Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897 —1941 )

Chemical engineer (MIT), fire insurance inspector, amateur linguist

Religion to texts and language to Mayan, anthropology, Hopi via Sapir

Edward Sapir (1884 —1939 )

German and Indo-European philology to descriptive Native American linguistics to psychological anthropology

Albert Einstein (1879 - 1955)

• Theory of Specific Relativity• Field Theory• Overthrough of classical mechanics

A field theory of mind

'In the new field language it is the description of the field between the two charges, and not the charges themselves, which is essential for an understanding of their action.’ (Einstein & Infeld 1938:151)

• Mind is a system of neurological linkages and rapport sustaied by physiological structures and processes

• Minds as intermeshing or resisting one another.• A Manifestation of social or universal mind activity

Sapir - ‘points in the pattern’

Language “consists of a peculiar symbolic relation—physiologically an aribitrary one—between all possible elements of consciousnbess on the one hand and certain selected elements localized in the auditory, motor, and other cerebral and vernous tracts on the other. … language [is] a fully formed functional system within man’s psychic or ‘spiritual’ constitution’.

P10 Language

An American Indian Model of the Universe

Hopi Time is notA smooth flowing continuumIn which everything proceeds at an equal rate

Out of a futureThrough a presentinto a past

In our timeThe observerIs being carriedIn the stream of durationContinuously awway from A pastAnd into a future

Hopi time disappearsHopi space is alteredNew concepts and abstractionsFlow into the picture

The Hopi Universe presentsTwo grand cosmic forms

We may call them ManifestedAndManifesting

One is objectiveManifestedPastAnd presentAll that IsOr has beenAccessileTo the senses

The other is subjectiveManifestingFutureAppearanceAndExistence

Within and behindAll the formsAnd appearancesOf nature

In the heartOf natureMental

In the heartOf animalsPlantsThings

ThoughtThinking itselfOut from an inner realmIt is ThoughtAndHeartManifesting

It is inA dynamicState

Yet notA state Of motion

Thought and heartAre already with usIN a vitalAnd mental Form

They areIntellectionAnd Emotion

The striving of purposeful desireIntelligent in characterToward manifestationA manifestationWhich is much resistedAnd delayedBut in some formOr otherIs inevitable

It is the realmOf expectancyOf desire and purposeOf vitalizing lifeOf effieicent causes

Of thoughtThinking itselfOutFrom and innerRealm

Cryptotypes• Key part of theory of ‘psycholinguistic patterning’• Part of a field theory of mind and language• Investigating the systematicity - the local categories -

of a language• “Language: Plan and Conception of Arrangement”

Cryptotypes"... a dimly felt relation of similarity between the [Hopi]

verb usages in each group having to do with some inobvious facet of their meaning, and therefore itself a meaning, but one so nearly at or below the threshold of conscious thinking that it connot be put into words by the user and eludes translation. To isolate, characterize, and understand the operation of these dimly flet, barely conscious (or even unconscious) meanings is the object of my further analysis. Such an elusuive, hidden, but functionally important meaning I call a CRYPTOTYPE. (pp104-105).

Cryptotypescompare Vygotsky 1986[1934]:249--

"Inner speech is to a large extent thinking in pure meanings. It is a dynamic, shifting, unstable think, fluttering between word and thought, the two more or less stable, more less firmly delineated components of verbal thought."

and Whorf LTR:81--

"... its logic becomes a semantic associate of what unity of which the configurative aspect is a bundle of non-motor linkages mooring the whole fleet of words to their common reactance."

Shifting termsCryptotype and phenotype -

• Groups of words

• Grammatical meanings

• Semantic categories

Holism and Holography

• Language is embedded in a field of dicourse

• Language is a part of culture– Total sum of way of being

• Any single manifestation implicates the entire system

• Compare with Boas’ “Principles of Ethnological Classification”

Contradiction?

Whorf says that there is no correlation between language and culture (p. 139), but on pages 148-49 he connects behavioral features to linguistic categories.

Is this a contradiction?

Contradiction - No

P 139:“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 ‘agriculture, hunting,’ etc., and linguistic ones like ‘inflected,’ ‘synthetic,’ or ‘isolating.’”

Contradiction - No

P 148-9:“… people act about situations in ways which are like the ways they talk about them.”

The covert categories of language, grammar, are associated with unconscious, cultural assumptions we make about the world, what is natural, how it works.

Two definitions of ‘Language’

Saussurian (structuralist system)

Sapirean (languaculture)

Languages in cultures

Language as form:Linguistic elements can be studied as contrasting and complementary forms. Examination of their arrangement, rules for combination, generating surface structure. (Bloomfield, Chomsky)

Language as action:People say things and mean something. They do things with words. Language is more than communication, it is also understanding the world, creating the world. (Sapir, Whorf, Hymes)

Misinterpreting Whorf’s ideas

1953 - Chicago “Language in Culture” ConferenceQuick to trivalize the man/thinkerOverplayed his religion (misread Carroll’s biography?)

Stuart Chase’s Foreword (vi):“Whorf as I read him makes two cardinal hypotheses:First, that all higher levels of thinking are dependendent on language.Second, that the structure of the language on habitually uses influences the manner in which one understands his environment. The picture of the universe shifts from tongue to tongue.”

Sapir on Language & thought“Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. 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. 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.”

Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835)

Language as Weltanschaung (worldview)

“Each tongue draws a circle about the people to whom it belongs, and it is possible to leave this circle only by simultaneously entering that of another people.”

but “one always caries over into a foreign tongue to a greater or lesser degree one’s own cosmic viewpoint — indeed one’s personal linguistic pattern.”

Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?

They never co-authored anything, although Whorf does refer explicitly to his teacher.

There is no statement of a hypothesis. Term is used by Stuart Chase in his foreword (p.vi)

Whorf frames his statements as empirical conclusions.

Whorf’s principle of linguistic relativity

Linguistic Relativity

“The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds—and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds.” (213)

– B. L. Whorf

SAE Objectification

John Locke (1632-1704) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding

Idea = “the object of the understanding when a man thinks”

All ideas come from sensation or reflection

Most important simple idea is solidity

Form and Content

SAE dualities - body and soul

The form (shape, structure, appearance) can be

separated from the

content (material, essence, nature) of the thing.

Hopi people don’t make a necessary distinction between form and content, don’t rely on objects in space as a primary metaphor for time, person, other qualities