“The Hopi language is seen to contain no words, grammatical forms, construction or expressions that refer directly to what we call ‘time,’ or to past, present or future.”
— Benjamin Lee Whorf
Early in this column’s existence, I took a rather superficial look at what’s come to be known as the Whorf Hypothesis (“The Whorf Hypothesis,” Oct. 7, 2010) which, in a nutshell, claims that our Native language influences — or even determines — our view of the world. At that time, I failed to make a distinction between the strong and weak versions of the hypothesis. The strong version, linguistic determinism — the one championed by Benjamin Lee Whorf some 80 years ago — claims that language actually determines thought, thus limiting what we can actually think. The weak version, linguistic relativism, only says that one’s language influences one’s perceptions, but without limiting them.
Whorf was an enthusiastic pupil and close friend of pioneering linguist Edward Sapir (1884-1939), who has been associated with Whorf’s ideas, which, long after both men had died, are sometimes referred to as the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. It’s rather unfair because Sapir was a skeptic, writing, “It would be naïve to imagine that any analysis of experience is dependent on patterns expressed in language.” For that matter, Sapir and Whorf never published a joint paper.
With linguistic determinism, Whorf went out on a limb, claiming, for instance (on the basis of a single Hopi acquaintance in Manhattan, Ernest Naquayouma, along with a brief visit to a Hopi Reservation in Arizona) that the Hopi language lacked any words for time. The tribe, Whorf said, lived in a timeless, ideal world. Had he deepened his research, he would have discovered that the Hopi people have as much a concept of time as anyone. In his 1983 book Hopi Time, German-American linguist Ekkehart Malotki put Whorf’s notion of Hopi “timelessness” to bed.
The much weaker version of so-called “linguistic relativity” is alive and well, however, much discussed in academic circles today. The go-to example of linguistic relativism starts with the observation that English has the word blue, modified by “light” and “dark,” whereas Russian has a single term for each: siniy is light blue and goloboj is dark blue. Does this mean that Russian speakers are more sensitive to shades of blue than Anglophones? To test the idea, researchers timed how long it took for native speakers of English and Russian to match squares of subtly different blues against a test color. Sure enough, the Russian speakers were faster at the task than the English speakers; it’s easier for people whose language has separate terms for light blue and dark blue to differentiate between shades of that color than for people who have to modify a single word. Case closed!
Well, yes and no. True, Russian speakers were more adept at the task, but not by much. In fact, on average, their reaction time was a little more than one-tenth of a second faster than English speakers. Is that really significant? Other experiments to test whether language affects perception have led to equally ambiguous results. In my previous column, for instance, I quoted linguist Guy Deutscher’s claim that German people, whose word for “bridge” is feminine (die Brücke), associated bridges with more feminine qualities (slender, elegant) than Spanish speakers, who tended to describe bridges in more masculine terms (strong, durable) following, presumably, the unconscious prompting of their language: el puente is masculine. But so what? It all seems rather inconsequential. As a former bridge designer, I’m quite sure that German and Spanish engineers used the same criteria when planning a new structure.
Popular author and linguist Steven Pinker is particularly critical of language relativity, writing in his 1994 book The Language Instinct, “The more you examine Whorf’s arguments, the less sense they make.” For Pinker, the whole idea of our native language affecting our worldview is moot anyway. Pinker believes that thought is independent of language, since we don’t think in the language we use to communicate. Rather, we think in “mentalese,” our brain’s meta-language that precedes our native language.
Next week, we’ll look at two examples of how linguistic determinism, aka the Strong Whorf Hypothesis, has made it into popular culture: The movie Arrival and the novel 1984.
Barry Evans (he/him, barryevans9@yahoo.com) isn’t quite sure what a thought is, anyway.
This article appears in BESTO! Best of Humboldt.