The Whorf Hypothesis

[R. Rankin]

I don't think most of the discussions here are puerile except in the most technical sense (i.e., reflecting relative innocent inexperience -- Latin puer 'boy'), and Wally isn't the sort to generate put-downs.  I feel it's useful to jump into discussions and try both to educate and to get an education.  Every time I try to explain some concept on the list I have to think through various aspects of it and I usually learn something myself doing it.  That's what makes the Siouan list one of the best around, and useful to experienced and inexperienced alike.  But I take Wally's point that there IS responsible research out there on linguistic relativity.  Whether it proves specific premises or not is a question for each reader to determine.

I'd recommend reading Wally's contribution plus that of Bowerman (if it's Melissa Bowerman).  I'm acquainted with both and trust their scientific objectivity.  Unfortunately, I believe that there is also a lot of "touchy-feelie", errant, personally motivated, non-scholarship on the same topic, much more than there was a few decades ago -- scientism in the service of politics.  Here in the States, I'm not sure I'd go so far as to label it Marxist simply because I'm not convinced many of the offenders are bright enough to read Marx.  And since 1991 he's less and less relevant anyway.  It's especially useful, then, to have Wally's recommendations for further reading.  My own not-very-technical view was expressed in my posting yesterday.

For some reason I'm often unhappy with analogical argument, and I'm not entirely sure I agree with the argument comparing semantics and phonology.  I guess I still have a hard time accepting many of the conclusions of those who take linguistic relativity in its strong form seriously.  Most linguists probably wouldn't argue with a weaker statement though.  Grammatical and semantic categories must have SOME kind of effect.  But what kind?  And how much?  If you want to read some really far-out fiction on the subject, try John Holbrook ("Jack") Vance's _Languages of Pao_ in which a rigid class system is maintained by having each group or trade learn its own language -- a language designed to keep the thoughts of individuals in a straight jacket.  There is other such science fiction, but I can't think of any other titles at the moment.

I'm also a little leary of saying the MIT people are hung up on universals.  If by universals, we mean what they call "UG", [yu: ji:], then I'd agree that a number of prominent practitioners are both narrow and sloppy.  But lots of responsible linguists are engaged in the search for universals, and those who approach it from a combination of field experience and typological comparison in institutions like Max Planck and RCLT are making good progress, I believe.

Bob

> I didn't want to get involved in this discussion, much of which struck me
> as puerile, but Bob's recent message touched a raw nerve. In my opinion,
> associating recent quite responsible research on this important question
> with post-modernism does it a serious disservice. A couple basic sources
> are Gumperz and Levinson, "Rethinking Linguistic Relativity", and Putz (u
> umlaut) and Verspoor, "Explorations in Linguistic Relativity". In the first
> book, the papers by Slobin and by Bowerman are especially cogent. In the
> second there's even a paper by me. I should also mention the survey by
> Penny Lee, "The Whorf Theory Complex".
>
> I see it like this. Nobody would dispute the observation that languages
> organize sounds differently. Why, then, shouldn't they organize thoughts
> differently as well? The way languages organize thoughts produces semantic
> structures, which I should think anyone who's worked with more than one
> language would agree are different. So as long as one is "thinking for
> speaking" (Slobin's term), one necessarily thinks differently in different
> languages. But not all thought is linguistic, and the remaining question
> ought to be, how much are one's thoughts as a whole influenced by the way
> one organizes them for speaking? Whorf didn't exactly put it that way, and
> surely he at times exaggerated the influence. But sixty years after his
> death we really ought to go beyond arguing about what Whorf really meant
> (he wasn't always consistent), and examining carefully the relation between
> linguistically determined semantic structures and thought in general. The
> MIT bunch doesn't care about such things, they're so hung up on universals,
> but the rest of us certainly should care.
> Wally
>
>