The Whorf Hypothesis

[David Kaufman]

>>the remaining question ought to be, how much are one's thoughts as a whole
>>influenced by the way one organizes them for speaking?<<

Perhaps this should REALLY have been the phrasing for my original question.
When I suggested to Heike that our thoughts must fit into a "template" for
mutual comprehension and communication, I was referring to grammar or syntax
as the template we must use.  And, yes, just how much does the grammatical
or syntactical organization of a particular language "force" one to think or
understand in a certain way?  There's no doubt thought exists without
language--I can picture a concept without necessarily having a word for it
or without even being able to express it very well--which I suppose would be
called the universal form of "mentalese" (a la Pinker or Hansen) all of
humanity seems to share, regardless of their mother tongue or languages they
speak.  I think it is correct that the grammars of some languages may
highlight or emphasize one thing over another not emphasized in another
language.  And I guess the question now would be: HOW MUCH does that
grammatical emphasis or lack thereof from one language to the next affect a
culture's or individual's thought patterns, if at all?

As for the time issue, I find that some languages (especially the IE
languages) are very tense-oriented while others (e.g., perhaps most Native
American and Polynesian languages) are more aspect-oriented.  (Not sure if
these are the correct linguistic terms.)  I would say from what little I
know so far of Native American and Polynesian languages (having studied some
Hawaiian), these languages focus more on whether something is finished or
not (complete vs. incomplete action) without being so hung up on stating the
exact time or period.  In English we must think of the tense-factor before
we utter a single sentence to put it in a correct tense form (past, present,
or future) which is something these native languages don't seem to be so
concerned with.  Yes, they can emphasize time if they want to, but that
doesn't appear to be a standard part of their sentence structure as it is in
English. And, (here we go again!) does that less tense-oriented and more
aspect-oriented perspective affect the culture and how important they
perceive time to be?  Perhaps "Indian-" or "Hawaiian-" time is simply an
influence from their language and culture in that as long as something gets
done they don't care exactly when, as long as it happens (!).  But,
regardless of our language, I think we ourselves as individuals can
determine how important time is to each of us, although OUR society
definitely places a great emphasis on punctuality!

Dave



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http://dvklinguist.homestead.com/Homepage1.html





>From: Wallace Chafe <chafe at linguistics.ucsb.edu>
>Reply-To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu
>To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu
>Subject: Re: The Whorf Hypothesis
>Date: Wed, 18 Dec 2002 17:54:13 -0800
>
>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


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