The principle of linguistic relativity, popularly known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, holds that the structure of a language affects its speakers' world view or cognition. What's your opinion?
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis suggests that our language will mould our view of the world and consequently, different languages may probably express their unique ways of understanding the world. Sapir-Whorf hypothesis consists of two parts: linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity. Linguistic determinism refers to the notion that a language determines certain nonlinguistic cognitive processes. Linguistic relativity refers to the claim that the cognitive processes that are determined are different for different languages. The hypothesis is now interpreted mainly in two different ways: a strong version and a weak one. The strong version believes that the language patterns determine people's thinking and behavior; the weak one holds that the former influence the later.
In my opinion, I partly agree with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
Firstly, Linguistic relativity is reasonable. For example, not every language has the same set of words for the colors; in Spanish there is no word that corresponds to the English meaning of “blue”.
Secondly, for example, Eskimos have many different words for different types of snow, Aborigines for different types of sand. These phenomena can be explained from the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
Thirdly, I think it is unreasonable that the hypothesis holds excessive concern with surface structures of individual languages. In fact, all languages are fundamental of the same universal human character, including the lexical-semantic and syntactic components of language and all normal human beings are gifted with the same linguistic faculty and cognitive capacity.
Fourthly, the flaws of that hypothesis can be revealed through the following analysis. (1) Different grammatical structures do not mean that speakers of different languages differ in thinking logic or reasoning. (2) Equivalent translation is always possible in spite of the fact that in practice there are hardly any people in perfect control of two genetically different languages. (3) People who have good command of two genetic-unrelated languages do not have “double minds”，or do not have to change their thinking logic when speaking foreign tongue.