The following are two articles on the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis that
together constitute an extensive summary of the issue as well as a
bibliography of other references.  Both articles are from back issues of
Ju'i Lobypli, the journal of our organization; the 2nd article being a
compilation of Linguist List essays from around 2 years ago.  I can
supply a citation for these issues if you want to reference them.

Both I and Dr.  Gorsch (address at end of 1st article) would be
interested in whatever bibliography you compile on the SWH.

lojbab

----
lojbab                                                lojbab@access.digex.net
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA                        703-385-0273
 For the artificial language Loglan/Lojban, see ftp.cs.yale.edu  /pub/lojban
    or see Lojban WWW Server: href="http://xiron.pc.helsinki.fi/lojban/"

===================================================

Versions of the Theory of Linguistic Relativity

by Robert Gorsch

  

INTRODUCTION



The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

The "Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis," which asserts that one's native language
determines in some fashion the nature of one's experience and that
members of different linguistic communities will necessarily inhabit
different experiential worlds, has its roots in the ideas of eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century thinkers like Giambattista Vico and Wilhelm von
Humboldt.  [See George Steiner, After Babel:  Aspects of Language and
Translation (London:  Oxford Univ.  Press, c. 1975), pp. 73ff.] The
emergence of this hypothesis reflects the growing willingness of
European civilization over the past couple of centuries to take other
cultures and their "world-views" seriously, not only as curiosities of
interest to scholars (especially anthropologists), but as evidence of
the range of possible human experience.  The formulation of the
hypothesis, associated with the names of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee
Whorf, had to await what Noam Chomsky has called the "Boas tradition" of
anthropological linguists, early-twentieth century scholars engaged in
empirical studies of American Indian languages.  [See Chomsky,
"Linguistic Contributions to the Study of Mind:  Future," rpt. in
Language in Thinking:  Selected Readings, ed.  Parveen Adams
(Harmondsworth:  Penguin, 1973), pp. 336ff.] The hypothesis is
emphatically not the a priori doctrine of linguists seduced by a
philosophical tradition, but a proposal advanced by investigators who
actually took the trouble to confront "alien" languages and cultures.

What does the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis claim?  If it were true, what
phenomena would we encounter and be equipped to explain?  In a fairly
recent article in the American Anthropologist (1984), Paul Kay and
Willett Kempton reduce the Hypothesis to three propositions:



I. Structural differences between language systems will, in general, be
paralleled by nonlinguistic cognitive differences, of an unspecified
sort, in the native speakers of the two languages.

II.  The structure of anyone's native language strongly influences or
fully determines the world-view he will acquire as he learns the
language.

III.  The semantic systems of different languages vary without
constraint.



["What is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?"  American Anthropologist 1984
(86), 66.  Kay and Kempton's formulation is based upon the thinking of
Roger Brown and, through him, Eric Lenneberg.]

As this series of propositions suggests, one can distinguish two
possible sources of "Whorfian effects":  (1) differences in "linguistic
structure" and (2) differences in "semantics."  (Strictly speaking, of
course, the "semantic system" of a language, the division of experience
embodied in its lexicon, is a part of its "structure."  For, in
linguistics, "structure" is really a synonym for "system.")  Whorfians
typically emphasize linguistic "structure" in a fairly limited sense.
Thus, they tend to argue that the structure of one's native language
will, by encouraging a particular manner of structuring one's report of
experience, have the effect of shaping one's perception of the world.
One will tend to note in perception, that which one's grammar asks one
to report in utterance.  "Structure" embodies, and imposes upon the
speaker, a metaphysics.

The semantic organization of one's language will similarly shape one's
experience of the world.  This is the implication of Whorfian arguments
that make appeal to such facts as the number of words that the Eskimos
have for the English concept "snow."  If one approaches the semantic
system of language in a Whorfian spirit, this system will be viewed as
an arbitrary segmentation of the experienced world.  We divide up the
continuum of experience in "culturally pertinent" ways, to use a phrase
borrowed from the semiologist Umberto Eco, in accordance with our needs
as members of cultural groups confronting particular physical and social
environments.  The lexicon of our language, by the categories it
defines, affords us ways to make distinctions in the experienced world
and, by its omissions, discourages other, logically possible
distinctions.

In short, according to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, one will "see" what
the structure of one's language asks one to see and one will "see" -- as
separate things -- what the semantic system of one's language defines as
discrete semantic units.



Saussurean Sign-Theory

It is sometimes thought that the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis has been
discredited and relegated to the trash-heap of intellectual history.
Certainly, it is true that mainstream linguists, influenced by Noam
Chomsky, tend to dismiss the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis no matter how
judiciously it is reformulated.  One could hardly expect any other
response, since Chomskian linguists are committed almost as a matter of
faith to the notion that the differences between human languages must be
superficial and even trivial.  If one accepts the Chomskian theory of a
"universal grammar," one will be compelled to dismiss any attempt, no
matter how empirical its grounds, to justify the Whorfian argument that
"grammars" vary enough to affect the structure of human experience.

Whatever mainstream linguists say, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is alive
and well in the popular mind and in the academic mind -- at least
outside of the discipline of linguistics.  Many feminists, for example,
believe that the structure of English imposes upon its speakers a
patriarchal metaphysics.  (English customarily subsumes the feminine
under the masculine in its pronoun system, as in expressions like "To
each his own.")  In the disciplines customarily termed the humanities,
particularly those that investigate literature and culture, versions of
the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis are widely taken for granted; the Sapir-Whorf
Hypothesis, in some version, is the premise of many currently dominant
methodologies.

Take for instance modern "sign-theory."  Semiology or "sign-theory,"
popularized by structuralism and post-structuralism, embraces an
equivalent of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.  Some "sign-theorists" even
look back to Whorf as a precursor.  Modern "sign-theory," rooted in the
work of the Swiss linguist Ferdinand De Saussure, posits an initial
moment when the human subject enters "language" and at the same time a
certain culture-bound experiential world.  In first language acquisition
an arbitrary system for organizing raw experience begins to be imposed
upon the mind.  Subjects learn how to segment experience into the units
specified by the language they acquire as infants; they divide the
continuum of experience into the "semantic units" that semiologists call
"signifieds" -- i.e., the conceptual elements of "signs."  [According to
semiological theory, every "sign" consists of a "signifier" or
"expression" and a "signified" or "content":  every linguistic sign, for
instance, unites a combination of sounds or a series of written symbols
(the signifier) with a concept (the signified).]

Semiologists typically pay special attention to the array of
"signifieds" posited by a linguistic community, i.e., the units into
which the community divides the continuum of the experienced world, and
to the network of relations by which these "signifieds" are
interrelated, i.e., the system of connotative links by which units
belonging to different semantic fields are linked with one another.

Thus, semiology takes for granted one of the crucial corollaries of the
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, namely, that in acquiring the semantic system of
a language one embraces a particular "map" of experience.  A semantic
system divides the continuum of experience into units -- "things,"
"states," "processes," and so forth -- and links these units, one to
another, in a web of relations of opposition and affinity.  Green is,
for instance, differentiated from yellow on the one hand and blue on the
other:  green exists as a unit in opposition to adjacent units in the
same semantic field.  At the same time, green is linked metaphorically,
in relations of affinity, to units belonging to different semantic
fields, for instance, such units as nature, life, youth, and jealousy.

In suggesting that "raw experience" -- what Whorf calls "the
kaleidoscopic flux of impressions" -- is organized by the human mind
after its embrace of a particular sign-system, Saussurean sign-theory
simply reformulates the Whorfian Hypothesis.  According to this
reformulation, the lexicon of one's native language imposes a system of
categories on one's experience; the lexicon imposes on the speaker an
arbitrary differentiation of the continuum of experience into semantic
units -- or, in the terminology of semiology, "signifieds" or
"culturally pertinent units."  At the same time each language imposes on
the speaker a network of relations of affinity between these semantic
units.  This system of categories and the accompanying network of
associations constitute the "map" of experience offered by each language
to its native speakers.



A WORKING BIBLIOGRAPHY

    

Note on the bibliography:

In this bibliography I attempt to trace the development of the
"Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis" from the early decades of the twentieth-century
to the present.  The items included in the bibliography range in date
from 1911 to 1990.  While the bibliography makes no claims to
completeness, it does represent an attempt (1) to clarify the role of
earlier ethnologists, including Boas and Sapir, in the formulation of
what is often called simply "the Whorfian Hypothesis," (2) to chart the
career of the Hypothesis from the 1940's to the 1980's, and (3) to draw
attention to the kindred thinking of semiologists working in the
tradition of Saussurean linguistics.

The bibliography is not alphabetical; entries are arranged by category
and date.

In compiling this working bibliography I have cannibalized, without
shame, the following lists of references:  Wallace L. Anderson and
Norman Stageberg, eds., Introductory Readings on Language (New York:
Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1975), pp. 38ff.; Ben G. Blount, ed.,
Language, Culture, and Society:  A Book of Readings (Cambridge, Mass.:
Winthrop, 1974); Ralph Dumain, "Bibliography on Language and Thought,"
ju'i lobypli (The Logical Language Group), March, 1990, 36-38; John J.
Gumperz, "Reader" for "Interactional Sociolinguistics (Anthropology
270B)," University of California, Berkeley, Fall, 1986; John
Parks-Clifford, [Note], ju'i lobypli (The Logical Language Group), Dec.,
1989, p. 44; and Bob LeChevalier [and Alan Munn], ju'i lobypli, March,
1991, pp. 57ff.  I want to thank Bob LeChevalier and the Logical
Language Group for arguing incessantly about the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
and my colleague Barbara Grant for loaning me a copy of Gumperz's
"Reader."



1a.  The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis:  Formulation



Ben G. Blount, ed., Language, Culture, and Society:  A Book of Readings
(Cambridge, Mass.:  Winthrop, 1974).

This sourcebook includes important selections from Boas, Sapir, Whorf,
and Hoijer.

Franz Boas, "Theoretical Importance of Linguistic Studies," in
"Introduction" to the Handbook of American Indian Languages, F. Boas,
ed., Bulletin 40, Part II, Bureau of American Ethnology (Washington, D.
C.:  Government Printing Office, 1911).  Reprinted in Blount, pp. 23-31.

Lucien Levy-Bruhl, How Natives Think (N.Y.:  Knopf, 1925), pp. 139-180.

Willis D. Wallis, An Introduction to Anthropology (N.Y.:  Harper and
Row, 1926), pp. 416-431.

Edward Sapir, "The Unconscious Patterning of Behavior in Society," in
The Unconscious:  A Symposium, ed.  E. S. Drummer (New York:  Knopf,
1927).  Reprinted in Blount, pp. 32-45.

- - - - - - , "Conceptual Categories in Primitive Languages," Science 74
(1931).

- - - - - - , "Language," Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences, ed.
Seligman and Johnson (New York:  Macmillan, 1933).  Reprinted in Blount,
pp. 46-66.

Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought, and Reality:  Selected Writings
of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed.  John B. Carroll (Cambridge, Mass.:  MIT
Press, 1956).

The most revealing essays are, in my opinion, "Science and Linguistics"
(1940) and "Languages and Logic" (1941).  Another interesting essay,
reprinted in Blount as well as in Carroll's selection, is "The Relation
of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language" (1939).

See also the essays "An American Indian Model of the Universe" (c.
1936), "A Linguistic Consideration of Thinking in Primitive Communities"
(c. 1936), "Linguistics as an Exact Science" (1940), and "Language,
Mind, and Reality" (1941).



1b.  The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis:  Career



M. J. Herskovits, Man and His Works (N.Y.:  Knopf, 1947), pp. 440-457.

Clyde Kluckhohn, "The Gift of Tongues, in Mirror for Man:  A Survey of
Human Behavior and Social Attitudes (New York:  McGraw-Hill, 1949),
Chapter VI.

John B. Carroll, The Study of Language (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), pp.
43-48.

Harry Hoijer, "The Relation of Language to Culture," in Anthropology
Today, ed.  A. L. Kroeber (Chicago:  Univ. of Chicago Press, 1953), pp.
554-573.

Harry Hoijer, ed., Language in Culture, Comparative Studies of Cultures
and Civilizations, No. 3; Memoirs of the American Anthropological
Association, No. 79 (Chicago:  Univ. of Chicago Pr., 1954).

The proceedings of a 1953 conference on the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.

Harry Hoijer, "The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis" (1953), reprinted in Hoijer
(1954) and in Blount (1974).

R. Brown, "Linguistic Determinism and Parts of Speech," Journal of
Abnormal Social Psychology 55 (1957), 1-5.

R. Brown and E. Lenneberg, "Studies in Linguistic Relativity," in E.
Macroby, T. H. Newcomb, and E. L. Hartley, eds., Readings in Social
Psychology, 3rd edition (New York:  Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1958),
9-18.

John B. Carroll and Joseph B. Casagrande, "The Function of Language
Classification in Behavior," in Readings in Social Psychology (1958),
18-31.

Paul Hanle, Language, Thought, and Culture (Ann Arbor:  Univ. of
Michigan Press, 1958).

Summarizing the results of a conference held at U. Mich. in 1951-2.

Roger Brown, Words and Things (N.Y.:  Free Press, 1958), pp. 229-63.

J. Fishman, "A Systematization of the Whorfian Hypothesis," Behavioral
Science 5 (1960), 232-39.

James Cooke Brown, "Loglan," Scientific American 202 (1960), 53-63.

Describes an effort in linguistic engineering designed to create an
artificial language that would permit the Whorfian Hypothesis to be
tested.

John B. Carroll, "Language and Cognition," in Language and Thought
(Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1964).

See especially 106-110 ("The linguistic-relativity thesis"), which
offers a critique of the strong version of the Whorfian Hypothesis.

James Cooke Brown, Loglan I (Gainesville, Fla.:  The Loglan Institute,
1966).

Brown's book was revised in 1975 and 1989.

Dell Hymes, "Two Types of Linguistic Relativity," in Sociolinguistics:
Proceedings of the UCLA Sociolinguistics Conference (1964), ed.  W.
Bright, Janua Linguarum Series, 20 (The Hague:  Mouton, 1968), 114-167.

Arnold M. Zwicky, Review of Brown's Loglan I, Language 45:2 (1969),
444-457.  See also John Cowan (1991), below.

Roger Brown, Psycholinguistics:  Selected Papers (N.Y.:  Free Press,
1970), pp. 235-256.

John MacNamara, "Bilingualism and Thought," Georgetown University Round
Table on Languages and Linguistics 1970:  Bilingualism and Language
Contact, ed. by James E. Alatis (Washington:  Georgetown University
Press, 1970), pp. 25-45.

Critical of the Whorfian Hypothesis.

Ferruccio Rossi-Landi, Ideologies of Linguistic Relativity (The Hague:
Mouton, 1973).

Includes consideration of the sociological roots of the doctrine of
linguistic relativity, including white guilt over the extermination of
the Indians.

Noam Chomsky, Introduction to Adam Schiff, Language and Cognition
(1964), tr.  Olgierd Wojtasiewicz and ed.  Robert S. Cohen (N.  Y.:
McGraw-Hill, 1973).

Critique of the Whorfian Hypothesis.

Adam Schiff, Language and Cognition (1964), tr.  Olgierd Wojtasiewicz
and ed.  Robert S. Cohen (N.  Y.:  McGraw-Hill, 1973).

Historical account of linguistic theory (from the 18th century on):
background to the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.

Ronald W. Langacker, "Semantic Representations and the Linguistic
Relativity Hypothesis," in Foundations of Language 14 (1976), 307-357.

The author "tries to formulate the hypothesis in a non-vacuous manner,
and ultimately rejects the strong version, basing himself on a
distinction between primary conceptual structures and the semantic
representations into which thought is coded" (R.  Dumain).

Danny K. Alford, "The Demise of the Whorf Hypothesis (A Major Revision
in the History of Linguistics)," Proceedings of the 4th Annual Meeting
of the Berkeley Linguistic Society, 4 (1978), 485-99.

Paul Friedrich, Language, Context, and the Imagination:  Essays by Paul
Friedrich, selected and introduced by A. S. Dil (Stanford:  Stanford
Univ.  Press, 1979).

"Friedrich disagrees with Whorf's views on language and metaphysics, but
accepts the strong thesis in the realm of poetic language and its
relation to the imagination" (R.  Dumain).

Paul Kay and Willett Kempton, "What Is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?"
American Anthropologist 86 (1984), 65-79.

Discusses the content of the Hypothesis and reviews empirical research
that attempts to test it; reports experimental confirmation of a
modified version of the Hypothesis in the area of color perception.

Frederick J. Newmeyer, The Politics of Linguistics (Chicago:  Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1986).

A history of linguistic theory that attacks the Whorfian Hypothesis as
racist.

David McNeill, "Linguistic Determinism:  The Whorfian Hypothesis," in
Psycholinguistics:  A New Approach (New York:  Harper and Row, 1987),
Ch. 6, pp. 173-209.

The Logical Language Group, ju'i lobypli (1988-1991).

A variety of discussions of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis from the
perspective of Lojbanists:  see Aug.-Sep., 1988; Dec., 1988; June-July,
1989; Nov.-Dec., 1989; March, 1990; May, 1990; August, 1990; and March,
1991.

John Cowan, "Loglan and Lojban:  A Linguist's Questions and an Amateur's
Answers," ju'i lobypli (March 1991), pp. 21ff.

Responding to Zwicky's review of Brown's Loglan I.

   

2. Semiology and the Thesis of Linguistic Relativity.

The following list by no means represents the field of semiology as a
whole; I have limited myself to a handful of texts that I have found
useful in the classroom.



Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics (1915), tr.  Wade
Baskin (New York:  Philosophical Library, 1959), pp. 7-17, 65-78, and
111-122.

Seminal sections from Saussure's lectures, laying the foundations for
modern sign-theory (semiology or semiotics).

Pierre Guiraud, Semiology (1975).

A reasonably good primer, introducing sign-theory and its application to
various areas of human experience.

Umberto Eco, "Social Life as a Sign System," Structuralism:  An
Introduction, ed.  David Robey, (1973), pp. 57-72.

- - - - - , "How Culture Conditions the Colours We See," On Signs, ed.
Marshall Blonsky (1985), pp. 157-175.

This essay and "Social Life as a Sign System" provide a useful
introduction to the semiological equivalent of the Sapir-Whorf
Hypothesis.

Takao Suzuki, Words in Context:  A Japanese Perspective on Language and
Culture (1973), tr.  Akira Miura (Tokyo:  Kodansha International, 1978;
rev., 1984).

A richly suggestive comparison of the languages and cultures of Japanese
speakers and English speakers.  The book presents, and offers empirical
evidence for, a theory of linguistic relativity similar in spirit to
those of Whorfians and Saussurean semiologists.

John Lucy, "Whorf's View of the Linguistic Mediation of Thought," in
Semiotic Mediation:  Sociocultural and Psychosocial Perspectives, ed.
E. Mertz and R. J. Parmentier (Orlando:  Academic Press, 1985).

3.  Related Studies



B. Comrie, ed., The World's Major Languages.

Descriptive text used in the design of Lojban.

Brent Berlin and Paul Kay, Basic Color Terms (Berkeley:  Univ. of Calif.
Press, 1968), esp. pp. 1-14.

George Steiner, After Babel:  Aspects of Language and Translation
London:  Oxford Univ.  Press, c. 1975), esp. pp. 73-109:  Linguistic
relativism (including Whorf) vs. linguistic universalism (Chomsky).

Useful for its discussion of the philosophical tradition that lies
behind the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.

Eleanor Rosch, "Classification of Real-World Objects:  Origins and
Representations in Cognition," MS, University of California, Berkeley,
c. 1975.

Criticizes, on empirical grounds, the idea that experience is a
continuum arbitrarily segmented by the mind.  Available from E. Rosch,
c/o Dept. of Psychology, Univ. of Calif., Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago:  Univ. of
Chicago Press, 1980).

"The authors make an important study of the metaphorical basis of
language.  In the final chapters they argue for an extreme relativism"
(R.  Dumain).

Alfred H. Bloom, The Linguistic Shaping of Thought:  A Study in the
Impact of Language on Thinking in China and the West (Hillsdale, N.J.:
L. Erlbaum, 1981), pp. 13-36.

"The Distinctive Cognitive Legacies of English and Chinese," especially
the sections "Counterfactuals in English and Chinese" and "Theoretical
Extensions."

George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things:  What Categories
Reveal About the Mind (Chicago:  Univ. of Chicago Press, c. 1987).

How human beings segment and order their experience.



CONCLUDING NOTE:  This is only a working bibliography; I welcome the
assistance of other interested scholars.  Please send comments,
criticisms, corrections, and suggested additions and deletions, to the
following address:

Robert Gorsch
Department of English
St.  Mary's College
Moraga, Calif. 94575


======================================================

The following was compiled from a previous discussion of the SWH on
Linguist List.  See the LL archives for details and info needed for
citation.

Discussions on the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis



In a discussion of Sapir-Whorf on the Linguist List linguistic mailing
list "linguist@tamsun.tamu.edu", Lojbab wrote:

Michael Kac says:

On the basis of unsystematic observation and impressionistic judgements
which are confirmed by all other linguists I've consulted, it would
appear that the view that one's world view is determined by the language
one speaks is nearly universally accepted by educated people who aren't
linguists.



I'll concur, as well, and my primary interaction is with such people.
The exceptions to this are correlated with politics, with some people
(usually 'left') considering linguistic relativism to be racist.
However, even these people are inconsistent, since the arguments about
gender and pronouns/language-gender (including the recent one on
Linguist List) inherently assume some form of language effect on
world-view, or it wouldn't make any difference.  Note that the
occasionally emotive arguments in this latter discussion shows that even
linguists may to some extent assume what they claim they don't.

Factors in the continuing belief include:

a) what people mean by 'world view' and 'determined' is different.
Sapir-Whorf is generally understood to have strong and weak versions,
with the strongest form almost certainly false because translation IS
possible, and the weakest form true to the point of triteness.

b) the field of semiotics is heavily dependent on assuming linguistic
relativism, and most educated people are more exposed to literary
criticism than linguistic theory.

c) the continuing identification of political issues with the linguistic
relativity assumption.  As such, people are continually exposed to the
assumption in daily life without it being explicitly identified as a
hidden assumption.

d) I believe certain areas of anthropological linguistics still accept
Sapir-Whorf to some extent, especially where the researcher is in the
anthropology department rather than the linguistics dept.  My source of
this is Reed Riner at U. of No.  Arizona, but I think I heard something
similar from John Atkins who was at U. of Washington.

I've used the phrase 'linguistic relativity' because when actually
pinned down, many people will say that they aren't sure whether language
determines world-view or vice versa, but that there is obviously a
relation.



I guess I don't find that particularly strange (a lot of my friends,
however, consider ME extremely strange for being skeptical on this
point);



The Loglan (artificial language) project has the goal (among others) of
testing the 'Sapir-Whorf hypothesis'.  Those of us working on the
project, linguists or not, are assumed by many to 'believe in' the SWH,
though we are predominantly agnostic or skeptical like you.  I think it
is again an unquestioning assumption that the concept holds, with little
analysis of the implications, that leads to this assumption.

I do find it somewhat odd that people who accept this view seem to think
that it is (a) obviously correct, and (b) profound, a contradiction in
terms.  I welcome further data and insights.



Again, I think people assume the concept to be obviously correct in some
'weak' form and also intuitively realize that it breaks down in some
stronger form.

The profundity is due to the never-ending political and philosophical
implications of the assumed-true concept.  That the hypothesis isn't
even well stated means that none of the tests conducted in the 50s truly
settled the issue.  Supporters of the hypothesis seem to think that
linguists abandoned the issue either because they could not prove it one
way or the other, or because the idea became unfashionable or even
non-P.C. with the rise of Chomsky's ideas.

If unambiguously true, the hypothesis itself is uninteresting.  Until
the bounds of its truth are explored, the philosophical implications
will continue to be profound.

I think there is some considerable correlation in attitude on linguistic
relativity and language prescriptivism.  In the latter area as well,
linguists tend to have a considerable disagreement with the
educated-populace-at-large, who consider it a truism that there is a
right way to speak and use a language and other usages are wrong.  This
assumption is also considered 'obvious', and when its fallacies and
philosophical implications are pointed out, also considered profound.

_________________________________________



A lively debate ensued, partly in response to these comments.



Niko Besnier, Department of Anthropology, Yale University
<UTTANU@YALEVM.BITNET> replied:

The reason why linguistic anthropologists "still" believe in some
version of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (SWH) is not that they know less
about language than mainstream linguists (many fields have much to say
about language, and it is a delusion to think that any one field has a
monopoly on the subject), but that they focus on language in a different
way from linguists.  The prototypical anthropological paradigm focuses
on diversity, on the particular, and builds theory on the particular,
looking at, for example, relational patterns between the particular in
language and the particular in society and culture.  This contrasts with
the avowed universalism extant in most linguistic paradigms.  Having
been "brought up" in the latter paradigm, to then move to some version
of the former, I am at a loss to decide that one is "better," more
intellectually worthwhile, etc., than the other.  I doubt that
mud-slinging ("butterfly collector!"  "universalist-schmuniversalist!")
will get either field very far.

There is room for the SWH in a particularistic approach to language.
But what it has to be grounded on is a careful reading of poor Whorf,
who must be on the most misread (unread?) thinkers of the century.
Interpretations of Whorf extant amongst mainstream linguists have little
to do with what Whorf actually wrote, and this had led linguists to call
the man by all sorts of names (e.g.  "weekend linguist" - Geoffrey
Pullum in NLLT).  It is telling, for example, that in my linguistic
training at two institutions I was never required to read a single
original text by Whorf.  To a certain extent this is understandable,
since Whorf wrote in an opaque, dense style.

John Lucy ("Whorf's view of the linguistic mediation of thought," in
Semiotic Mediation, ed. by Elizabeth Mertz & Richard Parmentier,
Academic P, 1985) shows that one of the important aspects of the SWH
missing from laypersons' accounts (i.e. accounts by those who have not
read Whorf) is that Whorf is not talking about determinism by all of
language of all aspects of world view.  Rather, fashions of speaking
determine habitual thought.  Fashions of speaking are broad patternings
of grammatical categories and discourse strategies in a language, across
what Whorf calls overt and covert categories.  Areas of language where
one should seek "weak" determinism (the strong version of determinism
was never advocated by Whorf, but by subsequent linguists who never seem
to have read Whorf) are in fact very different from areas that Whorf is
usually said to have claimed to be deterministic.  I'd point to work
like that of Elinor Ochs as example of where determinism is to be found
between language and habitual thought:  the shape of, even the
presence/absence of baby talk in a speech community, provides a pretty
strong deterministic "lesson" to language acquirers about the
relationship between structure (= institutions) and agency (= person)
extant in the society, i.e. about the type of things that social
theorists worry about.

This posting is already too long, but I'd like to point to Alan Rumsey's
(1990) paper, "Wording, Meaning, and Linguistic Ideology," American
Anthropologist 92:346-361, for an excellent discussion of where
Whorfianism works.



________________________________________



[Bruce Nevin gave a very detailed and informative discussion of the
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.  He has given us permission to publish the
entire text which is part of a longer work-in-progress.  The I, II, and
III perspectives listed in the text are not his but as cited.  Following
is Bruce's relevant background.

Bruce Nevin received his AB and AM degrees in linguistics from the
University of Pennsylvania in 1969 and 1970.  From 1970 through 1974 he
did extensive fieldwork on Achumawi, a Hokan language spoken in the
northeastern corner of California.  He resumed PhD matriculation at the
University of Pennsylvania in 1987, intending to use the Achumawi
material in the dissertation.  He has been employed as a writer by Bolt
Beranek and Newman (BBN) in Cambridge, Massachusetts since 1982.

The following is Copyright 1991 by Bruce Nevin, <bn@bbn.com>.]



I want to outline the views of Sapir and of Whorf on linguistic and
cultural relativism as I understand them and survey some of what has
been done with these ideas, both as deriving explicitly from their
writings and as arising from less clearly articulated cultural and
intellectual antecedents that it is difficult for any of us not in some
measure to share as we grapple with universals and idiosyncrasies of
language and culture.

These ideas arose for Sapir in the context of his work on language
typology on the one hand and psychology on the other.  In the background
lay social Darwinism, or at least the pervasive evolutionist perspective
of 19th-century anthropology, and in this respect Sapir's interest here
was a continuation of Boas' restitution of "primitive" languages as on
an equal footing with the languages of familiar literate cultures, and
an all-important entree into "the network of cultural patterns of a
civilization," which "In a sense ... is indexed in the language which
expresses that civilization."  (1929:162)

In his conception of the relation of language, personality, culture, and
"the world," Sapir distinguished between social reality:

"Language is a guide to `social reality.'  ... it powerfully conditions
all our thinking about social problems and processes ... the world of
social activity as ordinarily understood"1

and objective reality, as had Durckheim and others, and affirmed of the
former that:

"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."

It was in this sense that he made his famous assertion "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."  (Preceding quotations all loc.
cit.)

The core of the matter for Sapir, however, was an identification of
language, specifically grammatical categories, with thought:

"I quite frankly commit myself to the idea that thought is impossible
without language, that thought is language."  (In a letter of 8 April
1921 keeping Lowie abreast of progress on the manuscript of Language;
quoted in Darnell 1990:99.)

In other places, Sapir severely divorces language from culture, but in
this he appears to mean material culture, the "inventory" of cultural
artefacts.  The correlation of these things with associated vocabulary
he regarded as trivial.2

Whorf may have been a Theosophist.  His philosophical interests
attracted him to Sapir and to linguistics, and his fascination with the
"hidden metaphysics" of languages remained always the central thing for
him, for which the tools of linguistics were subordinate means.  From
the point of view of an emerging profession, then, he was quite
literally eccentric, in that specific sense.  His ideas began to
crystallize with preparation to teach a course at Yale during Sapir's
leave in 1937-38.  His intention was to "excite [students'] interest in
the linguistic approach as a way of developing understanding of the
ideology of other peoples" (letter to Spier).  He would focus on "a
psychological direction, and the problems of:

"meaning, thought and idea in so-called primitive cultures," aiming to
"reveal psychic factors or constants" and the "organization of raw
experience into a consistent and readily communicable universe of ideas
through the medium of linguistic patterns" (to Carroll; both quoted in
Darnell 1990:381).

Whorf developed his ideas about linguistic relativity during Sapir's
illness and elaborated it after his death, so Sapir never had a chance
to comment.  Whorf died in 1941 at the age of forty-four, leaving less
sympathetic colleagues to pursue the implications of his work.  (Darnell
1990:375)

Sapir had confined the constitutive role of language to social reality.
Whorf went farther, and developed the claim that:

"It is the grammatical background of our mother tongue, which includes
not only our way of constructing propositions but the way we dissect
nature and break up the flux of experience into objects and entities to
construct propositions about."  (1956:239)

The identification of language and thought takes an adversative twist:

"[T]hinking ... follows a network of tracks laid down in the given
language, an organization which may concentrate systematically upon
certain phases of reality, certain aspects of intelligence, and may
systematically discard others featured by other languages.  The
individual is utterly unaware of this organization and is constrained
complete within its unbreakable bonds."  (256)

Since:

"if a rule has absolutely no exceptions, it is not recognized as a rule
or as anything else; it is then part of the background of experience of
which we tend to remain unconscious.

In the background always is Theosophy, as in The Voice of the Silence:

The mind is the great slayer of the real."  (Quoted on p. 253)

His views were recast in terms more acceptable to prevalent conceptions
of operational test and verification, as by Eric Lenneberg in 1953,
summarized by Roger Brown (Reference:  In Memorial Tribute to Eric
Lenneberg, Cognition 4:125-153):

I. Structural differences between language systems will, in general, be
paralleled by nonlinguistic cognitive differences, of an unspecified
sort, in the native speakers of the two languages.

II.  The structure of anyone's native language strongly influences or
fully determines the world-view he will acquire as he learns the
language.  (p. 128)

Behind this was the assumption (presumably "part of the unconscious
background" of every student in the Boas-Sapir tradition, and indeed of
virtually everyone as has been argued on the LINGUIST list) that:

III.  Languages, and hence cognitive systems, can vary without
constraint.

Proposition II has generally been presumed to be untestable because of
the identification of language and any means of communicating one's
world-view.  Attempts to verify or falsify the hypothesis have concerned
themselves either with I or III (with indirect evidence for II sought
from III).  It would be interesting to see a resumption of attention to
II; e.g. employing techniques developed for study of non-human
communication.

A conference organized by Robert Redfield in 1953 drew together a
relatively small number of linguists and anthropologists with the aim of
defining problems related to the hypothesis, reviewing work undertaken
and plans for future work relating to it, and attempting to establish a
minimal framework of institutional support for these research interests.
Their proposals concerned mostly methods for getting at I. Their
conclusions were cautious, as noted above, in keeping with the temper of
the times.

Kay and Kempton (AA 86:66), perhaps somewhat parochially but truthfully
as regards empirical research, claim that most of this research has been
in the domain of color.  They give citations of work bearing on III
beginning about the time of the Redfield conference (Ray 1952, Conklin
1955, Lenneberg and Roberts 1956, Gleason 1961, Bohannan 1963), and
probably the best known study, their own (Berlin and Kay 1969).  They
remark that "studies before 1969 tended to support III; those since 1969
have tended to discredit III" (loc. cit.)  They accept the finding of
Kay and McDaniel (1978) explaining universal constraints in color
classification in terms of the neurophysiology of human color vision,
and discrediting III with respect to color.  They affirm of course that
research into II and III is an open matter for domains other than color
perception, in particular domains (they mention religion) where
characteristics of peripheral neural mechanisms like those of color
perception have no bearing.

A parallel tradition of research into aspect I of the hypothesis has
been carried out primarily by psychologists, and Kay and Kempton (1984)
is a continuation of this.  They cite Brown and Lennebert 1954, Burnham
and Clark 1955, Lenneberg 1961, Lantz and Stefflre 1964, and Stefflre,
Castillo, and Morely 1966.  This line of research seeks a correlation
between a linguistic variable (codability and communication accuracy)
and a nonlinguistic cognitive variable (memorability) within a single
language, and is thus a weak form of I.

After initial claims of success in finding a positive correlation
between the memorability of a color and its value on a linguistic
variable, Rosch showed that both memorability and the combined variable
of codability and accuracy of communication is determined universally by
focality or perceptual salience.  The assumption that the linguistic
variables of codability and communication accuracy differ across
languages (III again) was falsified by this research, and therefore any
correlation between memorability and a linguistic variable was not
relevant to the hypothesis.  Lucy and Shweder determined that the
problem of focality or salience was an artefact of how the color chips
were presented, and devised an array by repeatedly re-randomizing chips
from the initial array so that there is no relation between focality and
findability.  By this means they have reinstated the earlier correlation
in favor of I with respect to color categories.  There remain problems
of interpretation and relevance to the broader aims of the enterprise,
as unfortunately often happens in narrowly empirical work.

Research of a broader sort has gone on in many fields.  In social and
cultural anthropology it is difficult to find anything that is
absolutely irrelevant to the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, though the latter
can be made irrelevant to some forms of anthropological work essentially
by legislating a rather narrowly realist, anti-constructivist
perspective for science.  Among clearly relevant issues I name questions
of symbolism, including especially money and symbols of political and/or
religious stature, magic and cargo cults, studies of kinship systems and
their role in the construction of interpersonal and social relations,
and work in social categories.  To this must be added work of more
obviously linguistic nature, such as projection of prehistoric cultures
from reconstructed proto-languages, Studies of the bases of prejudice,
of stereotyping, and of national character in a more genuine sense (as
pioneered by Gregory Bateson) ... the list is seemingly endless.

The fields of ethnolinguistics and sociolinguistics, themselves
extremely broad and diversified (and themselves polarized rather as the
right and left hemispheres of the brain of the archetypal
anthropological linguist), have obvious bearing on the hypothesis.
Hymes has urged a reinterpretation of the hypothesis, investigating
patterns of language use rather than of language structure per se.

The perhaps contentiously named field of cognitive linguistics has a
strong constructivist bent.  Work in psycholinguistics in general often
has clear bearing, though the direction of interest (and funding) to
linguistic universals has tended to obscure investigation of linguistic
idiosyncrasies that might correlate with cognitive differences.

From Bateson's work on communication and learning and in particular the
discovery of the double bind in relation to these have developed lines
of clinical research that have developed practical techniques of
reframing and use of metaphor, and an understanding of human systems in
cybernetic terms, as therapy (particularly the field of family therapy).

Lastly, I must mention the resurgence of feminism in all its many forms,
especially as a scholarly concern in anthropology.

I will describe in a little more detail a new test of aspect I of the
hypothesis devised by Kay and Kempton (1984) so as not to be so
restricted in interpretive scope as the previous
communicability/codability studies had been.  Speakers of Tarahumara (a
Uto-Aztecan language of northern Mexico) lack the basic lexical
distinction between green and blue (as do various other languages,
including Achumawi).  Aspect I of the hypothesis predicts that speakers
of English will polarize their perceptions near the border of green and
blue, but speakers of Tarahumara will not.3 In the first experiment,
English-speaker's judgements reflected the division of green against
blue in 29 trials out of 30; Tarahumara speakers responded even-handedly
with 13 out of 24, extremely close to a 50-50 split, vindicating the
hypothesis.

These experiments involve discriminating among three chips.  In the
first experiment, the subject had an opportunity to assign a color name
to the intermediate chip, and this may have prejudiced the later step of
the experiment, when the alternate comparison was made.  The second
experiment made the comparisons with the three chips adjacent in a box
with a sliding cover that covered the chip on one end.  In the setup
stage, the subject agrees that the middle chip is greener with respect
to one chip, and then that it is bluer than the other.  It thus has both
names associated with it when the subject is invited to alternate views
as often as desired, and judge which difference is greater.  In this
experiment the polarization effect disappears.

This accords with an interpretation by categorization (experiment 1)
versus an interpretation by discrimination (experiment 2).  An exact
parallel could be made with the fact that people can discriminate
differences between sounds with indeterminate fineness (phonetics), but
discriminate relevant differences that make a difference in small
numbers of categories (phonemes, contrasts, distinctions) and displaying
characteristic polarization effects at the boundaries.  A
culturally/linguistically determined contrast can be repeated, a
difference requiring perceptual discrimination can only be imitated.

Kay and Kempton interpret these findings as disconfirming what they call
radical linguistic determinism, in which "human beings ... are very much
at the mercy of the particular language" (Sapir, quoted previously).
Because the polarization associated with naming can be made to disappear
simply by not naming, we are not hopelessly at the mercy of our
language.  To this I would add that it is difficult to do many sorts of
things cooperatively with other human beings or with social consequence
and recognition without employing the categories inherent in language.
The exceptions, it seems to me, are in the realms of art, of religion,
of play and creativity.  These are the domain of the pleroma in
Bateson's terms, the realm of cybernetic explanation, as opposed to the
creatura, the realm of forces and impacts dealt with in the conventional
categories of one's shared language and culture.

In formal linguistics, Zellig Harris and his co-workers have come full
circle to the work on information structures in discourse that opened
the whole field of transformational grammar.  Harris, Ryckman, Gottfried
et al.  The Form of Information in Science (1990) develops a
representation of the information immanent in a body of texts written
over a span of years in the history of a sub-field of a science
(immunology).  Changes in this structure correlate transparently with
historically well-documented changes and developmental stages of the
science during that period, although the structure was determined by
clearly defined formal means and without reference to any knowledge of
that historical context.  In this way, they have demonstrated strongly
that structures found in the sub-language of that science (and not
imposed a priori on it) correlate on the one hand with aspects of the
social reality of the science and on the other with the structure of the
real-world domain which is the concern of that science.

The latter correlation is reflexive, however, in the sense that, as the
structure changed, it (and the understanding of the scientists writing
the original research reports on which the analysis was done) over time
came into closer conformity with a reality whose nature was in process
of being discovered.  Before that change and that concurrent discovery,
certain characteristics of reality could not be stated or thought;
afterward, they could.  But the discovery and the change in structure
were simultaneous (though of course the writing down for publication was
not).  No better confirmation of Sapir's intuition of the essential
unity of language and thought could be offered by one of his students.4

To illustrate this point further, I should like to adduce a recent
contribution to the enormous literature in the study of kinship
categories, always a favorite topic in anthropological linguistics.
Wierzbicka, in Semantics and the interpretation of cultures:  the
meaning of 'alternate generations' devices in Australian languages,
proposes a new set of metalanguage terms for discussing the alternate
sets of pronouns used in many Australian languages.  She urges that the
terminology of "generation harmony" and "disharmony" that has become
traditional in anthropology is arcane and psychologically arbitrary,
does not capture native speakers' meaning and does not make that meaning
accessible to people from other cultures, and claims that her new
terminology provides a better fit.  This work illustrates a Whorfian
effect in the sub-language of a specialization within the science of
anthropology.  With the traditional terminology, aspects of aborigine
culture are difficult to come to recognize and understand, and not
possible to communicate; she claims that with the proposed new
terminology it is.5

Thus, while providing an illustration of Whorfian effects within a
sub-field of a science, she proposes to overcome such effects by
devising a perfect metalanguage for that sub-field.  Since the sub-field
concerns an area that is by nature a matter of social convention and so
in social reality rather than physical reality (to make that
Durckheimian distinction again), she may be able to get away with it.  I
do not doubt the creativity of human cultures, however, and would build
in means for the sub-language to evolve.

An abiding interest of Harris, as of his teacher Sapir, has been the
question of refinements and possibly extensions of natural language that
foster international scientific communication.  In his analysis,
language-particular characteristics due to the reduction system
(extended morphophonemics) of one language or another are partitioned
from operator-argument structures that `carry' information, which are
remarkably uniform from one language to another.  This uniformity
becomes very close indeed in the grammar of a science sub-language,
where classifications and selection restrictions are much more closely
constrained than in other domains.  But even in nontechnical domains
Harris has a great deal to say about linguistic universals6, and about
the distinctions between what is universal in language and culture and
what is idiosyncratic and therefore pertinent to the Whorf-Sapir
Hypothesis.

__________________________________________



[One of the researchers on color terms mentioned above then posted some
additional notes on his research:]



Willett Kempton <willett@Princeton.EDU>:

I'm a coauthor of the Kay and Kempton study discussed in several earlier
messages.  (I don't follow this newsgroup regularly, but a colleague
passed on the thread.)  As pointed out earlier, from the tangled cluster
of hypotheses referred to as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, we tested only
one question:  Do the lexical categories of a language affect
non-linguistic perceptions of its speakers to a non-trivial extent?  (P.
Kay & W. Kempton, "What is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?", American
Anthropologist, vol 86, No. 1, March 1984.)

Considering the complexities of prior research efforts, our primary
experiment was simple:  Present three color chips (call them A, B, C) to
speakers of two languages, such that colors A and B are slightly more
different in terms of (universal) human visual discriminability, whereas
B and C have a linguistic boundary separating them in one language
(English) but not the other (Tarahumara, a Uto-Aztecan language).  As
noted earlier, the English speakers chose C as most different, whereas
the Tarahumara chose A or split evenly (there were actually eight chips
and four sets of relevant triads).

I'll add a couple of points of interest that were either buried in that
article, or have not appeared in print.  First, as the speaker of a
language subject to this perceptual effect, I would like to report that
it is dramatic, even shocking.  I administered the tests to informants
in Chihuahua.  I was so bewildered by their responses that I had trouble
continuing the first few tests, and I had no idea whether or not they
were answering randomly.  In subsequent analysis it was clear that they
were answering exactly as would be predicted by human visual
discriminability, but quite unlike the English informants.

An informal, and unreported, check of our results was more subjective:
I showed some of the crucial triads to other English speakers, including
some who had major commitments in print to not finding Whorfian effects
for color (several of the latter type of informants were available on
the Berkeley campus, where Kay and I were).  All reported seeing the
same effects.  We tried various games with each other and ourselves like
"We know English calls these two green and that one blue, but just
looking it them, which one LOOKS most different?"  No way, the blue one
was REALLY a LOT more different.  Again, the Tarahumara, lacking a
lexical boundary among these colors, picked "correctly" with ease and in
overwhelming numbers.  The article includes the Munsell chip numbers, so
anyone can look them up and try this on themselves.

Some of the triads which crossed hue and brightness were truly
unbelievable, as it was perceptually OBVIOUS to us English speakers
which one was the most different, yet all the visual discriminability
data were against us.  (The article did not mention the hue/brightness
crossovers for the sake of simplifying the argument in print.)

Our second experiment, like the original visual discrimination
experiments, showed only two chips at a time.  We additionally made it
difficult to use the lexical categories.  And we got visual
discrimination-based results, even from English speakers.  So there are
ways to overcome our linguistic blinders.  (Which we knew already, or
the original visual discriminability work could not have been done in
the first place.)  I don't feel that the differences across these tasks
was adequately explored, and represent a golden opportunity for a
research project or thesis.

I didn't expect to find this.  The experiment was a minor piggy-back on
another project.  I believed the literature and the distinguished
scientists who told me in advance that we wouldn't find anything
interesting.  The experiment was going to be dropped from the field
research, saved by a conversation at a wine party with a "naive"
sociologist (Paul Attewell) who had read Whorf but not the later
refutations.

A simple experiment, clear data, and seeing the Whorfian effect with our
own eyes:  It was a powerful conversion experience unlike anything I've
experienced in my scientific career.  Perhaps this all just goes to
affirm Seguin's earlier quote, as applying to us as both natives and as
theorists:

"We have met the natives whose language filters the world - and they are
us."

__________________________________



[One linguist on Linguist List added comments to those of Bruce Nevin,
specifically noting that Sapir and Whorf did not necessarily believe in
the 'Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis'.  As noted in JL16, Alexis Manaster-Ramer
has become interested in potential linguistics research applications for
Lojban.  This interest derived in part as a result of these
discussions.]



Alexis Manaster-Ramer writes <Alexis_Manaster_Ramer@MTS.CC.WAYNE.EDU>:

In several recent messages there are references to Whorf or Sapir and
Whorf together as having originated the idea of "human thinking patterns
being relative to the inventory of the available language system" (to
quote one contributor).  However, like the story of the Eskimo words for
snow, this story about Whorf and Sapir is not factually correct.

First of all, it was Sapir who fought against such simplistic
language-thought claims of earlier scholars such as Uhlenbeck (one of
the guys who claimed that certain "primitive" folks don't have the same
perception of action as we do because they speak ergative languages and
that some of them also have trouble distinguishing between themselves
and their body parts because they speak languages in which possessors of
subjects or objects are sometimes treated as subjects and objects).

Second, it is true that Whorf took for granted (as did almost everybody
else at the time) the idea that the structure of a language can be taken
literally as giving the underlying ontology (not that it causes it, mind
you, but that it does reveal it).  We know for example that Whorf was
much impressed with the claims (I forget whose at the moment) that
Chinese has no relative clauses, only things that were rendered as Jack
build-ish house (i.e., the house that Jack built).

Third, all of Whorf's claims about Hopi are quite explicitly of this
same variety:  He does not assert that the structure of the language
causes the world view, merely that it reveals it.  He also does not
claim this connection between the ontology and the language to be a new
idea.  He presupposes it.  That is a big difference, of course, because
Whorf is often accused of claiming such a connection without giving any
independent evidence about the ontology.  But in fact he did not make
any such claims, he merely assumed that there was such a connection
because everybody around him assumed it also.  His contribution (as he
saw it) was entirely different:  it was to show that the way people view
time, events, quantities, etc., can be culture- and hence
language-specific.

What I find particularly surprising about the need to reiterate all this
is that the relevant writings of Whorf's are all reprinted in a widely
available collection, and that Sapir's writings are hardly obscure
either.

_____________________________



At another point, Alexis also wrote:

I am very grateful to those who have written in to note that the
so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was NOT what Whorf (or a fortiori
Sapir) maintained.  And also to those who have written in reminding us
of the results, such the Berlin and Kay ones, that seem in fact to
support the Un-Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.  However, it should be noted that
these results do NOT show a causal relation going from language to
cognition.  Indeed, the often-noted fact that color terminologies seem
to become more and more complex as the speakers' material culture
becomes more and more complex would argue for precisely the opposite
causality:  People find they need to distinguish more colors because of
material, nonlinguistic reasons, and then devise the necessary
linguistic means to formalize the distinctions.

I would also like to address briefly the question of a connection with
Humboldt.  As I noted in my first message on the subject of Whorf, Whorf
(like most of his contemporaries) PRESUPPOSED the existence of a
connection between language and cognition, a connection which Humboldt
was one of the first (if not the first) to make.  The issue is very
simple, really.  Before Humboldt and others like him, the standard way
of describing languages was in terms of how they would be glossed in
some Western metalanguage like Latin or Spanish.  This is why people
were perfectly happy to describe ergative constructions (in e.g.
Greenlandic) or "active" ones (e.g., in Huron and Guarani, see Mithun's
recent Language article) without noticing anything odd.  They would just
say that the subject and the verb had different forms in transitive as
opposed to intransitive constructions.  People like Humboldt came up
with the revolutionary idea of describing languages in their own terms,
which meant that the superficial patterns of each language had to be
taken at face value.

Hence, Humboldt's argument that Malayo-Polynesian verbs are really
nouns, for example.  Or later arguments by various people that ergatives
are really passives (or other things).  But that then made it imperative
to explain why exotic peoples say things that we would not, e.g., why do
they use "nouns" instead of verbs or "passives" instead of actives.  And
the explanation, of course, was that they THINK differently from us as
well.  Whorf, like almost all his contemporaries, was steeped in this
way of thinking, but certainly did not originate it.  As I noted before,
his point to show just HOW EXOTIC languages could get, and this he tried
to do by discussing the Hopi treatment of time, events, and quantities.

__________________________



Alexis provided evidence for his claims in the following:

Since many of the readers of LINGUIST are from Missouri, I thought I
would provide some evidence for my recent assertions that Whorf's
position has been widely misunderstood.

In "The relation of habitual thought and behavior to language", Whorf
says among other things:

"That portion of the whole investigation here to be reported may be
summed up in two questions:  (1) Are our concepts of 'time', 'space',
and 'matter' given in substantially the same form by experience to all
men, or are they in part conditioned by the structure of particular
languages?  (2) Are there traceable affinities between (a) cultural and
behavioral norms and (b) large-scale linguistic patterns?  (I should be
the last to pretend that there is anything so definite as "a
correlation" between culture and language, and especially between
ethnological rubrics such as 'agricultural, hunting', etc., and
linguistic ones like 'inflected', 'synthetic', or 'isolating'."

In a footnote on the same page (p. 139 of the Language, Thought, and
Reality book), he says emphatically that "The idea of "correlation"
between language and culture, in the generally accepted sense of
correlation, is certainly a mistaken one" and he cites some arguments.

Thus, I believe that Whorf made a clear distinction between culture
(behavior) and language, but he did not make such a distinction between
language and thought.  As I said before, he presupposed as did almost
everyone else at the time that if people speak a certain way then that
reflects the way they think.  He took it for granted for example that if
the Hopis pluralize the word for cloud (oomaw) the way that they
normally pluralize animate nouns, then they must think of the clouds as
animate.

Of course, this view is naive, as Joseph Greenberg pointed out in the
fifties, since languages make all sorts of arbitrary distinctions (or
fail arbitrarily to make them in certain environments) without any
apparent conceptual consequences.

Essentially, I think the connection works one way, namely, if a language
makes a distinction which cannot be described in purely structural
terms, then we must ascribe to the speakers the ability to perceive or
imagine or whatever the corresponding distinction in the world.  Thus,
when Greenberg points out that nothing important hinges on the fact that
the French use an ordinal in Napoleon Premier but a cardinal in Napolean
Deux, that's OK, because the choice here can be made w/o reference to
the world.  The rule is purely linguistic.  And, of course, this could
be the case with the Hopi word for cloud and its plural.

On the other hand, if we find that speakers of Polish systematically use
a different genitive ending for place-names in Poland (and other Slavic
countries) than they do for other place-names, and do so PRODUCTIVELY,
then it IS reasonable to conclude that they are capable of a conceptual
distinction between Poland (or Slavdom) and the rest of the world.

The distinction between these two kinds of cases is what seems not to
have been entirely clear to Whorf, and that, as far as I can see, is
where he came to sometimes came to grief.

It is also quite clear that he was not claiming any originality about
the relation of language and thought per se, rather he was trying to
show just how different the language/thought of one culture could be
from that of another in the case of such basic ideas as that of time,
although he points out (p 158) that there is not a comparable difference
between Hopi and Standard Average European regarding space.

As to culture, Whorf was faithfully following Sapir in claiming that
there is no more than an "affinity" between language and culture, but no
"correlations or diagnostic correspondences" (p 159).  For, as I noted
earlier, Sapir was one of the staunchest critics of the late 19th
century and early 20th century linguists who propounded such theories as
the "passivity" of peoples whose languages use the ergative
constructions, and such like drivel.

Incidentally, much of what I have said about Whorf's intent in bringing
the Hopi vs. the SAE treatment of time and matter can also be said about
Sapir's work on the psychological reality of phonemes.  Today, we
emphasize the psychological reality part, but actually in his time, the
novelty was the phoneme.  Claims about psychological reality about in
the second half of the 19th century and later (and we find them in all
of Sapir's as well as Bloomfield's early writings).  The idea of the
psychological vs. the grammatical subject after all originated in that
period.  And, to take one example our of thousands, when Platt wrote in
the 1870's that the Urdu speakers perceive certain constructions in
their language as active even though they look passive (these are, of
course, ergatives again!), he was expressing himself in a way which was
quite typical for the time (though not for the 17 or the 18th century).

_________________________________



Finally Alexis wrote, in a fourth posting:

Setting aside for the moment the question of why so many people continue
to insist on attributing to Whorf and Sapir views they did not hold (or
at least did not express), I would like to say something about the
results which are claimed to support the hypothesis that language and
non-linguistic behavior (behavior, for short) exhibit certain close
connections (which people seem to want to interpret as involving
causality going from language to behavior).

(1) Even if we find certain correlations between language structure and
patterns of behavior, this does NOT (as I think I noted earlier)
indicate the direction of causality (as indeed Whorf himself noted at
one point).  The color terminology business shows, if anything, that the
complexity of a color terminology seems to depend on the complexity of
the culture, there being, for example, no industrial or post-industrial
cultures whose languages use two or three color terms.  There has also
been speculation about the fact that the lateness of terms for 'blue'
may be connected with the relative scarcity of blue objects (other than
the ubiquitous sky) in nature.

This would suggest very strongly that the linguistic pattern comes
second, as a reflection of a culture's need to make certain
distinctions.

(2) All the studies that claim to show a connection between language and
behavior that I have seen mentioned seem to deal with two or at any rate
a small number of languages, e.g., Tarahumara and English.  Likewise, I
have seen studies by Alexander Guiora on Hebrew and English and other
such small sets, which I don't think have been cited on LINGUIST so far.
Yet, since the claim being tested is correlation between linguistic
structure and nonlinguistic behavior, the relevant population is
languages (not individual speakers), and you cannot seriously talk about
correlations for populations of two (or three or whatever small number
is involved).  What we require is a study involving a dozen or a hundred
languages that have the Tarahumara color system and a dozen or a hundred
that have the English one before we can say anything at all about
correlations and things.

Having said this, I would predict that we will find such correlations
but I would also predict that at least some of them will turn out to
have the opposite causality from that suggested (or a more complex one
than either of the simple unidirectional ones).

Is there anybody out there who would like to collaborate on putting
together such a mass cross-linguistic study?

_______________________



Lojbab responded privately to Alexis's last message with the following:

You write:

Setting aside for the moment the question of why so many people continue
to insist on attributing to Whorf and Sapir views they did not hold (or
at least did not express) ...

Note that when we talk about the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis in Lojban
writings, we are using the common name for the hypothesis, not in
particular attributing the formulation of that hypothesis that we use to
either Sapir or Whorf.  That formulation is of course more complex than
simple 'cultural relativism', and there seems to be no other good name,
much less one that is known to people.

From this end of your postings, I'd say that you've made your case that
the two did not believe in 'their' hypothesis, at least insofar as it is
generally understood by others.

(which people seem to want to interpret as involving causality going
from language to behavior).

I agree that this is not evidenced in the writings.  I note by the way
that Jim Brown, who invented Loglan, also cites F. S. C. Northrop (1946)
The Meeting of East and West as proposing a cultural effect of language
independently of the presumed interpretation of S and W, but he never
cites quotes.  I also have read a book in the 80s, The Alphabet Effect,
by a follower of McLuhan, that claims cultural effects from orthography.
Certainly the concept "the medium is the message" significantly
underlies most interpretations of the SWH.  Perhaps it should be call
the SWMcH %^).

I do not know where John Carroll fits in the historical setting of the
SWH, whether he knew Whorf or Sapir, etc.  Carroll WAS involved in Jim
Brown's formulation of Loglan throughout the 60s and 70s, and presumably
found Brown's assertions to not be inconsistent with his own writings on
SWH.  So I would ask you whether you believe that Carroll has said
anything (presumably in his comments on the collection of Whorf's essays
or elsewhere) that misinterprets those writings?  Although he is
retired, I could ask Carroll to respond.  It seems that the issue is
ripe for such discussion.

(1) Even if we find certain correlations between language structure and
patterns of behavior, this does NOT (as I think I noted earlier)
indicate the direction of causality (as indeed Whorf himself noted at
one point).

Agreed.  One reason we are working very hard on Lojban before proposing
a specific test is that we want to be able to predict a causal effect of
language that is clearly not part of the cultural milieu.  The drastic
differences between Lojban and natural languages make it more likely
that we can identify a way to determine both a relation and a causal
effect, if one exists.  This may then tell us how to look for confirming
data in the natural languages.

The color terminology business shows, if anything, that the complexity
of a color terminology seems to depend on the complexity of the culture,
there being, for example, no industrial or post-industrial cultures
whose languages use two or three color terms.  There has also been
speculation about the fact that the lateness of terms for 'blue' may be
connected with the relative scarcity of blue objects (other than the
ubiquitous sky) in nature.

I think that color terminology is the worst place to look for a SW
effect, since it seems patently obvious that color recognition is going
to be dominated by the basic biological process of recognizing color
which would mask more subtle linguistic effects.  Indeed, if one
presumes that biology was directed by evolutionary requirements, there
may be some environmental reason that we are not aware of that causes
certain colors to seem more basic or important than others.

This would suggest very strongly that the linguistic pattern comes
second, as a reflection of a culture's need to make certain
distinctions.

I agree that this also occurs in language, and in constructing new
artificial languages, especially a language like Lojban where nonce new
word creation is easy and favored, the scope of this direction of
response should be easy to measure.

Is there anybody out there who would like to collaborate on putting
together such a mass cross-linguistic study?

I obviously would be interested (especially if funding can be obtained)
but note that I can't contribute much in understanding of the other
languages.  I also would like to see such a study, even if it must
include colors due to the popular associations of colors with SWH, find
one or two other areas of language that are more believably independent
of biology.  I've heard that kinship terms is another area of comparison
that might be considered.  My own preference would be an analysis of
words for emotions, emotional expressions, and linguistic and
para-linguistic ways of expressing emotions, as well as perhaps on time
and spatial relations (e.g. do languages with 2 distinctions of distance
in demonstratives this/that have any correlations in culture not found
in those having three this/that/that yonder?)

Essentially, I think the connection works one way, namely, if a language
makes a distinction which cannot be described in purely structural
terms, then we must ascribe to the speakers the ability to perceive or
imagine or whatever the corresponding distinction in the world.  Thus,
when Greenberg points out that nothing important hinges on the fact that
the French use an ordinal in Napoleon Premier but a cardinal in Napolean
Deux, that's OK, because the choice here can be made w/o reference to
the world.  The rule is purely linguistic.  And, of course, this could
be the case with the Hopi word for cloud and its plural.  On the other
hand, if we find that speakers of Polish systematically use a different
genitive ending for place-names in Poland (and other Slavic countries)
than they do for other place-names, and do so productively, then it is
reasonable to conclude that they are capable of a conceptual distinction
between Poland (or Slavdom) and the rest of the world.

This sounds like you would see value in finding out what types of
productive distinctions are made in an artificial language where
structure and concept are strongly separated and it is relatively easy
to recognize native language reflections (pollutions?) because of the
drastic structural differences.  The obvious question is where you would
look for such distinctions.

Lojban is only one language, but perhaps we might detect correlations
between native language features and conceptualization in Lojban when
those people learn Lojban.  Do people with AN structures lose that
pattern in a language where the AN distinction is blurred (I find myself
in Lojban often expressing things in the form of house-big, as well as
big-house, but would not presume to try to find any correlations yet?)
My wife and I have devised several possible experiments related to this
concept, but have long figured that it will be a while before there's an
opportunity to even do a detailed plan, much less conduct the
experiments.

____________________________________________



Alexis responded:

Thank you for your extensive and thoughtful responses.  ...  I would
love to be in touch with Carroll.  He certainly knew Whorf, but is not a
linguist.  How he interprets Whorf is not always clear from his intro to
Whorf's selected writings (which is his only contribution (I mean the
only contribution of his) I know on this subject).  Let me reemphasize:
Whorf and Sapir did NOT argue for a correlation between linguistic and
nonlinguistic behavior (although they saw connections) and they simply
did not see the question of a correlation between language and thought
in the way that we do.  This is NOT to say that, like in the case of
language and nonlinguistic behavior, they held there was no correlation.
Rather, they did not see clearly that there was anything to correlate,
since they assumed that language and thought go hand-in-hand.  And this
they almost certainly did because the same idea was generally accepted
at the time.  So, I would not say that Sapir and Whorf did not believe
in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.  Rather they did not consider it a
hypothesis.

______________________________

[Note:  We will endeavor to pass along to the respective authors any
comments on the above discussions that readers may send us.]

______________________________



During the course of the discussion of the Sapir-Whorf Discussion,
several references were mentioned, which can be added to bibliographies
on Sapir-Whorf, such as those which have appeared in previous issues of
ju'i lobypli.  I've collected these together, sometimes including the
comments of the person who mentioned the work:

John Lucy ("Whorf's view of the linguistic mediation of thought," in
Semiotic Mediation, ed. by Elizabeth Mertz & Richard Parmentier,
Academic P, 1985).

Alan Rumsey's (1990) paper, "Wording, Meaning, and Linguistic Ideology,"
American Anthropologist 92:346-361, for an excellent discussion of where
Whorfianism works.

There's a nice discussion by Roger Brown of the Brown & Lenneberg work
in his old book Words & Things, in 2 different chapters separated by
another chapter.  There is one article I know of that provides some
evidence for the strong version of the hypothesis, by Carroll &
Casagrande on object classification by Navaho vs.  Boston suburban kids.
It's in an early psycholinguistics anthology (Saporta's??)

Berlin & Kay's (1969) study of color-term universals was indeed a real
breakthrough, although I also believe again that it attacked what Whorf
did not maintain, but rather what was imputed to Whorf.  However, there
has been work since then which has examined Berlin & Kay (1969) closely,
and has come up with some pretty damning evaluations.  One of the main
problems with the study is the inaccurate data that it used (but then
again Whorf has been shown to have misunderstood the structure of Hopi),
and the criteria used in determining when a color term is basic and when
it's not, and when a color is focal or not.  Chapter 4 of Geoffrey
Sampson's (1980) School of Linguistics, (Stanford University Press) is
one reference that comes to mind.

There are also pretty careful experimental studies on the recognition of
and memory for color terms which have come out in favor of both Whorfian
relativism and determinism.  See:

Lucy, John and Richard Shweder. 1979.  Whorf and his critics:
Linguistic and nonlinguistic influences on color memory.  American
Anthropologist 81:581-615.

Lucy, John and Richard Shweder. 1988.  The effect of incidental
conversation on memory for focal colors.  American Anthropologist
81:923-931.

The first paper was critiqued by Linda Garro (reference below), and the
second paper is an answer to Garro:

Garro, Linda. 1986.  Language, memory, and focality:  A reexamination.
American Anthropologist 88:128-136.

Another attempt at an empirical test is Alfred Bloom's book The
Linguistic Shaping of Thought.  He found that Chinese speakers had more
difficulty comprehending a text full of counterfactual conditionals than
English speakers, and attributed this to the lack of explicit coding of
counterfactuals in Chinese.  However, Terry Au and Lisa Garbern Liu in
Cognition (1985?) replicated the experiment trying to avoid cultural
bias, and found no significant difference.

A more recent reference on Whorf and color terms is a paper by Paul Kay
and Willet Kempton called What is the Sapir Whorf hypothesis? in
American Anthropologist vol. 86, 1984.

Brown, R. L. (1967).  Wilhelm Von Humboldt's Conception of Linguistic
Relativity.  The Hague:  Mouton.

Rheingold, H. (1988).  They Have A Word For It, Los Angeles:  Jeremy P.
Tarcher, Inc.

Saporta, S. (1960) (Editor) Psycholinguistics :  A book or readings,
Holt Rinehart.

Newcombe, etc.  ??  (1958??)  (Editors) Readings in Social Psychology.

Vygotsky, Language and Thought

Kuhn, T. (1960?), Structure of Scientific Revolutions (2nd Edit.).

Aarsleff, H. (1982).  From Locke to Saussure.  Minneapolis:  University
of Minnesota Press.

G. Pullam's book, The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax, essays by Sir
William Jones and by W. D. Whitney, Carter and Nash's Seeing Through
Language, Coupland's Styles of Discourse, and Freeborn's Varieties of
English, and works by philosophers such as Austin, Searle, Grice, and
Stalnaker.

Helmut Gipper, whose office sported an oversized poster of Einstein
formulated an explicit link between the principle of relativity in
theoretical physics and a similar principle in linguistics (Helmut
Gipper, Gibt es ein sprachliches Relativitaetsprinzip?:  Untersuchungen
zur Sapir-Whorf-Hypothese, Fischer 1972).