[lit-ideas] Re: The limits of our language...
- From: Adriano Palma <Palma@xxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx" <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sat, 28 Jun 2014 17:38:05 +0000
The “most” famous worf cases, aside from the jokes about the inuits is Everett…
From: lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx [mailto:lit-ideas-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On
Behalf Of Omar Kusturica
Sent: 28 June 2014 19:28
To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [lit-ideas] The limits of our language...
http://www.psmag.com/navigation/books-and-culture/dozen-words-misunderstood-language-linguistics-79600/
The belief in question—that the languages we speak shape the thoughts we
think—is known in linguistics as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and among the
linguistic establishment, Whorfianism has fallen on very bad times indeed. The
hypothesis’ namesakes, Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf, have been dead for 70
years, and in my own linguistics classes I rarely heard them invoked except to
be ridiculed, like biologists of yore who thought maggots grew spontaneously
from rotting meat, or historians who thought the world began 6,000 years ago.
What Whorfianism claims, in its strongest form, is that our thoughts are
limited and shaped by the specific words and grammar we use. Mayans don’t just
speak Mayan; they think Mayan, and therefore they think differently from
English speakers. According to Sapir-Whorf, a person’s view of the world is
refracted through her language, like a pair of spectacles (not necessarily
well-prescribed) superglued to his face.
The Herero people use the same word for green and blue, but they have no
difficulty distinguishing the color of a leaf and the color of the sky.
Whorf came up with his version of the hypothesis through his study of the
language of the Hopi Indians. Hopi, he believed, lacks tense markers, like the
“-ed” in “I walked to the store,” or words meaning “before” and “after.” In
English we can’t say a sentence about walking to the store without saying when
the walking happened. Whorf turned out to be wrong about Hopi time-words and
tense-markers, McWhorter notes: Hopi has them. But Whorf viewed Hopi’s supposed
lack of them as a sign that the Hopi see the world with less reference to time
than we do, and that they are a culturally “timeless” people, living in
communion with eternity while we English speakers are slaves to tense markers
and clocks.
Perhaps the most famous invocation of Sapir-Whorf is the claim that because
Eskimos have dozens of words for snow, they have a mental apparatus that equips
them differently—and, one assumes, better—than, say, Arabs, to perceive snow.
(I once watched the wintry film Fargo with an Egyptian who called everything
from snowflakes to windshield-ice talg—the same word she used for the ice cube
in her drink.) To get a hint of why nearly all modern linguists might reject
this claim, consider the panoply of snow-words in English (sleet, slush,
flurry, whiteout, drift, etc.), and the commonsense question of why we would
ever think to attribute Eskimos’ sophisticated and nuanced understanding of
snow to their language, rather than the other way around. (“Can you think of
any other reason why Eskimos might pay attention to snow?” Harvard’s Steven
Pinker once asked.)
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