Kirkch01's List: Sapir-Worf Hypothesis

• To Dr Johnson, language was 'the dress of thought', to the ethnolinguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf nature is dissected 'along the lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organised by our minds - and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organise it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, but its terms are absolutely obligatory; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organisation and classification of data which the agreement decrees.'. This is known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
• Whorf has been accused of being a racist and of distorting his evidence to fit his theory.
• Linguistic relativism has been given an unfair press because some believe it is the path towards suggesting that one language is superior to another. However, it would be hard to justify this by reference to their writings.
• If language does control thought, it does so at a very basic level, shaping the possible structures of thought and not the individual instances.

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• The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is in effect two propositions, which in a very basic form could perhaps be summed up as firstly Linguistic Determinism (language determines thought), and secondly Linguistic relativity (difference in language equals difference in thought).
• Edward Sapir was both an anthropologist and a linguist, who studied language in the same way he would treat any other part of a foreign culture. Perhaps it was this objective view of a foreign language that led him to theorise that the language we spoke affected our view of the world. In his words:'The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group' (cited in Ellis & Beattie 1986).
• His idea for proving the linguistic relativity theory was finding a concrete example of how the Hopi’s lives were affected by their different linguistic concept of time. He claimed that the way the Hopi rely on preparation, announcing events well in advance, for example, showed a concept of time continuing along instead of being divided up as Western societies do, which matches the linguistic differences. This, according to Whorf at least, shows language determining thought, in other words Strong (or Extreme) Whorfianism.
• The most obvious problem is the idea of causality – how can one ascertain whether (if at all) language has affected thought, or if the thought has affected the language? A national ‘character’ (if such a thing truly exists) would be as much an influence on us as a national language.
• The second most obvious criticism of Whorfianism is Benjamin Whorf’s methods. Brown (1958) and Lenneberg (1953) pointed out that Whorf never met an actual Indian, so his assessments of their character must be somewhat vague, and also that his translations of Hopi sentences were done to seem as different as possible, to emphasise the ‘different system of thinking’.
• Another criticism of extreme Whorfianism is the concept of translatability – if language affects thought, then presumably some concepts would only be understandable in the language in which they were first ‘thought’.
• 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.
• Pinker’s killing blow to linguistic determinism is found in the references to languageless adults. 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.
• Whilst it is easy to disprove Linguistic Determinism, there are observable tests which show relativity to exist. It differs from the extreme stance in many ways – it avoids the causality argument by acknowledging the two-way effects – language affecting thought and thought affecting language at the same time. In addition, it looks at language in a much wider context – social interaction and discourse are as much a part of language in this sense. In essence, the relativity argument does not subscribe to Sapir and Whorf’s view of language as a prison, but as something that has the potential to affect mind, thought and reality.
• Moderate Whorfianism therefore has some validity in language, but is hardly of central importance. The same stance can be applied to other topics, however. Substituting the word ‘media’ for the word ‘language’, we arrive at 'Difference in media equals difference in thought'. This seems more explainable.

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• Sapir was one of Boas' star students. He furthered Boas' argument by noting that languages were systematic, formally complete systems. Thus, it was not this or that particular word that expressed a particular mode of thought or behavior, but that the coherent and systematic nature of language interacted at a wider level with thought and behavior. While his views changed over time, it seems that towards the end of his life Sapir came to believe that language did not merely mirror culture and habitual action, but that language and thought might in fact be in a relationship of mutual influence or perhaps even determination.
• Whorf's formulation of this "principle of linguistic relativity" is often stereotyped as a "prisonhouse" view of language in which one's thinking and behavior is completely and utterly shaped by one's language. While some people might make this "vulgar Whorfian" argument, Whorf himself sought merely to insist that thought and action were linguistically and socially mediated.
• he most extreme proponents of this theory, such as Pinker, argue that thought is independent of language, and that language is itself meaningless in any fundamental way to human thought, and that human beings do not even think in what is called “natural” language, which is to say in any of the languages that we actually speak or write, but rather, we think in a meta-language that precedes any spoken language; this language of thought is called “mentalese”
• However, Pinker does not offer any evidence to substantiate his argument against the Whorfian viewpoint.
• A possible argument against the strong ("Weltanschauung") version of this idea, that most thought is constrained by language, can be discovered through personal experience: all people have occasional difficulty expressing themselves due to constraints in the language, and are conscious that the language is not adequate for what they mean. Perhaps they say or write something, and then think "that's not quite what I meant to say" or perhaps they cannot find a good way to explain a concept they understand to a novice. This makes it clear that what is being thought is not a set of words, because one can understand a concept without being able to express it in words
• The opposite extreme—that language does not influence thought at all—is also widely considered to be false.
• Among the most frequently cited examples of linguistic determinism is Whorf's study of the language of the Inuit, who were thought to have multiple words for snow. He argues that this modifies the world view of the Inuit, creating a different mode of existence for them than, for instance, a speaker of English. The notion that Arctic people have an unusually large number of words for snow has been shown to be false by linguist Geoffrey Pullum; in an essay titled The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax, he tracks down the origin of the story, ultimately attributing it largely to Whorf and suggesting the triviality of Whorf's observations.
• Recently, however, there has been a resurgence in the idea of linguistic determinism. An important case study by John A. Lucy on perception of numerosity in Mayan found compelling evidence for the hypothesis. Based on grammatical analyses of the structure of both English and Mayan in a universalist grammatical framework he ventured substantive hypotheses about the performance of speakers of both languages on a series of verbal and non-verbal tests. His results seem to comfirm his hypotheses.

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