Madison Hill's List: sapir-whorf hypothesis

• No two  languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the  same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct  worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached
• According  to the first, linguistic determinism, our thinking is determined by language.  According to the second, linguistic relativity, people who speak different  languages perceive and think about the world quite differently.
• Pablo Neruda noted that the  best translations of his own poems were Italian (because of its similarities to  Spanish), but that English and French 'do not correspond to Spanish - neither in  vocalization, or in the placement, or the colour, or the weight of words.' He  continued: 'It is not a question of interpretative equivalence: no, the sense can be  right, but this correctness of translation, of meaning, can be the destruction of a  poem. In many of the translations into French - I don't say in all of them - my  poetry escapes, nothing remains; one cannot protest because it says the same  thing that one has written. But it is obvious that if I had been a French poet, I  would not have said what I did in that poem, because the value of the words is so  different. I would have written something else'
• • the emphasis is on the potential for thinking to be 'influenced' rather than  unavoidably 'determined' by language;
     
  • it is a two-way process, so that 'the kind of language we use' is also  influenced by 'the way we see the world';
     
  • any influence is ascribed not to 'Language' as such or to one language  compared with another, but to the use within a language of one variety  rather than another (typically a sociolect - the language used primarily by  members of a particular social group);
     
  • emphasis is given to the social context of language use rather than to purely  linguistic considerations, such as the social pressure in particular contexts to  use language in one way rather than another.

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• Skinner, a behaviourist with a completely different take on language, offers this: 'One has not accounted for a remark by paraphrasing what it means'. This may well have some validity – in the sense that there will always be more to any utterance than the sum of its parts. The point is, however, that the concept can always be passed on between languages even if it does require some degree of circumlocution, disproving the extreme Whorfian stance. The study of the nuances implied by the choice of certain words is a matter for semantics and pragmatics, although some languages may require more words than others to get the exact meaning.
• How this proves a different thinking is less obvious. An English physicist would have one word for a concept that may take a page to explain, but we do not assume that the physicist sees the world differently because of his knowledge of this concept.
• He cites the example of Idlefonso, who was observed by Schaller (1991). Idlefonso was an immigrant completely without language, who was still intelligent, numerate, and once shown sign language was able to fully recount experiences and converse with Schaller. If language completely determines thought, then this man would not have been able to think, which he clearly did.

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• If the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is true, a speaker of the Hopi language (which has a very different system of tenses than English) will perceive time in a fundamentally different way than an English speaker. Similarly, a Spanish speaker will have a slightly different view of the world than an English speaker, simply due to the underlying differences between the two languages.
• Culture is also a complicating factor. Cultural beliefs and upbringing can have a profound effect on people’s views of the world, and in general, people sharing a given native language (or dialect) are likely to share a cultural background as well. So, you’re placed in the awkward spot of trying to decide whether a given effect is linguistic or cultural (or both).
• You’re trying to study how people use language, without biasing them. However, you’re going to have to use language to explain the study and conduct the experiments. So, you’ll have to face the added complication of using a translator to pass on instructions, which may bias your participant right from the get-go.

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• In a study done in the 1970’s a group of researchers studied the difference in perception of color in English compared with a small tribe from Papua New Guinea called Berinmo.  The Berinmo were given a sample of 160 different colors and asked to categorize them.  The Berinmo not only had less categories, they did not differentiate between the English colors blue and green, however, they did draw a category between colors in their language nol and wor which in English would both be perceived in the category of yellow.  The researchers found that the Berinmo speakers were better at matching colors across their nol, wor categories than across the English blue and green categories and English speakers were better at matching colors across blue and green than across the Berinmo nol and wor (Sawyer, 1999).
• There are three main points that researchers use to dispute the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: translatability, differences between linguistic and non-linguistic events and universals.
• The argument made by Eric Lenneberg against the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is that “linguistic and non-linguistic events must be separately observed and described before they can be correlated” (Carroll, 1956:28).  He argues that there is no way to define language as influencing thought when there is no distinction between these two events and that the evidence which supports language as influencing thought is based purely on linguistic differences.
• In determining linguistic relativity the question is not whether a language affects ones thoughts but to what degree (Wierzbicka, 1992:7)
• Support for the idea that language partially influences thought can also be seen in the concept of codability.  Codability can be seen as the ability to translate a word, phrase or idea from one language to another.  Anyone that speaks two languages would agree that some ideas are easier said in one language over the other.  Many times in language there are words that explain a thought, location, emotion etc. that in other languages could take up to a paragraph long to describe.

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