(Lee)-Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

[Rudy Troike]

I've been puzzled by something Mia wrote:

"The discussion of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was vicious, is still ongoing,
and is very detrimental to the view of American languages and the people who
spoke them."

As someone raised in anthropological linguistics, who had the rare opportunity
to study with four of Sapir's students, I've always been interested in this
famous hypothesis, and have read a fair amount of the discussion of it, 
pro and
con, but I've never encountered any discussion that would qualify as 
"vicious",
and I certainly have never seen anything that would be detrimental to the view
of American languages or their speakers -- quite the contrary, in fact. While
the hypothesis has taken an unfortunate beating over some of Whorf's hyper-
imaginative interpretation of Hopi, the aim of Sapir's original view was the
recognition of the unique genius of each language, whose grammar (and lexicon)
channeled learners into perceiving and categorizing their world in ways that
were different from those of learners of different languages. Some things CAN
be more easily expressed in one language than in another, and some things that
are regularly expressed in one language are virtually if not actually 
ineffable
in another language.

The first category involves mainly vocabulary, but vocabulary is an
important part of the way the speakers of any language categorize their
world. Many American languages, for example, have eight different terms
for siblings, depending on whether they are male or female, younger or
older, and whether the speaker is male or female. English, by contrast,
has a very impoverished terminology, distinguishing only male and female.
Does this observation "put down" American languages in any way? I hardly
think so -- quite the opposite! But this kind of comparison is at the
heart of the Lee-Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. A number of American languages
have a grammatical category called "evidentials", by which a speaker
essentially attests to the observed or hearsay knowledge of a reported
event. In such languages, a person cannot even mention something having
happened without attesting, by the choice of a grammatical element,
whether he or she actually knows it to be true first-hand or only knows
it by report or inference. While an English speaker CAN add this infor-
mation, if pressed (as in a courtroom), it is not compulsory to be
attested for every observation reported. Reporting this fact hardly
implies that one is suggesting that American languages are "primitive"
-- again, quite the opposite! It is English that comes off the worse
in the comparison. But the point is NOT that one language is better
or worse than another, but that LANGUAGES DIFFER, and these differences
may affect the way that people think about the world around them. It
is a view that leads to RESPECT for linguistic differences, and helps
English speakers climb out of their linguicentrism and see their own
language from a relativistic perspective as one of 6,000 different
equally valid ways of talking about the world. This is the real message
of the Lee-Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

      Rudy Troike
      University of Arizona