send secret messages.

Sapir's pupil, Benjamin Lee Whorf, continued the study of American Indian languages. 【A7】________interested in the relationship of language and thought, Whorf developed the idea that the structure of language determines the structure of habitual thought in a society. He reasoned that 【A8】________it is easier to formulate certain concepts and not others in a given language, the speakers of that language think along one track and not along 【A9】________. Whorf came to believe in a sort of linguistic determinism which, in its strongest form, states that language imprisons the mind, and that the grammatical patterns in a language can produce far-reaching consequences for the culture of a society. Later, this idea became to be known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but this term is somewhat inappropriate. 【A10】________both Sapir and Whorf emphasized the diversity of languages, Sapir himself never explicitly supported the notion of linguistic determinism.

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