(Lee)-Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

[MJ Hardman]

Thank you for the lovely statement.  I also studied with a student of
Sapir's and you state clearly exactly what I learned, and have lived.

If you have managed to avoid the viciousness Mia refers to, I would say very
very lucky you.  A great deal of it has reached us, both myself and the
people I work with, and yes, it continues.  Some popular theories of
linguistics through out entirely the position you articulate, as you must be
aware.

I feel fortunate in my preparation, and that there still are some of us
anthropological linguists about -- preparing some for the future.

MJ

On 04/26/2006 2:13 AM, "Rudy Troike" <rtroike at EMAIL.ARIZONA.EDU> wrote:

> 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
>