Sapir–Whorf hypothesis

In linguistics, the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis (SWH) (also known as the "linguistic relativity hypothesis") postulates a systematic relationship between the grammatical categories of the language a person speaks and how that person both understands the world and behaves in it. Although known as the Sapir–Whorf "hypothesis", it was an underlying axiom of linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir and his colleague and student Benjamin Whorf.

The hypothesis postulates that a particular language's nature influences the habitual thought of its speakers: that different language patterns yield different patterns of thought. This idea challenges the possibility of perfectly representing the world with language, because it implies that the mechanisms of "any" language condition the thoughts of its speaker community. The hypothesis emerges in strong and weak formulations.

History

The position that language anchors thought was first advanced in detail by several German thinkers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Early versions appear in the work of two students of Immanuel Kant, Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder; a well-known early defense of the doctrine appears in Wilhelm von Humboldt's essay "Über das vergleichende Sprachstudium" ("On the comparative study of languages") published in 1836. [Gentner, "et. al".; 2003: p.3 wherein the formative text is cited as: Humboldt, W. von (1836). "On language: The diversity of human language-structure and its influence on the mental development of mankind" (P. Heath, Trans.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1988).]

This notion has been largely assimilated into Western thought. Karl Kerenyi began his 1976 English language translation of "Dionysos" with this passage:

Franz Boas

The origin of the SWH as a more rigorous examination of this familiar cultural perception may be traced to the work of Franz Boas, often credited as the founder of anthropology in the United States. Boas was educated in Germany in the late 19th Century, when scientists such as Ernst Mach and Ludwig Boltzmann were attempting to understand the physiology of sensation.

One marked philosophical current was a revival of interest in the work of Immanuel Kant. Kant opined that knowledge is the result of concrete cognitive work on the part of an individual person—reality ("sensuous intuition") is inherently in flux, and understanding results when someone takes that intuition and interprets it via their "categories of the understanding." Different individuals may thus perceive the same noumenal reality as phenomenal instances of their different, individual concepts.

In the United States, Boas encountered Native American languages from many different linguistic families, all of which were quite different from the standard Semitic and Indo-European languages then studied by most European scholars. Boas realized how greatly ways of life and grammatical categories may vary from locality to locality. As a result he came to hold that the culture and lifeways of a people are reflected in their language.

Edward Sapir

Sapir was one of Boas's star students. He furthered Boas's argument by noting that languages are systematic, formally complete systems. Thus, it is not this nor that particular word that expresses a particular mode of thought and behavior, but the coherent and systematic nature of language interacting at a wider level with thought and behavior. While his views changed over time, towards the end of his life Sapir held that language does not merely mirror culture and habitual action, but that language and thought are in a relationship of mutual influence, verging upon determinism.

Benjamin Whorf

Whorf refined this idea and engendered precision by examining the particular grammatical mechanisms by which language influences thought. He framed his discursive thrust thus:

Despite criticism of his hypothesis as monocausal and deterministic, Whorf insisted that thought and action were linguistically and socially mediated, and not monolithically determined. In doing so he opposed what he called a "natural logic" position which held, according to him, that "talking, or the use of language, is supposed only to 'express' what is essentially already formulated nonlinguistically". [Whorf (Carroll; Ed.); 1956: p. 207] On this account, he argued, "thought does not depend on grammar but on laws of logic or reason which are supposed to be the same for all observers of the universe". [Whorf (Carroll; Ed.); 1956: p. 208]

Whorf's analysis of the differences between English and (in one famous instance) the Hopi language raised the bar for an analysis of the relationship between language, thought, and reality by relying on close analysis of grammatical structure, rather than a more impressionistic account of the differences between, say, vocabulary items in a language. For example, "Standard Average European" (SAE)—i.e., Western languages in general—tends to analyse reality as objects in space: the present and future are thought of as "places", and time is a path linking them. A phrase like "three days" is grammatically equivalent to "three apples", or "three kilometres". Other languages, including many Native American languages, are oriented towards "process". To monolingual speakers of such languages, the concrete/spatial metaphors of SAE grammar may make little sense. Whorf himself claimed that his work on the SWH was inspired by his belief that a Hopi speaker would find relativistic physics fundamentally easier to grasp than an SAE speaker would.

Influence and reactions

As a result of his status as a student and not as a professional linguist, Whorf's work on linguistic relativity, conducted largely in the late 1930s, did not become popular until the posthumous publication of his writings in the 1950s. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis influenced the development and standardization of Interlingua during the first half of the 20th Century, but this was largely due to Sapir's direct involvement. In 1955, Dr. James Cooke Brown created the Loglan constructed language (Lojban, a reformed variant of Loglan, still exists as a living language) in order to test the hypothesis. However, no such experiment was ever conducted.

Linguistic theories of the 1960s—such as those proposed by Noam Chomsky—focused on the innateness and universality of language. As a result Whorf's work fell out of favor. An example of a recent Chomskian approach to this issue is Steven Pinker's book "The Language Instinct." Pinker argues from a contravening school of thought which holds that a universal grammar underlies all language. The 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 "natural" language, i.e. any language that we actually communicate in; rather, we think in a meta-language, preceding any natural language, called "mentalese." Pinker, calling it "Whorf's radical position," vehemently denies that language contains any thought or culture, declaring, "the more you examine Whorf's arguments, the less sense they make." (1994, p. 60)

Representing a more Whorfian approach, George Lakoff has argued that much of language is essentially metaphor. [Lakoff, G; 1993: The contemporary theory of metaphor. In A. Ortony (Ed.) "Metaphor and thought" (2nd ed., pp. 202-251). New York: Cambridge University Press.] For instance, English employs many metaphorical tropes that equate time with money, e.g.:

* spend time
* waste time
* invest time
* free time

Whorf might interpret that this usage affects the way English speakers conceive the noumenon "time." For another example, political arguments are shaped by the web of conceptual metaphors that underlie language use. In political debates, it greatly matters whether one is arguing in favor of the "right to life" or against the "right to choose"; whether one is discussing "illegal aliens" or "undocumented workers". [ See Framing (social sciences) and Political Correctness.]

In the late 1980s and early 1990s advances in cognitive psychology and anthropological linguistics renewed interest in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Today researchers disagree—often intensely—about how strongly language influences thought. However, this disagreement has sparked increasing interest in the issue and a great deal of innovative and important research.

Experimental support

The most extreme opposing position—that language has "absolutely no" influence on thought—is widely considered to be false (Gumperz: introduction to Gumperz 1996). But the strong version of the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, that language determines thought, is also thought to be incorrect. Whorf himself never held this strong version; it is more of a theoretical construct employed as a foil. The most common view is that the truth lies somewhere in between the two. Current linguists, rather than studying whether language affects thought, are studying "how" it affects thought. Earlier, the bulk of the research was concentrated on supporting or disproving the hypothesis; the experimental data have not been able to disprove it. (Lucy 1992; Gumperz & Levinson 1996)

Investigation into the recall of linguistic entities confirms that the brain stores associations between semantic concepts (like the idea of a house) and phonetic representation (the sounds that make up the word "house"). The initial sounds are more important for recall purposes than later sounds. Relationships between semantic concepts are also stored, but indirect relationships between unrelated concepts can be inadvertently triggered by a "bridge" through a phonetic relationship. For example, the recall of the idea of a house can be sped up by exposure to the word "Home" because they have the same initial sound.Fact|date=February 2007

Linguistic determinism

Among the most frequently cited examples of "linguistic determinism" is Whorf's study of the language of the Inuit people, who were thought to have numerous words for snow. He argues that this modifies the world view of the Eskimo, 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. [ [http://users.utu.fi/freder/Pullum-Eskimo-VocabHoax.pdf "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax"] , Geoffrey Pullum, Chapter 19, p. 159-171 of "The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverent Essays on the Study of Language", Geoffrey K. Pullum, With a Foreword by James D. McCawley. 246 p., 1 figure, 2 tables, Spring 1991, LC: 90011286, ISBN 978-0-226-68534-2]

Numerous studies in color perception across various cultures have resulted in differing viewpoints. [Berlin & Kay, 1969; Heider, 1972; Heider & Oliver, 1973; Rosch, 1974; Miller & Johnson-Laird, 1976.] A recent study by Peter Gordon examines the language of the Pirahã tribe of Brazil. According to Gordon, the language used by this tribe only contains three counting words: "one", "two" and "many" and points out that even the words for one and two are not always used for those quantities. Gordon shows through a series of experiments that the people of the Pirahã tribe have difficulty remembering displays of objects when quantities are higher than about three (Gordon, 2004). However, the causal relationship of these events is not clear. Critics have arguedFact|date=February 2007 that if the test subjects are unable to count for some other reason (perhaps because they are nomadic hunter/gatherers with nothing to count and hence no need to practice doing so) then one should not expect their language to have words for such numbers. That is, it is the lack of need which explains both the lack of counting ability and the lack of corresponding vocabulary. On the other hand, such criticisms represent a simple-minded application of cause and effect and ignores the fact that numbers are encoded in words. A more systemic model of the interactions between culture, language and cognition would be more accurate. A recent study with the Munduruku tribe, who have only 5 words for numbers, shows that they have a basic understanding of geometry, which the authors suggest represents a form of protonumeric cognition. But since geometry does not require words for numbers, the relevance of these studies to the Whorfian debate is marginal. [Roger Highfield Science, "Amazon tribesmen pass geometry test." The Daily Telegraph (LONDON) Jan 20 2006.]

Fictional presence

*George Orwell's classic novel "Nineteen Eighty-Four" is a striking example of linguistic determinism and linguistic relativity in fiction, in which a language known as Newspeak has trimmed and supplanted Modern English. In this case, Orwell says that if humans cannot form the words to express the ideas underlying a revolution, then they cannot revolt. All of the theory of Newspeak is aimed at eliminating such words. For example, "bad" has been replaced by "ungood", and the concept of "freedom" has been eliminated over time. According to Nineteen Eighty-Four's appendix on Newspeak, the result of the adoption of the language would be that "a heretical thought ... should be literally unthinkable, at least so far as thought is dependent on words."
*Jack Vance's science fiction novel "The Languages of Pao" centers on an experiment in modeling a civilization by tweaking its language.
*In Robert A. Heinlein's novella "Gulf," the characters are taught an artificial language which allows them to think logically and concisely by removing the "false to fact" linguistic constructs of existing languages.
*In Frank Herbert's science fiction novel "Dune" and its sequels, the Principle of Linguistic Relativity first appears when Lady Jessica (who has extensive linguistic training) encounters the Fremen, the native people of Dune. She is shocked by the "violence" of their language, as she believes their word choices and language structure reflect a culture of enormous violence. Similarly, earlier in the novel, her late husband, Duke Leto, muses on how the nature of Imperial society is betrayed by "the precise delineations for treacherous death" in its language, the use of highly specific terms to describe different methods for delivering poison.
*Samuel R. Delany's novel "Babel-17" is centered on a fictional language that denies its speakers independent thought, forcing them to think purely logical thoughts. This language is used as a weapon of war, because it is supposed to convert everyone who learns it to a traitor. In the novel, the language Babel-17 is likened to computer programming languages that do not allow errors or imprecise statements.
*Neal Stephenson's novel "Snow Crash" revolves around the notion that the Sumerian language was a programming language for the human brain. According to characters in the book, the goddess Asherah is the personification of a linguistic virus similar to a computer virus. The god Enki created a counter program which he calls a nam-shub that caused all of humanity to speak different tongues as a protection against Asherah.
*In Iain M. Banks's science fiction series, the Culture has a shared language, Marain. The Culture believes (or perhaps has proved, or else actively made true) the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis that language affects society, and Marain was designed to exploit this effect. A related comment is made by the narrator in "The Player of Games" regarding gender-specific pronouns in English. Marain is also regarded as an aesthetically pleasing language.
*Linguist Suzette Haden Elgin's science fiction novel "Native Tongue" describes a patriarchal society in which the overriding priority of the oppressed women is the secret development of a "feminist" language, Láadan, to aid them in throwing off their shackles. Elgin has written extensively in defense of the "weak" form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (which she prefers to call the "linguistic relativity hypothesis"), including a book titled "The Language Imperative" [Elgin, Suzette Haden. "The Language Imperative." 2000: Perseus Books. ISBN 0738204285, ISBN 9780738204284] . [http://www.sfwa.org/members/elgin/LinkBetween.html Excerpt, "The Link Between Language and the Perception of Reality"] ]
*Ursula K. Le Guin's novel "The Dispossessed" takes place partly on a world with an anarcho-communist society whose constructed language contains little means for expressing possessive relationships, among other features.
*Gene Wolfe's novel "The Citadel of the Autarch" (part of The Book of the New Sun) presents a counter-example to the SWH: one of the characters (an Ascian) speaks entirely in slogans, but is able to express deep and subtle meanings via context. The narrator, Severian, after hearing the Ascian speak, remarks that "The Ascian seemed to speak only in sentences he had learned by rote, though until he used each for the first time we had never heard them . . . Second, I learned how difficult it is to eliminate the urge for expression. The people of Ascia were reduced to speaking only with their masters' voice; but they had made of it a new tongue, and I had no doubt, after hearing the Ascian, that by it he could express whatever thought he wished." [Wolfe, Gene, "The Book of the New Sun" (New York: SFBC, 1998) pg. 776.]
*Ayn Rand's novel "Anthem" presents a collectivist dystopia where the word "I" is banned, and any that use it are put to death.
*Robert Silverberg's novel "A Time of Changes" describes a society where the first person singular is considered an obscenity.
*In Robert A. Heinlein's "Stranger in a Strange Land", Valentine Michael Smith is able to do things that most other humans can't do, and is unable to explain any of this in English. However, once others learn Martian, they start to be able to do these things; those concepts could only be explained in Martian.
*In Jorge Luis Borges's "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius" the author discovers references in books to a universe of idealistic individuals whose language lacks the concept of nouns and has other peculiarities that shapes their idealism. As the story progresses the books become more and better known to the world at large, their philosophy starts influencing the real world, and Earth becomes the ideal world described in the books.
*In Ursula K. LeGuin's Earthsea series (beginning with "The Word of Unbinding," 1964, and "A Wizard of Earthsea", 1968), an ancient language (known as the Old Speech) exists in which every object has one and only one true name. In the mythology of the world, this is the language in which the world was spoken into existence; it is still spoken by magicians and dragons. Aside from the special case of dragons, it is not possible to lie in this language. A similar language system is used in Christopher Paolini's Inheritance trilogy (2002), in which a language exists known only as "the ancient language", spoken mainly by elves and magic-users. It is impossible to directly lie in this language (though it is possible to tell misleading truths, or in some cases use metaphor). While most characters in the novels believe that magic is only possible through speaking this language (and thus, can only cast spells which perform actions they can express), it is revealed in Eldest that the language is spoken only to keep spells under control, and magic can be used through thought, though this requires a great deal of focus to achieve the desired effect.
*In Ted Chiang's "The Story of Your Life," language directly determines thought, Learning the written language used by alien visitors to the Earth allows the person who learns the language to think in a different way, in which the past and future are illusions of conventional thought. This allows people who understand the language to see their entire life as a single unchangeable action, from past to future.

Quotations

Computer coding language conceptual correlate

Kenneth E. Iverson, the originator of the APL programming language, believed that the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis applied to computer languages (without actually mentioning the hypothesis by name). His Turing award lecture, "Notation as a tool of thought", was devoted to this theme, arguing that more powerful notations aided thinking about computer algorithms. [Iverson K.E.," [http://elliscave.com/APL_J/tool.pdf Notation as a tool of thought] ", "Communications of the ACM", 23: 444-465 (August 1980).]

Notes

References

*Adams, Cecil. [http://straightdope.com./classics/a1_297.html "What are the nine Eskimo words for snow?"] , 1979-02-16, "The Straight Dope" — Cecil Adams answers this question by saying that due to the polysynthetic nature of Inuktitut (which he and his interrogator term "Eskimo"), it is impossible to pin down a number of words.
*Adams, Cecil. [http://straightdope.com./columns/010202.html "Are there nine Eskimo words for snow (revisited)?"] , 2001-02-02, "The Straight Dope" — Cecil Adams responds to criticism by listing 15 of the words that "English" has for snow, concluding "Whatever may be said for the S-W hypothesis in general, the notion that it's supported by Eskimo words for snow is bunk.".
*Elgin, Suzette Haden. "The Language Imperative." 2000: Perseus Books. ISBN 0738204285, ISBN 9780738204284] .
*Everett, Dan. [http://ldc.upenn.edu/myl/llog/EverettPiraha.pdf "Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Pirahã: Another Look at the Design Features of Human Language"] . In "Current Anthropology" 46:4, August-October, 2005 (the Pirahã math experiments)
*Golubkov, Sergey V. 2000. [http://userpage.fu-berlin.de/~expert/psychnews/5_1/pn5_1d.htm "The language model of personality and its perspectives within psychology". PsychNews International, 5 (1).]
*Golubkov, Sergey V. 2002. "The Language Personality Theory: An Integrative Approach to Personality on the Basis of its Language Phenomenology". Social Behavior and Personality, 30 (6): 571-578.
*Gentner, Dedre & Goldwin-Meadow, Susan (Eds.) (2003). "Language in mind: advances in the study of language and thought". Massachusetts, MIT Press (A Bradford Book). ISBN 0-262-57163-3
*Gumperz, John, & Stephen Levinson, eds.. "Rethinking Linguistic Relativity". Cambridge University Press. 1996
*Kay, P. and W. Kempton (1984). "What is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?" American Anthropologist 86(1): 65-79.
*Lakoff, George. "Women, fire, and dangerous things", 1987.
*Lee, Penny. "The Whorf Theory Complex - a Critical Reconstruction", John Benjamins, 1996.
*Lucy, John A. "Grammatical Categories and Cognition: A Case Study of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis". ambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
*Lucy, John A. "Language Diversity and Thought: A Reformulation of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis". Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992.
*Pinker, Steven. . Perennial.
*Sapir, Edward. (1983). "Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture, and Personality". Edited by David G. Mandelbaum. University of California Press.
*Whorf, Benjamin (John Carroll, Editor) (1956). "Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf". MIT Press.

ee also

Topics

*Linguistic anthropology
*Sapir-Whorf and programming languages
*Language and thought

*E-Prime—avoids the verb "to be" in terms of general semantics
*non-sexist language—often promoted on the grounds that sexist attitudes are aided by sexist language
*gender-neutral pronouns such as spivak pronouns and sie and hir

People

*Walter Benjamin
*Lera Boroditsky
*Jacques Derrida
*Hans-Georg Gadamer
*Johann Gottfried von Herder
*Wilhelm von Humboldt
*Alfred Korzybski
*Uku Masing
*Cliff Pickover
*Ferdinand de Saussure

External links

* [http://www.news.harvard.edu/gazette/2004/07.22/21-think.html Which comes first, language or thought?]
* [http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99996303 Language may shape human thought]
* [http://www.enformy.com/dma-dwh.htm Part I: Demise of the Whorf Hypothesis] , Danny K. H. Alford, Phoenix: New Directions in the Study of Man, Volume IV, Nos. 1 and 2, 1980.
* [http://www.enformy.com/dma-Chap7.htm The Great Whorf Hypothesis Hoax] .
* [http://www.ship.edu/~cgboeree/golubkov.html Dr. George C. Boeree on Golubkov's Language Personality Theory]