40. Whorf

The claim that the structure of a language influences how its speakers view

the world is today most usually associated with the linguist Sapir and his student

Whorf, a chemical engineer by training, a fire prevention engineer by vocation,

and a linguist by avocation. However, it can be traced back to others, particularly

to Humboldt in the nineteenth century. Today, the claim is usually referred

to as the Linguistic relativity hypothesis, Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, or the Whorfian

hypothesis. I will use the latter term since the claim seems to owe much more

to Whorf than it does to Sapir.

Sapir acknowledged the close relationship between language and culture, maintaining

that they were inextricably related so that you could not understand or

appreciate the one without a knowledge of the other.

In this view different speakers will therefore experience the world differently

insofar as the languages they speak differ structurally, and not even the most

sophisticated linguist aware of all the subtleties of structural differences among

languages can escape to see the world as it is rather than as it is presented

through the screen of this language or that.

On several occasions Fishman (particularly 1960 and 1972c) has written

about the Whorfian hypothesis concerning the kinds of claims it makes. One

claim is that, if speakers of one language have certain words to describe things

and speakers of another language lack similar words, then speakers of the first

language will find it easier to talk about those things. We can see how this might

be the case if we consider the technical vocabulary of any trade, calling, or profession;

for example, physicians talk easily about medical phenomena, more

easily than you or I, because they have the vocabulary to do so.

of different languages will, therefore, have different world-views.

Whorf’s ideas were based on two kinds of experience. One was acquired

through his work as a fire prevention engineer for the Hartford Fire Insurance

Company; the other was acquired through his linguistic work, as Sapir’s student,

on Amerindian languages, principally on the Hopi language of Arizona. In his

work investigating the origins of fires, Whorf found that speakers of English

would use the words full and empty in describing gasoline drums but only in

relation to their liquid content; consequently, they would smoke beside ‘empty’

gasoline drums, which were actually ‘full’ of gas vapor. He found other examples

of such behavior and was led to conclude that ‘the cue to a certain line of

behavior is often given by the analogies of the linguistic formula in which the

situation is spoken of, and by which to some degree it is analyzed, classified, and

allotted its place in that world which is “to a large extent unconsciously built

up on the language habits of the group” ’

In the Whorfian view, language provides a screen or filter to reality; it determines

how speakers perceive and organize the world around them, both the

natural world and the social world. Consequently, the language you speak helps

to form your world-view. It defines your experience for you; you do not use it

simply to report that experience.

category of number in English and in Yucatec Maya, a language of Mexico.

Both languages mark nouns for plural. English, however, has a contrast between

‘count’ nouns like tree and book and ‘mass’ nouns like water and sugar (we say

trees and books but not waters and sugars, except in very marked circumstances).

Yucatec pluralization is optional and then only for nouns denoting animates.

Lucy hypothesized that English speakers would be more conscious of the numbers

of objects they see than Yucatec speakers and would also see more objects

as countable.

Language typology is an interesting topic