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Anyone who has learned a second language will have made an exhilarating (and yet somehow unsettling) discovery: there is never a one -to - one correspondence in meaning between the words and phrases of one language and another. Even the most basic expressions have a slightly different sense, issuing from a network of attitudes and ideas unique to each language. Switching between languages we may feel as if we are stepping from one world into another. Each language seems to compel us to talk in certain way and to see things from a particular perspective. But is this just an illusion? Does each language really embody a different world -worldview, or even dictate specific patterns of thought to its speakers?

In the modern academic context, such questions are usually treated under the rubrics of "linguistic relativity" or the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis". Contemporary research is focused on pinning down these questions, or trying to formulate them in rigorous terms that can be tested empirically. But there is currently no consensus concerning connections between language, mind and worldview. The hypothesis has a long history, spanning several intellectual epochs, each with their own preoccupations. Running through this history is a recurring skepticism surrounding linguistic relativity, engendered not only by the difficulties of pinning it down, but by a deep - seated ambivalence about the assumptions and implications of relativist doctrines.

There is quite a bit at stake in entertaining the possibility of relativistic doctrines. It impinges directly on our under standing of the nature of human language. A long -held assumption in Western philosophy, classically formulated in the work of Aristotle, maintains that words are mere labels we apply to existing ideas in order to share those ideas with others. But linguistic relativity makes language an active force in shaping our thoughts.

Furthermore, if we permit fundamental variation between languages and their presumably entangled worldviews, we are confronted with difficult questions about the constitution of our common humanity. Could it be that there are unbridgeable gulfs in thinking and perception between groups of people speaking different languages?

The roots of our present ideas about linguistic relativity extend at least as far back as the Enlightenment of the late 17th to the 18th century. Enlightenment discussions were often couched in terms of the "genius" of a language, an expression first coined in French. The genius of a language was understood as representing its distinct character, the Je ne Sais quoi that constitutes the idiomatic in each idiom. This unique character was frequently taken to embody something of the national mentality of the speakers of a language.