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Grammar girl here, I'm Minyon Fogarty.

Last November, I ran an episode on the myth

that the Inuit language has a surprisingly large number of words for snow.

I talked about how this myth is one example of a widely debunked idea

called the superior wharf hypothesis,

named after the linguists Edward's appear in Benjamin Wharf.

This hypothesis claims that the language you speak

determines the way you think, or at least influences it.

This hypothesis is also sometimes called linguistic relativity.

Here's one of the arguments against the idea of linguistic relativity

that I summarized in that episode.

Multiple languages have just one word that covers both the color blue

and the color green. Researchers sometimes call these

grue languages, grue being a portmanteau of green and blue.

But people who speak these grue languages can still distinguish between blue and green.

They recognize that they're different colors,

even though they're covered by one word,

in the same way that we recognize that light blue

and dark blue are different colors,

even though we'd sometimes just call them both blue.

There are some subtle differences,

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