Sapir-Worf Hypothesis Linguistic Determinism and...

Sapir-Worf Hypothesis: Linguistic Determinism and Linguistic Relativity The romantic idealism of the late eighteenth century, as encountered in the views of Johann Herder (1744-1803) and Wilhelm von Humboldt (I 762-1835), placed great value on the diversity of the world’s languages and cultures. The tradition was taken up by the American linguist and anthropologist Edward Sapir (1884-1939) and his pupil Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941), and resulted in a view about the relation between language and thought which was widely influential in the middle decades of this century. The â€Å"Sapir-Whorf hypothesis,† as it came to be called, combines two principles. The first is known as linguistic determinism: it states that language determines the†¦show more content†¦In Hopi, there is one word (masa’ytaka) for everything that flies except birds-- which would include insects, airplanes, and pilots. This seems alien to someone used to thinking in English, but, Whorf argues, it is no stranger than English-speakers having one word for ma ny kinds of snow, in contrast to Eskimo, where there are different words for falling snow, snow on the ground, snow packed hard like ice, slushy snow (cf. English slush), and so on. In Aztec, a single word (with different endings) covers an even greater range of English notions--snow, cold, and ice. When more abstract notions are considered (such as time, duration, velocity), the differences become yet more complex: Hopi, for instance, lacks a concept of time seen as a dimension; there are no forms corresponding to English tenses, but there are a series of forms which make it possible to talk about vari- ous durations, from the speaker’s point of view. It would be very difficult, Whorf argues, for a Hopi and an English physicist to understand each other’s thinking, given the major differences between the languages. Examples such as these made the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis very plausible; but in its strongest form it is unlikely to have any adherents now. The fact that suc cessful translations between languages can be made is a major argument against it, as is the fact that the conceptual