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SAPIR––WHORF
Language and Perception of Reality
Training Handout
Our words affect what we see
The work of Edward Sapir and Benjamin Whorf about seventy years ago was based on a mistake; they incorrectly
thought the Hopi language had no tenses (past, present, future).
Most importantly, they suggested that our common sense notion that words were simply labels we attach to
things –– was wrong. Instead, each language has embedded in it ways of looking
at the world.
In English, we have no precise word equivalent to the German "Weltanschauung," or the French "prise
de conscience," meaning that language has perception built into it.
Much was made of the Inuit language
where there is no precise equivalent to the single English word "snow."
Because snow is such an important
part of survival of people of the north, they had nineteen different words
that varied according to the condition of snow.
At first, some argued that this was
only a matter of what sizes and shapes of boxes are the words we use in
which to put experiences.
In English, however, we have no single
word meaning the chemical, di-hydrogen oxide (H2O).
If you want to object and say, "But
we have the word 'water,'" let me point out that the word "water" does
not apply to conditions of H2O when it is frozen, crystallized or vaporized,
for which we have other words (ice, snow, steam, fog, clouds, humidity).
From the time we are born, we are
inundated with hundreds of thousands of bits of information per second,
as sound, smell, touch, temperature and sight.
They are many and random.
In themselves, they have no meanings.
It is only through our interaction
with other human beings that we begin to apply meaning, and we start to
put a range of different information bits into the same categories, words.
Those words, or categories of large
numbers of information bits, differ from language to language.
When you observe something, eg your
sociology instructor in class, you do not obtain exactly the same set of
information bits as your neighbouring student.
Two things (including
students) can not occupy the same space at the same time.
Yet you would usually
agree that you have both seen the same thing at that time.
A lot of work has been done with
the language of colours, because we can use colour charts from culture
to culture, then draw comparable maps of the boundaries between colours.
English, for example, has two separate
words for red and a mixture of red and white (pink) but does not have two
separate words for blue and a mixture of blue and white.
In my own work among the Kwawu
of West Africa, I found that there were three basic colours, black, white
and red, which were at the base of the traditional cosmology, and all other
colours were combinations or colours "of" concrete things.
The word "yellow," for example, would
be translated into "the colour of chicken fat" (which is reminiscent of
the Yiddish word "schmaltz").
Some observers have attributed to
language a factor in the winning of the space race by the Soviets in 1957,
putting Sputnik, the first human made satellite, into earth orbit.
The Russian language has a discontinuous
tense, where something continues, stops, then continues again.
That, in turn, allowed Russian mathematicians
to more easily work with the concept of something divided by zero, derivatives
(in calculus).
This, in turn, allowed Russian mathematics
and calculus to get far ahead of the Americans and Western Europeans.
That advanced mathematics,
in turn, was a factor in the Soviets putting Sputnik up.
It does not matter if you "believe" this or not.
Your task is not to believe in something,
but to learn the hypothesis and be able to explain it in some ordered and
understandable manner.
Your beliefs, opinions
and feelings are for class and email discussions, not for exams.
There are lots of debates around
the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and, if you study sociolinguistics, you will
discover many of them.
At first (eg in this introductory
course), however, you need to learn what the hypothesis is.
The languages we learn
have profound impacts on how we see the world around us.
To some sociolinguists,
this means that language determines reality.
The implications of this are immense.
Our entire way of life is based on
language, although (like
strange fish knowing water) most of that linguistic base is
invisible to us.
While language is a tool, and belongs
to the technological dimension of culture, it appears to be one of our
earliest.
It allows us to go far beyond our
primate cousins in terms of complexity and connections with other families,
other communities, other nations and world wide, to develop a world wide
economy (and think about that next time you eat an orange or drink a cup
of coffee).
It is an essential requirement for
international and other co-operation, even if it is not a guarantee for
it.
Learning
another language than our first is not merely the learning of
a code.
It means learning another way of
dividing up perceptions into different schemes of categories, learning
a different culture and therefore reality, and deepens our depth of understanding
the world and the nature of culture.
Like having binocular vision gives
us 3-D depth of vision, so does having fluency in more than one language
gives a "3-D" depth of cultural awareness.
In the 1930s, the author, George
Orwell, warned us against "Newspeak" where words and phrases were given
new meanings and uses them support of political oppression (a tyrannical
regime is called "big brother" in his book).
Today we have a profession called
"spin doctoring," no matter what it might be called, where there is deliberate
and conscious alteration and manipulation of traditional meanings so as
to interpret unpleasant news in ways that are favourable to a party in
power.
Here we have, as mentioned in class
by a student, a new term like "collateral damage" as a soft and guiltless
phrase to rename the senseless deaths and injuries to innocent women, children
and others standing nearby a military action.
The pen is, indeed, mightier than the sword.
The Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis is not accepted by all social scientists.
See:
Sapir.
Footnotes
1. For some of my writing
on learning a language, see "An Aural Method to Learn an Oral Language,"
which you can get by clicking on
www.scn.org/cmp/aural.htm
2. Today's tool, which
serves the purpose once served by the pen (more mighty than the sword), is the computer
keyboard (more powerful than an RPG).
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