No, it has nothing to do with technobabble on Star Trek.
Sapir and Whorf were a pair of linguists, and their hypothesis is that language plays a strong role not just in expressing thought but in shaping and controlling thought.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis undoubtedly has an element of truth in it. We do a lot of our thinking in words, and the words that we have at our disposal will make it easier for us to think certain thoughts and harder to think and express others.
Unfortunatley, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis seems to be too strong as it is commonly interpreted. Thinking is not as strongly determined by language as many suppose. This is clear from a variety of facts, including that we also do a lot of our thinking visually (using images rather than words) and we can make up new words and expressions for things and distinctions we can recognize even though they are not expressible using current language. We’ve also all had the experience of having an insight and then been unable (at least momentarily) to find the words to express it.
The strong versions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and its knockoffs (including some that originated before Sapir and Whorf) have also had bad consequences. For example, if you’ve ever read the novel 1984, you know about Newspeak–a revision of the English language designed to eliminate the words and thus the concepts needed to express ideas at variance with the totalitarian system IngSoc (English Socialism). Its purpose was to make politically undesirable concepts literally unthinkable.
Here’s a copy of George Orwell’s essay on The Principles of Newspeak. It’s fascinating reading, particular when–after enunciating the principles of Newspeak–Orwell gives a Newspeak translation of the beginning of the Declaration of Independence. Check it out.
The thing is, though, Newspeak wasn’t simply something Orwell came up with out of whole cloth. 1984 is a cautionary tale warning about the dehumanizing effects of Communism, and Newspeak is based on Soviet language revision as a form of propaganda.
The same impulse is behind the politically correct and gender-revisionist movements in American English: By re-engineering how people are allowed to express themselves, it is thought that the thoughts they think will be re-engineered as well.
Some new research is testing the limits of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This research involves going to cultures whose languages have severely restricted vocabularies in some areas and see if they can conceptualize things that don’t fit their language.
For example, there is the Dani people of Indonesia (ever meet any of them, Beng?) who have only two color terms: black and white. Turns out, though, that they can distinguish other colors, even though they don’t have words for them. I don’t know, but I suspect that they may have circumlocuations for other colors (e.g., “The American dollar is the same color as grass”) even though they don’t have unique words for them.
Another group is the Piraha people of Brazil, who have only three number terms: one, two, and many (which might be more accurately translated “one,” “a few,” and “many”). Turns out the Piraha display the ability to conceptualize more numbers than their counting system has terms for, though with certain numerical tasks they show marked limitations.
There’s an article from The Economist which reports on the Piraha number research. It’s not quite as well done as I’d like (e.g., it concedes more reality to the hypothesis than I think is justifiable), but it’s still fascinating stuff.
There’s also this excellent Wikipedia article which gives some of the other side of the story.
Whorf himself thought that Hopi Indians didn’t have a way to express temporal relationships the way we do and that they perceived things in a kind of non-linear, timeless way (that would radically change their understanding of physics, for example).
Needless to say, this got relativists all excited for a while.
Also needless to say, it’s complete hog slop.
The Hopi do have the concept of linear time and they can express temporal relationships in their language. Whorf simply didn’t gather enough data and pay enough attention to the data he had to realize this. In fact, it’s really embarrassing to look at later studies of this question and note that Whorf’s own data contains counterexamples to his claims about the Hopi conceptualization of time.
Sapir-Whorf has even reared its head in biblical studies. A number of years ago there were a lot of people all worked up about the way the biblical languages allegedly affected the thought of the sacred authors. Hebrew was held to result in “concrete” thought, while Greek was held to result in “abstract” thought, making the former suited to the parochial Old Testament and the latter suited to the cosmopolitan New Testament.
The kindest thing that can be said about these kinds of claims is that they are highly problematic.
Today most biblical scholars (or at least the good ones) will roll their eyes when such claims are introduced. Except for technical vocabulary, all human languages have approximately equal expressive power, and technical vocabulary is the easiest thing to add to a language when you need it. It is extremely difficult to make a whole lot out of the character of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek and attribute specific theological thought to the genius of these languages. That doesn’t stop one from hearing a lot of such claims from certain quarters, though.
While we’re on the subject of technical vocabulary, let me mention one particular idea you hear sometime: that Eskimos have a huge number of words for snow that express subtle distinctions lost on us English-speakers.
It’s not true.
Total myth.
Long discredited.
Every professional linguist knows this.
Contradict the claim when you hear other people make it.
It is true, however, that the Ferengi language has 178 words for rain.
Wonder what Lt. Cmdr. Worf would make of that?
Jimmy:
What are your thoughts on the opposite hypothesis, that a culture’s thinking influences the development of its vocabulary and, more specifically, its rules of grammar.
For instance, I’ve heard suggested that cultures with a more communitarian concept tend to couple the noun and verb in a single word, while whose with a more individualistic streak separate the two.
I’m open to the idea and would like to see evidence cited in its favor, though I’m skeptical of the claim.
It seems to me that every prior culture (or every one that survived for any period of time) has been more communitarian than we are today, so it’s not clear to me the scale on which the evidence is to be judged.
Also, it seems to me that there are obvious counter-examples. For instance, East Asian languages like Chinese and Japanese have very little inflection, forcing the nouns and verbs into clearly separate slots in the sentence, yet these cultures are far more communitarian than the Roman Empire was, though Latin encodes more information about the sentence’s subject into the verb than either Chinese or Japanese does.
It seems to me that–like the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis–the theory must contain some element of truth since it is communities of people that create language and it is thus logical that the nature of the community will shape the language to some extent. However, I suspect that the degree of truth to the claim is rather minimal and that most elements of most languages are arbitrary.
It strikes me as far more defensible that the nature of a community affects the vocabulary of a language than its grammar. Western languages–being inspired by Christian culture–have huge theological vocabularies designed to express concepts from Christian theology (e.g., no non-Christian culture is going to develop words for “Trinity” or “Bible” in its language without contact with Christianity).
The same is true of other cultures. A culture that places a high value on camels, for example, will have all kinds of camel-related vocabulary items that other languages will lack (e.g., a while ago I was reading about an Arabic word for a female camel with a split ear, such ear-splitting being involved in Arab camel commerce). It’s the idea that cultural values affect grammar where the thesis becomes more problematic.
Still, I’m curious to see what evidence is offered for the claim. Do you have any references I could look at?
Much obliged!
Jimmy:
I can’t recall the specifics, and it may have been more speculation than scholarly analysis.
I seem to recall some mention of the matter in one of Joseph Campbell’s work on mythology, in a discussion on the clash between European and near Eastern, Occidental cultures.
I recall another interesting supposition arising from the battles over Britain after the withdrawal of the Romans.
Specifically, when we speak of certain animals “on the table” (i.e. pork, veal) we use words derived from the old French. But when those animals are out in the yard (swine, calf) we use words derived from the old English. Would this be reversed if the history of 11th Century Britain turned out differntly?
Esq: That is true. The words for various foods got grafted onto the English language from French as a direct result of the Norman Conquest, while the names of the animals those foods came from continued to be words from the language of the conquered subjects.
I guess the French insisted on using their own words when ordering the food and the English used their words when taking care of the animals.
On the Norman/Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, the novel Ivanhoe actually sheds some light.
Re: the theory proposed: wouldn’t actually their theory be more obvious not in the germination of a language, which I would suppose comes in part from environs, community, and sheer necessity (OK, we’ll call this thing a snarfblatt! – think of home signs in ASL), but rather in changing how people think by changing an existing language. In essense, I wonder if Newspeak (or PC lingo) is only effective in parasitical rather than germinal form? (E.g., the use of the words “gay” and “tolerance” in the past few years rather than their original meanings – to change not the word but the connotation has further reaching effects?)
It’s curious that in the creation of a language they haven’t studied how people learn ASL (American Sign Language). It’s more akin, one would imagine, to heiroglyphics, except that the meanings of signs is at once both more abstract and more concrete (pulling on someone’s sleeve in any language means “pay attention to me!” while the ASL signs used may vary). What I’m getting at is that to a certain extent, each home or community makes up their own specific vocabulary in ASL, thus making a) communication between those who sign tricksy at best and b) sign language a constantly new and unique language, ready for the studying.
I once read an article once on some researchers who showed to people from many different countries a tape of a cartoon cat swinging on a vine. They then asked the people one by one to describe what they saw. Of those who accompanied their descriptions with gestures, the researchers noted (according to the article) that those whose language had a word equivalent to “to swing” used a curved, swooping hand motion while speakers of those that do not (such as Japanese, I seem to recall) tended to use a straight linear motion.