36.3148, Reviews: Linguistic Relativity: Jeffry Pelletier and Ryan M. Nefdt (2025)

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Subject: 36.3148, Reviews: Linguistic Relativity: Jeffry Pelletier and Ryan M. Nefdt (2025)

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Date: 18-Oct-2025
From: Geoffrey Sampson [sampson at cantab.net]
Subject: Philosophy of Language: Jeffry Pelletier and Ryan M. Nefdt (2025)


Book announced at https://linguistlist.org/issues/36-1808

Title: Linguistic Relativity
Subtitle: An Essential Guide to Past Debates and Future Prospects
Publication Year: 2025

Publisher: Oxford University Press
           http://www.oup.com/us
Book URL:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/linguistic-relativity-9780197799840?utm_source=linguistlist&utm_medium=listserv&utm_campaign=linguistics

Author(s): Jeffry Pelletier and Ryan M. Nefdt

Reviewer: Geoffrey Sampson

SUMMARY
This book began as a contribution to the excellent online Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It has since been considerably expanded,
but remains quite a short book. (It is printed in an unusually narrow
page format, perhaps in order to swell the page-count to a respectable
figure for a standalone book.) Despite its brevity, the book covers a
remarkable amount of ground. Its central focus, as might be expected,
is on what is standardly called the “Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis” or just
the “Whorf Hypothesis”, put forward in the mid twentieth century,
about the influence of individual languages on the thought of their
respective speakers. (Pelletier and Nefdt note that the former name
seems to have been coined by Harry Hoijer for a conference whose
proceedings were published as Hoijer 1954.) But the book ranges well
before that period, to examine related ideas put forward in earlier
centuries, and brings the coverage up to date with discussion of
recent attempts to reconcile the concept with the methodology of
falsifiable empirical science.
As is proper for a book which originated as part of an encyclopedia
entry, the volume is about what others have written rather than about
what these co-authors themselves believe. But that does not mean that
it is merely a dull listing of names and published opinions. Pelletier
and Nefdt’s prose makes it obvious that this is an intellectual area
which engages them deeply, with the result that what they have written
is well placed to engage the reader in turn.
Although Whorf’s is the name most centrally associated with the idea
of linguistic relativity, and that idea is commonly taken as implying
that a speech-community’s language and its culture must somehow
reflect one another, Pelletier and Nefdt’s Chapter 1 points out that
Whorf himself (1941) explicitly denied this, citing the Uto-Aztecan
languages Hopi and Ute as ones which “are as similar as, say, English
and German”, yet whose associated cultures are completely different.
And although the Whorf Hypothesis is an aspect of linguistics which
tends to appeal specially strongly to students and indeed to the wider
public, the attitudes of professional linguists (these co-authors tell
us) are often expressed in remarks like “Whorfianism … Ah yes! The
undergraduate disease.”
Their Chapter 2 mentions antecedents of the Whorf idea in Ancient
Greek philosophical writings, including Plato’s ‘Cratylus’, and in
Locke, before examining in more detail an intellectual conflict
between Immanuel Kant’s 1781 ‘Critique of Pure Reason’ and (Kant’s
one-time pupil) Johann von Herder’s 1799 reply in ‘Understanding and
Experience’. They then discuss relevant writings by Wilhelm von
Humboldt, and by Franz Boas. (I would see Boas as having at least as
much right as Sapir to have his name associated with the Hypothesis,
but Boas seems to be less read by linguists today than he once was.
This is perhaps a consequence of the “woke” self-censorship which
currently constrains intellectual activity. I recently had the
experience of being invited by the editor of a new book series to
contribute a volume on Boas, only to have the idea dropped like a hot
potato when I pointed out some of the controversial issues that would
have to be covered.)
Chapter 3 discusses Sapir and Whorf themselves (devoting ten pages to
Sapir and 27 to Whorf), in each case sketching their careers before
analysing their intellectual positions.
Chapter 4 discusses the suggestion, generally accepted among
professional linguists, that linguistic relativism is not a single
point of view but a spectrum of claims of different degrees of
strength – Pelletier and Nefdt use the terms “minor”, “medial”, and
“grand” relativism. An example of minor relativism would be the idea
that our ability to distinguish similar shades of colour is influenced
by how our mother tongue happens to chop the colour space up between
different basic colour terms. The co-authors see the evidence for
minor relativism as solid, but they find it a fairly trivial
phenomenon. What gives linguistic relativism its public impact is
grand relativism, such as the idea in Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’
that a version of English (“Newspeak”) could be designed to make it
impossible for its speakers to think dissident thoughts. Grand
relativist claims are the reverse of trivial, but many are sceptical
about whether they are right or, perhaps, even meaningful.
This difference in strength relates not only to the importance of the
thought-patterns induced by a language but to how rigidly the language
imposes them. Pelletier and Nefdt quote Sapir as writing about “the
tyrannical hold that linguistic form has upon our orientation in the
world”, and of speakers being “at the mercy” of their particular
mother tongue. Expressed this strongly, linguistic relativism seems
obviously wrong. Isaac Newton’s ‘Principia’ assumed one concept of
space and time, and it may well be that the structures of what Whorf
called “Standard Average European” languages such as Newton’s Latin
and English made this concept feel like common sense. But German is
another Standard Average European language, and it did not hinder
Albert Einstein from formulating a contrasting concept which everyone
qualified to judge agrees is right, or righter than Newton’s at least.
However, other relativists suggest only that mother tongue may
predispose speakers to a certain default outlook which an individual
speaker can choose to reject. That is easier to believe.
EVALUATION
For anyone seriously interested in the Whorf Hypothesis, this book is
an absolute must. It does an admirable job of expounding, as clearly
as possible, the various alternative ideas which fall under the
linguistic relativity heading, which are often inherently very vague.
The book offers pointers to almost all areas within the literature of
linguistics that students of the topic ought to be aware of (though
one gap is no mention of the Australian researchers associated with
R.M.W. Dixon – see e.g. Aikhenvald et al. 2022); and it introduces
bodies of thought which are quite relevant to the topic but which many
professional linguists are likely to ignore as falling outside the
discipline of linguistics. (I am not sure how many linguists are
familiar with Kant’s theory of synthetic but a-priori knowledge, for
instance, or have even encountered the name Herder.)
Furthermore the book is fertile in offering novel takes on those
topics which a typical linguist will know about. For instance, it
seems clear prima facie that Chomsky’s concept of Universal Grammar,
and his idea that a Martian would see all Earthlings as speaking
essentially the same language with minor dialect differences, must (if
taken seriously at all) be incompatible with Whorf’s idea that
different native languages induce different world-views. Yet in their
Chapter 5, Pelletier and Nefdt develop what they call a “rather
surprising argument for relativity within generative linguistics”.
And the coverage of attempts to make versions of linguistic relativity
into testable, empirical scientific hypotheses is another strong point
in the book which undergraduate courses in linguistics rarely touch
on. Any professional linguist who hopes to contribute novel ideas or
findings in this area would undoubtedly do well to treat Pelletier and
Nefdt’s book as a starting point.
I do have one problem with the book, though. As already said, it
discusses others’ views rather than explicitly arguing for the
co-authors’ own, as befits an encyclopaedia entry. However, sometimes
Pelletier and Nefdt wield quotations so as to further their own views
while appearing to be neutral referees rather than advocates; readers
need to be on their guard against this tactic. I shall illustrate it
by looking in some detail at what is perhaps the most crucial single
passage in the book.
Whorf’s best-known specific argument in support of his general
relativistic idea is his claim that Hopi is a “timeless language”; he
argued that Hopi structure is devoid of references to time, and that
as a result a monolingual Hopi “has no general notion or intuition of
TIME as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe
proceeds at an equal rate, out of a future, through a present, into a
past” (Whorf in Carroll 1956: 57). The most influential – and, at 699
pages, surely the fullest – published attempt to refute that assertion
is Ekkehart Malotki’s 1983 book ‘Hopi Time’. Malotki believes Hopi is
no more “timeless” than European languages are. Seven pages of
Pelletier and Nefdt’s book discuss Malotki’s case against Whorf. They
clearly disagree with Malotki; but rather than arguing against him
directly, they proceed by quoting another writer, Dinwoodie (2006).
Dinwoodie refers to a pair of epigraphs which appear on Malotki’s last
prelims page. (I apologize for the indirectness of all this.) The
first epigraph is by Whorf, from the same page as the passage I quoted
at the beginning of this paragraph, and the second is Malotki’s
translation of a passage from a Hopi folk tale. To save space I show
just part of the first epigraph here, I omit the Hopi original of
Malotki’s translation, and I correct several misprints by comparison
with the sources of the quotations:
“the Hopi language is seen to contain no words, grammatical forms,
[etc.] that refer directly to what we call ‘time’ …”
“Then indeed, the following day, quite early in the morning at the
hour when people pray to the sun, around that time then he woke up the
girl again.”
Dinwoodie continues: “We are apparently to see that the second
epigraph provides a direct challenge to the first. Chock full, as it
seems to be, with ‘references’ to ‘time’, the second passage is meant
to leave the reader wondering why, as Malotki puts it, ‘Whorf erred so
drastically.’ … What draws our attention, however, is that the second
passage is attributed _not to a Hopi individual_ but to ‘Ekkehart
Malotki, Hopi Field Notes 1980’ ”. (Underlines surround wording
italicized by Dinwoodie.) Pelletier and Nefdt conclude that “one thing
seems certain, it is simply wrong to say that Malotki’s work is
obviously a crushing demolition of Whorf’s analysis”.
Is that so wrong? Perhaps it might be unjustified, if the two
epigraphs were Malotki’s whole argument. But they are not even part of
his argument, which lies rather in the detailed analyses of hundreds
of Hopi words and constructions in the body of the book. Like
epigraphs in other books, what Malotki has quoted is intended simply
to get his readers in the mood to be receptive to the contents of the
600-plus following pages. Then, what point is Dinwoodie making by
saying (in italics) that the second quotation is not attributed to an
individual? If Malotki had given us the name of the particular Hopi
speaker he heard tell the story, what difference would that have made?
Furthermore, even the epigraphs alone, without the body of Malotki’s
book, do strike me as enough to raise serious doubts, at the very
least, about Whorf’s account of Hopi. Pelletier and Nefdt make the
point that, faced with wording in an alien language whose structure
does not map neatly onto that of English, we can always aim either at
a literal translation which necessarily reads unnaturally in English,
or at a rendering which is natural in English but which, consequently,
distorts the original meaning. This is true, but what grounds do we
have in the present case to assume that Malotki’s natural English,
with its many time references, does distort the Hopi utterances?
Perhaps it does, but the case is not argued.
Pelletier and Nefdt make a further point against Malotki by quoting
another writer, Hinton 1988, and this is justified. Among the many
cases of Hopi time reference cited by Malotki is an utterance which he
translates as “He did it three times”. Hinton sees it as questionable
whether this use of the word “time” in English “should be viewed as
temporal at all”, and I agree that it isn’t. This is just an
uninteresting case of polysemy; other Standard Average European
languages make no linguistic link between the two concepts (e.g.
French ‘fois’ v. ‘temps’, German ‘-mal’ v. ‘Zeit’). I see it as a
mistake for Malotki to have used this example, and for Pelletier and
Nefdt it is a sufficiently serious mistake that after discussing it in
Chapter 3 they revert to it in their closing pages. But the section of
Malotki’s book which treats this sense of “time” is about three pages
long. That leaves 696 pages that do relate to the relativism issue.
There is a fair incidence of misprints, not all trivial. The
co-authors repeatedly refer to a French writer under the name “Fabre
d’Oliver”; this should be “d’Olivet”, a village in the Loire region
rather than the English dictator. Morris Swadesh’s surname is written
“Swadish” on p. 34; a footnote on p. 43 seems to have words missing;
“Penurian language” on p. 51 should read “Penutian”.
But these errors do not alter my assessment that Pelletier and Nefdt’s
book is the best survey of linguistic relativity I know.
REFERENCES
Aikhenvald, A. Y. et al., eds. 2022. The Integration of Language and
Society. Oxford University Press.
Carroll, J., ed. 1956. Language, Thought, and Reality: selected
writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf. MIT Press (Cambridge, Mass.).
Dinwoodie, D. 2006. “Time and the individual in Native North America”.
In P. Strong and S. Kan, eds, New Perspectives on Native North
America. University of Nebraska Press (Lincoln, Neb.), pp. 327–48.
Hinton, L. 1988. Review of Malotki 1983. American Indian Quarterly
12.361–4.
Hoijer, H., ed. 1954. Language in Culture. University of Chicago
Press.
Malotki, E. 1983. Hopi Time. Mouton (Berlin).
Whorf, B.L. 1941. “The relation of habitual thought and behavior to
language”. In L. Spier, A. Hallowell, and S. Newman, eds, Language,
Culture, and Personality. Sapir Memorial Publication Fund (Menasha,
Wis.), pp. 75–93. Reprinted in Carroll 1956.
ABOUT THE REVIEWER
Geoffrey Sampson graduated in Chinese Studies from Cambridge
University, and his academic career was spent partly in Linguistics
and partly in Informatics, with intervals in industrial research.
After retiring as professor emeritus from Sussex University in 2009,
he spent several years as Research Fellow at the University of South
Africa. He has published contributions to most areas of Linguistics,
as well as to other subjects. His most recent book is “Structural
Linguistics in the 21st Century”, a sequel to his popular “Schools of
Linguistics”.



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