Linguistic Relativity in Words Formed by Means of Prefixation in English and Albanian Language

Abstract

There are a lot of difficulties deriving from the diversity of cultures, history, languages, when people from different ethnic and linguistic backgrounds come into contact and communicate with each-other. This idea led to the theory of linguistic relativity, which was inspired by Edward Sapir’s hypothesis. It gives priority to the necessity of understanding linguistic and cultural relativity. Linguists claim that English speakers think about the world in different ways from Albanian ones. Albanian language is spoken by a small population and its lexicon is rather smaller than that of the English language, and for this reason, during the translation process lexical or semantic equivalents are often unavailable. This paper contrastively analyses the English and Albanian languages in terms of linguistic relativity in derived words by means of prefixation in English and Albanian language.The paper treats problems that occur during translation process in the words formed by means of prefixation. We will consider the locative prefixes, the negative prefixes, the prefixes of attitude, reservative prefixes, pejorative prefixes, prefixes of size, degree and status, prefixes of time and order, prefix of repetition, as Quirk classifies them semantically.

DOI: 10.5901/jesr.2014.v4n1p205