The SapirWhorf Hypothesis PHIL 2610 Final Paper Details

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis PHIL 2610

Final Paper

Details Assigned 29/11 Due 20/12 7 -10 pages (double spaced) Can be an extension of the paper you’ve already written.

Edward Sapir • American anthropologist and linguist • Worked on Native American languages • Pioneer in comparative linguistics for Native American languages

Benjamin Lee Whorf • Chemical engineer/ fire prevention engineer • “Amateur” linguist and student of Sapir

The Sapir-Whorf Hypotheses STRONG: The language one speaks determines what one can think about/ perceive. WEAK: The language one speaks influences what one can think about/ perceive.

Example

Of Common Interest No word for X Can’t think about X (Can’t translate X) Multiple words for X Sees X in a different way than us

Banal Whorfianism (Pinker) • “Language affects thought because we get much of our knowledge through reading and conversation. ” • “A sentence can frame an event, affecting the way people construe it. ” • “The stock of words in a language reflects the kinds of things its speakers deal with in their lives and hence think about. ” • “[I]f one uses the word language in a loose way to refer to meanings, … then language is thought. ” • “When people think about an entity, among the many attributes they can think about is its name. ”

No Word For “Mountain Summit” In Tibetan, there is no word for a mountain summit; the very place the British so avidly sought, their highest goal, did not even exist in the language of their Sherpa porters.

Dan Everett and the Pirahã

Dan Everett • American linguist • Bentley University • Famous for studying the Pirahã

Wolfe on the Pirahã “You couldn’t call them Stone Age or Bronze Age or Iron Age or any of the Hard Ages because the Ages were all named after the tools prehistoric people made. They were pre-toolers. ”

Factual Counterfactual Future X X Present X X Past X X

Factual Counterfactual Future X X Present X X Past X X

Factual Counterfactual Future X X Present X X Past X X

Factual Counterfactual Future X X Present X X Past X X

Nonpast Tense I teach tomorrow. I am giving a lecture tomorrow. What time are we meeting tomorrow? When is tomorrow’s meeting?

English “Future” I am going to teach tomorrow. I will teach tomorrow.

E. J. Spode Why did they want to use a scraping tool to make a bow if they weren’t planning on using it to hunt in the future. And why did they plan on hunting if they weren’t planning to kill an animal in the future? And why did they want to kill an animal if they weren’t planning on eating it in the future?

The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax

Whorf on Snow “We have the same word for falling snow, snow on the ground snow packed hard like ice, slushy snow, wind-driven flying snow – whatever the situation may be…”

Whorf on Snow “To an Eskimo, this all-inclusive word would be almost unthinkable; he would say that falling snow, slushy snow, and so on, are sensuously and operationally different, different things to contend with; he uses different words for them and for other kinds of snow. ”

Geoff Pullum’s Counts • Four (Boas) • Seven (Whorf) • Nine (AAA) • Fifty (Wilson) • One hundred (NYT) • Four dozen (NYT)

Pullum on Racism and The Eskimo “And the alleged lexical extravagance of the Eskimos comports so well with the many other facets of their polysynthetic perversity: rubbing noses; lending their wives to strangers; eating raw seal blubber; throwing grandma out to be eaten by polar bears; ‘We are prepared to believe almost anything about such an unfamiliar and peculiar group, ’ says Martin, in a gentle reminder of our buried racist tendencies. ”

Color Terms [T]o say ‘green’ they use an expression that, translated literally, would yield ‘it is temporarily being immature’. Nevins et. al. complain that this just is the Pirahã’s expression for ‘green’, and that to literally translate the expression so as to reveal it’s etymology is another way to exoticism and primitivize the Pirahã.

Color Terms On the flip side, however, what charmingly primitive people our interior decorators must be, using expressions like ‘egg shell’ and ‘cream’ and (in the case of my patio) ‘lazy lizard’ to describe colors, whereas if they were civilized people they would give those colors proper color names, like ‘black’, from the Proto. Germanic ‘blakaz’. Which meant “burned. ”

The Weak Hypothesis

Example

Rainbows Again (SEP) Greek has separate terms for what we call light blue and dark blue, and no word meaning what ‘blue’ means in English: Greek forces a choice on this distinction. Experiments have shown (Thierry et al. 2009) that native speakers of Greek react faster when categorizing light blue and dark blue color chips—apparently a genuine effect of language on thought.

Rainbows Again (SEP) But that does not make English speakers blind to the distinction, or imply that Greek speakers cannot grasp the idea of a hue falling somewhere between green and violet in the spectrum.

https: //www. ted. com/talks/keith_chen_could_your_language_affect_ your_ability_to_save_money

Factual Counterfactual Future X X Present X X Past X X

Pirahã Again “They do not store food in any quantity, but generally eat it when they get it. ” “[They] have ignored lessons in preserving meats by salting or smoking. ” Although they grow manioc plants, they “make only a few days' worth of manioc flour at a time. ”

Liberman on Correlations “For example, if you borrow your writing system from the Chinese, it's likely that you'll borrow some aspects of food culture and architecture as well. This is not because a logographic writing system tends to cause people to use chopsticks or build pagodas. ”