Sapir–Whorf hypothesis
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is an assumption in the field of linguistics. It was derived, posthumously, from the writings of Benjamin Whorf, who attributed the idea to his professor Edward Sapir. The expression "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" is due to Harry Hoijer (1954). In the context of finding out to what extent a certain language, with its grammatical structures and its lexicon, determines the vision of the world that the corresponding linguistic community has, this hypothesis can be formulated by saying that language shapes thought. Many experts on the subject identify this concept with the so-called "linguistic relativism".
You can distinguish between a strong version and a loose version of the hypothesis.
- Hypothesis whorfiana strong: The language determines the thinking and linguistic categories limit and determine the cognitive categories. This posture is known as linguistic determinism.
- Hypothesis whorfiana laxa: Language categories only influence in thought and decisions.
The strong version is the one held by some early linguists from before World War II, while the weak version is the one contemporary linguists tend to defend.
Origins and critique of the denomination
The idea was first expressed clearly by thinkers of the 19th century, among them Wilhelm von Humboldt, who saw language as an expression of the spirit of a nation. In the writings of the mathematician and logician Gottlob Frege or the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, concepts that point in the same direction also appear. Strictly speaking, Sapir wrote more against than in favor of linguistic determinism. His disciple Benjamin Lee Whorf came to be considered the leading proponent of the idea because he published his observations on how, in his view, language differences influenced human cognition and behavior.
It was another of Whorf's disciples, Harry Hoijer, who coined the term, although those credited with the concept never advanced any such hypothesis and do not even have any cosigned publications. Hence the expression "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" considered an unlucky name. Furthermore, it is debatable whether Whorf really understood the hypothesis as such (ie as a starting point for his investigations, in the course of which the validity of it would be decided) or rather as an axiom. The distinction between weak and strong version is also a later invention; Sapir and Whorf never posed such a dichotomy. In any case, the current literature deals mostly with the derived hypothesis, leaving aside any axiomatic elements that might underlie it.
Re-examination of the idea
Although in the early 1990s linguistic relativity had been considered dead, later a school of linguists specialized in the subject examined what effects differences in linguistic categorization have on cognition, and in experimental contexts they have seen that the non-deterministic version of the hypothesis is highly favored by the results.
The hypothesis is based on three main ideas:
- Languages show great differences regarding the meaning of words and syntax, an assumption confirmed by all types of studies.
- Second, semantics can affect the way in which speakers perceive and conceptualize the world
- Finally, as the language affects thought, speakers of different languages think differently.
Whorf took the theories of his teacher to develop them throughout the 1940s. In its strong version, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis can be considered a form of linguistic determinism, although the interest of psychologists in the influence of language in thought it is prior to the formulation of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as such. Julia Penn, in her book Linguistic Relativity versus Innate Ideas, The Origins of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis in German Thought, traces the theoretical foundations of this hypothesis to the work of the German pietist thinker Johann Georg Hamann (1730- 1788), later developing an evolutionary line for this current of interpretation of language that would include Johann Gottfried Herder (1744-1803), Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835) and Jan Baudouin de Courtenay (1845-1929), while Franz Boas (1858-1942) and Edward Sapir (1884-1935) would depart on a different branch of the current evolutionary tree. In Penn's scheme, Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941) would take elements of these thinkers, especially Sapir, to elaborate the hypothesis treated in this article.
A heavily revised version of the "weak" version of the Whorfian hypothesis is known as the Whorf-Korzybski hypothesis. Julia Penn considers this hypothesis highly probable and defines it as follows:
The way individuals name or describe situations influences the way they behave in such situations.
Penn relies, to contemplate this hypothesis as possible, in the experiments carried out by John B. Carrol and Joseph H. Casagrande with Hopi and Navajo speakers.
The position that the structure and categories of one's mother tongue condition thought was argued convincingly by Bhartrihari (6th century AD) and was the subject of centuries of debate in the Indian linguistic tradition. Related notions in the West, such as the principle that language has controlling effects on thought, can be identified in Wilhelm von Humboldt's essay Über das vergleichende Sprachstudium (On the comparative study of languages), and the notion has been assimilated to an important extent in Western thought. Karl Kerenyi began his translation of Dionysus into English in 1976 with this passage:
The interdependence of thought and discourse makes it clear that languages are not so much means to express a truth that has already been established but rather means of discovery of a previously unknown truth. Their diversity is a diversity not of sounds and signs but of ways of seeing the world.
The origin of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as a more rigorous analysis of this familial cultural perception can be traced to the work of Franz Boas, the founder of anthropology in the United States. Boas was educated in Germany in the late 19th century during a time when scientists like Ernst Mach and Ludwig Boltzmann were trying to understand the physiology of sensation.
In the US, Boas found Amerindian languages from different language families, all distinct from the Semitic and Indo-European languages studied by the vast majority of European scholars. Boas realized how great the differences between parts of speech and ways of life can be from one place to another. As a result, Boas came to the conclusion that the culture and ways of life of a people were reflected in the language spoken by it.
Edward Sapir was one of Boas's most notable students, and he furthered his argument by noting that languages were formally and systematically complete systems. So it was not that any particular word expressed a way of thinking or behaving, but that the systematic and coherent nature of language interacted on a broader level with thought and behavior. Although his ideas changed over time, it seems that towards the end of his life Sapir came to believe that language was not a mere reflection of culture, but that language and thought could in fact have a mutually influential relationship. and even determination. Whorf gave this idea even more precision by examining the particular grammatical mechanisms by which thought influenced language.
Sapir stated:
When it comes to linguistic form, Plato walks along with the Macedonian fowl; Confucius, with the wild Assam head hunters. In Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech (1921. Chapter X).
This expression, which basically expresses a prejudice, indicates that the way of speaking of the Macedonian swineherds was not inferior to the way of speaking of Plato, and that Confucius did not have a syntactic capacity superior to that of the hunters of Assam heads. The criticism of this hypothesis will be structured on the argument that the linguistic form of all human beings is equivalent.
Empirical evidence
There are facts that seem hardly compatible with the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. On the other hand, it has been possible to verify that babies, chimpanzees and even pigeons are capable of categorizing and grouping categories of objects into concepts, despite lacking human language.
However, the issue seems different when we consider the weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis'. It has long been known that memory and psychological perception are affected or influenced by the availability of appropriate words and expressions, for example, colored nouns. Certain experiments have shown that people's visual memories tend to become distorted over time, so that visual memories end up looking more and more like the linguistic categories commonly used by said people. These experiments seem to partially confirm the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, but do not provide sufficient evidence in favor of its strong formulation. It seems reasonable to accept that the language one speaks has an influence on memory and the way in which some things are encoded in it, as has been said, but it is doubtful that language is actually the one that provides all the thought patterns of the individual (certain experiments show the existence of non-verbal thought).
Several recent experiments seem to confirm the plausibility of a weak version of linguistic relativity. This is the case of, for example, John Lucy, who has conducted comparative studies with native speakers of English and Yucatec Maya, in which he showed that native speakers of English tended to select objects by their geometric shape, while Yucatecan speakers tended to prefer the material they were made of. Thus, for example, if asked to choose an object similar to a cardboard box, English speakers would select boxes, even if they were made of plastic, while Yucatec speakers would choose cardboard objects, even if they were not box-shaped. Lucy attributed this difference in the conceptualization of objects to the presence, in Yucatec, of some classifiers that must accompany the noun whenever it occurs after a numeral; These classifiers are the ones that linguistically indicate the shape of objects, so for Yucatecan speakers the most important aspect of nouns would not be the shape, but rather the matter.
Dan Slobin has also carried out several experiments in which he studies the effects of grammar on conceptualizing; Specifically, he defended that two different languages can give rise to two incommensurable narratives of the same event. His study dealt with the way in which native speakers of English, Turkish and Spanish, divided by age range, narrated the same succession of images. According to his conclusions, there was a correlation between the language spoken and those aspects of the scene that the participants narrated; Thus, for example, native Spanish speakers tended to emphasize more the time in which the action took place, English speakers tended to emphasize in which spatial direction what was happening was oriented, while Turkish speakers highlighted which protagonists of the scene they had seen what was happening. As a conclusion, Slobin has postulated the existence of a series of mental categories that are acquired through language and that are used solely for linguistic expression; It would therefore be a version of linguistic relativity limited to purely linguistic contexts.
Alfred Bloom has also worked on the topic of various narratives, working on Mandarin Chinese. Bloom conducted an experiment where he showed native English speakers a text containing subjunctive constructions, while showing native Chinese speakers a literal translation of it into their language, in which this grammatical construction is non-existent. The result was that when participants were asked whether or not the events narrated in the text had happened, Chinese speakers failed at a much higher rate than English speakers; The conclusion was, therefore, that it is impossible to literally translate from one language to another, and this must be because each of them conceptualizes reality in a different way. The psychologist and cognitivist Lera Boroditsky has also worked on comparative studies between English and Mandarin Chinese, and has shown that the speakers of each of these conceive time in a different way: while English associates the passage of time with a horizontal movement, the Chinese associate it with a vertical one. However, this author has also defended the possibility that speakers of one language learn to conceptualize in the same way as those of the other without having to learn the other language, so she advocates a weak - non-deterministic - version of relativity linguistics.
In another experiment detailed by John Lyons, it was shown, for example, that monolingual speakers of Zuñi, an Amerindian language spoken in New Mexico, whose vocabulary does not differentiate between "orange" and "yellow", experienced greater difficulty than nonlinguals. Zuni who also knew English or those who only spoke English when it came to recognizing after a certain time objects of a color easily codified and expressible in English, but not in the Zuni or Zuni language.. In the experiment an object was shown, which for some individuals was yellow and for others orange, although the general shape of the object was always the same. After a certain time, he was shown two identical objects, one yellow and the other orange, among which was the one the subject had seen before, and he was asked to identify the one that had been shown the other time. It has also been shown that it is not that Zuni speakers were unable to perceive the difference between a yellow and an orange object, if they were asked to compare them when they were present, but rather a memory effect over time to remember the tonality
Criticism
Today this hypothesis is discredited in its strong form. The examples that Sapir and Whorf relied on are unrealistic. For example, they said that the Zuni Amerindians did not have a different word for "yellow" and "orange" and that this would have to condition their way of thinking. The truth is that they do not have those words, but they perfectly differentiate yellow from orange. What happens is that in their way of life the difference is irrelevant, although as Lyons explains, their memory habits do seem to be affected by the existence of the lexical distinction.
In relation to the experiments with colors there has been a long controversy that began with universalism about the color terms that included the results of the experiments carried out by Berlin and Kay. These experiments confirm the existence of linguistic universals in terms of the terms to name the basic colors. Thus, physiology and perception, of a universal nature, would play a determining role when establishing the semantics of a language. However, this type of work has sparked another major debate on the question of linguistic relativism, known as the color naming debate.
A possible proof of the Sapir-Whorf error would be the fact that translators are capable of translating what is said in one language into another. Therefore, it could not be said that language determines the way we think, it would be more accurate and correct to say that it never influences thought.
Bloom's experiments on the subjunctive have been questioned by Au, who conducted a series of experiments similar to those conducted by Bloom; The problem with the latter's experiments, he showed, was the fact that the Chinese translation he had made was confusing because it was too literal, and once the translation was adapted to more common Chinese, the differences between the speakers of both languages disappeared. Another critical response appears in 1985 in the magazine "Cogniton".
The main criticisms of the hypothesis of linguistic relativism would therefore be:
- Noam Chomsky's "innaticism" which argues the existence of a L-language that is equal to all members of the human species, interiorized and innate, which constitutes the linguistic faculty.
- Anna Wierzbicka's "semantic universalism", which sustains the existence of a universal semantic system, to which one of the natural languages can be translated.
Steven Pinker has also strongly attacked the hypothesis of linguistic relativity, defending the universality of Mentalese or the language of thought. As he defends, thought would work in a similar way to a Turing machine, and therefore it is absurd to consider that it is conditioned by a particular language —just as physiology could not be either—, for which reason language could never influence thinking. thought.
Another criticism that is made of this theory is the nationalist, or even racist, vision that it could entail, since, by distinguishing the functioning of the human mind based on the language of the speaker, it would be maintaining that individuals would have different intellectual capacities depending on their language, in case of speaking only one language, of course. Xabier Zabaltza writes: "What is now known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis [...] has served as an intellectual alibi for all linguistic nationalisms" (A history of languages and nationalisms. Xabier Zabaltza, 2006). Now, it could be said that both Sapir and Whorf admitted the psychic unity of humanity, and that the determining relationship of language was not so much towards the way of reasoning as towards the worldview held by the speakers.