The Whorf Hypothesis

[Koontz John E]

On Thu, 19 Dec 2002, Justin McBride wrote:
> ... For instance, [Whorf] 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.

My suspicion would be that they spoke a language with a
punctual/segmentative affix and that a high percentage of nouns were
nominalized clauses, even in cases where, say, English would use another
pattern.

It is certainly true that one of the big differences I notice between
different languages, e.g., English and Omaha-Ponca comes out of what is
grammaticalized and thus relatively more implicit.  Even within a language
speakers notice a difficulty when a particular category is missing for
some reason and a circumlocution is required.  I recall observing an
English speaker some years ago who was reaching for a noun meaning "the
act of declining an office" and came up with "declension," as in "please
send in your acceptances or declensions."  This is a clear example of a
paradigmatic hole in English.

Where this trips us up in analyzing another language is when we provide
some sort of word for word translation and then allow ourselves to be
influenced by the grammaticalized associations of the translation.  A
classic example is rendering or glossing an ergative clause as an English
(or other language) passive and then subscribing to the focus implications
of the passive gloss.  I think that thinking of something like OP Sneda=i
as 'he talls' has an analogous difficulty.  Rendered like that it seems
processual, though the process is implicit only in the English formation.
It might be a bit safer to loss it 'he is-tall', though nothing will
completely eliminate the difficulties implicit in the glossing crutch.

For what it's worth, the same problems occur going from English to Omaha.
I remember that speakers always translated 'she' as wa?u 'woman' and
faithfully represented independent pronominals with demonstratives so that
'he saw him' came out 'this one here saw that one there'.  This is one
reason why some authorities entirely reject the approach of offering
phrases for translation.  It's certainly a good reason for being cautious
with the technique.