The Whorf Hypothesis

[David Kaufman]

>>>But being (and staying) tall as a state and growing tall(er and taller)
>>>as a process are different affairs in real life (whatever that may be,
>>>and which probably was a neat subject for ethnophilosophical
>>>investigations).  What comes closest to your proposal is the category of
>>>resultative, i.e. a category denoing a state resultant from a process.
>>>Again, stative and resultative very nicely may be kept apart in the Old
>>>World, too.<<<

I guess what I'm curious to know here is whether there would be an
alternative in Hidatsa/Crow/Mojave and any other language that expresses
"(The) man talls" construct to distinguish between the state of BEING tall
and the process of GROWING TALLER.  Unfortunately all I have is the
dictionary from 1886 by Matthew Washington in Hidatsa, and nothing from
these other languages, and we haven't heard from our Hidatsa expert yet,
John Boyle, who would probably know best from his research on Hidatsa.  If
there are alternate methods depending on whether one is referring to a state
or process, then that would correlate with IE languages (i.e., he is tall,
he is getting taller).  If not, then I'm still left wondering why this
attribute would be stated only in a verb form.  I realize one could say it's
because they don't use adjectives, but why choose a verb form instead,
unless an adjective has much in common with a verb (?).

I agree that both of these polarized views are too extreme and the real
answer lies somewhere in the middle in a big "grey" area.  I believe, as
Pinker says, we can think without words and remember "gists" of
conversations which are not the same as remembering a bunch of words, but I
also believe that spoken or written language has to fit into a grammatical
construct template in order for our thoughts to make sense to another
speaker of the same language.  How much our grammatical construct template
limits us in how we think or expresses nuances in different languages I'm
not sure about.

After several years of studying different languages (mostly European and now
just beginning Native American) I too find it difficult to come up with
adequate answers, and I only hope that as my multilingual and mutlicultural
awareness increases I will be able to find more answers!

Thanks for the input!

Dave






>From: "R. Rankin" <rankin at ku.edu>
>Reply-To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu
>To: <siouan at lists.colorado.edu>
>Subject: Re: The Whorf Hypothesis
>Date: Wed, 18 Dec 2002 15:54:40 -0600
>
>
> >But being (and staying) tall as a state and growing tall(er and taller)
>as
>a process are different affairs in real life (whatever that may be, and
>which probably was a neat subject for ethnophilosophical investigations).
>What comes closest to your proposal is the category of resultative, i.e. a
>category denoing a state resultant from a process. Again, stative and
>resultative very nicely may be kept apart in the Old World, too,
>
>Indeed.  It seems to be the case that every language capable, using one
>mechanism or another, to convey all the nuances of other languages.
>
> >This is why I wonder if speakers of these languages might be more in tune
> >to nature and thinking in processes (being more fluidly verb- and
> >process-oriented) and this is reflected in their language.
>
> >It is a romantic though understandable view, . . .
>
>To me, that sums it up nicely.  When I was a student in the early '60's the
>Whorf linguistic relativity hypothesis was mentioned, but understood to be
>unprovable.  It was essentially dropped from the linguistics curriculum
>(but not always from Anthropology).  Now, thanks to Post Modernism and the
>like, it has returned.  But there are still no tests that would enable one
>to prove the theory.  So, the very same theory can be totally "out" one
>year but be totally "in" another year, with no evidence adduced for either
>view really.  This fact doesn't tell us a lot about the nature of language,
>but it says a great deal about the state of American social science.
>
>Taking one view allows the "scholar" to emphasize the similarities among
>all speakers of natural languages and denigrate his "touchy-feely"
>colleagues.  Taking the other view allows people to give in to romantic
>prejudices and popular stereotypes and feel all warm and fuzzy about
>essentially Rousseauesque views of natural man.  Obviously there are those
>who gravitate to one or the other of these extremes.  I have never felt
>comfortable with either one.
>
>I have had bilingual students, especially one American girl who had been
>raised in Japan and was about as close to bilingualism as you can get, who
>insisted that she reacted to stimuli quite differently depending on the
>language milieu she was interacting in.  But, of course, these were
>subjective statements, and she couldn't really describe exactly what it was
>that was different.  I took her feelings and statements seriously, but
>couldn't verify them.
>
>I've been a linguist for 35 or 40 years and still don't have answers to
>these connundrums.  But I think that, as scientists, we have to ask one or
>two questions.
>
>1)  Can the linguistic relativity hypothesis be falsified?  If the answer
>is "no", then it is useless as a scientific theory.
>
>2)  Can the linguistic relativity hypothesis be proved?  If not, then it's
>still a useless theory.  If experiments are possible, then they should be
>designed and performed, preferably by someone with a neutral outlook.
>
>Otherwise we're being self-indulgent to maintain either of the polar views.
>
>By the way, I once gave a seminar on the work of Edward Sapir and didn't
>find that he really supported linguistic relativity strongly.  So I tend to
>leave his name out of it and attribute it to Benjamin Lee Whorf.
>
>Bob


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