The Whorf Hypothesis

[Justin McBride]

> Whorf talked about sensitivity to "time" in tense-marking languages (like
European lgs.) and lack of such in "tenseless" languages.  Personally, I
think he had adopted the stereotype of the Indian who does everything on
"Indian Time".

I don't think Whorf is saying the speaker of a Native language has lost the
notion of time, or even that time is blurry as a concept.  On the contrary,
in his paper "An American Indian Model of the Universe," he basically
asserts that time is perceived very intensely for the Hopi speaker, but that
the notion of space and distance seems to be intimately tied to the
grammatical categories of time and tense.  He gives very little linguistic
evidence to back his assertion, but it seems to revolve around the
correlation of tense and inceptive elements to expressions of depth and
distance from the speaker.  From this (and a few other grammatical features
of Hopi) he comes to the conclusion that Hopi is a more adequate language
for use in hard science.  I suppose Whorf thought that the Hopi speaker
would react to some of the more abstract concepts of General Relativity with
the Hopi equivalent of "Well, duh."  :)

Apparently this sort of thing (regardless of its truth or applicability)
really struck his as an underlying psychological reality for all Hopi
speakers, affecting their perceptions at almost every level.  For instance,
he noted elsewhere that Hopi speakers describe all repetitive patterns--from
the rolling hills on the horizon, the distribution of clouds in the sky, to
the teeth of a serated knife--with certain punctual/segmentative affixes.
>>From this he gathered that Hopis were natural born scientists.  A famous
quote from this period:  "The Hopi actually have a language better equipped
to deal with such vibratile phenomena [described as including the "movements
of machinery and mechanism, wave processes and vibrations, electrical and
chemical phenomena" etc.] than is our latest scientific terminology."

To me, it seems obvious that Whorf suffered from the Information Age
equivalent of what I call "Noble Savage Syndrome."  He was overly romantic
about Native Americans in general, and just wasn't prepared to see Native
folks as everyday ordinary people with common faults and strengths.  The
only fault he would attribute to the Hopis is that they weren't the rightful
founders of NASA.  A very romantic notion, indeed!  But what do you expect
from a guy who shared an office with the poet Wallace Stevens?

As thought out as his methodology is, Whorf is clearly a poor linguistic
scientist.  His writings in general are just brimming with contradictions:
"Thus, the Hopi language gets along perfectly without tenses for its verbs."
And elsewhere:
"Hopi also has three tenses: factual or present-past, future, and
generalized or usitative."
And he ALWAYS violates the cardinal rule of our Siouan list; he translates
languages to English, and then analyzes the English.  One of my favorites of
these is where he goes to great, great lengths describing how utterly
foreign the Shawnee word for 'to clean with a ramrod' would be to a speaker
of English (read: Whorf, himself).

Nevertheless, I think he's on to something... not sure what exactly.  Of
course there are quite often no 1:1 correspondences of certain grammatical
features between languages, and often times translation gets bogged down in
going the distance to express everything at all times in one language as it
was in another.  I suppose that's why the Bible sounds either haughty or
sparse depending on the edition.  Surely, the concepts are there in all
languages, but their distribution in the mind is clearly not uniform between
languages.  I think that's what he would call culture. That's a very strange
definition as far as I'm concerned, but that only goes to strengthen his
claim in some bizarre way (language deconstructs to idiolect which
deconstructs to personality which... you get the idea).  Sure, it's a
reductio.  But it's HIS reductio.

Linguistic relativity might help someone attempt to wrap his/her mind around
new concepts in a second or third language, by bluntly reminding us of
potentially skewed perceptions (or at least grammatical constructions).  But
is it provable?  Whorf's ideas may in fact lend themselves to testing, but
I'm not sure how it could be done.  All evidence that would support or
refute his claims would rely on bilingualism in some way, and that seems to
be something that Whorf isn't prepared to allow in his hypothesis.   Final
word:  HELPFUL BUNK.