THE SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS
Smit Mehta (MEHSD1903)
Kenneth Huyhn
CMNS110
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Introduction:
While the formal study of languages traces its origin back to the ancient world with
linguistic traditions being recorded in ancient Greece, India, China and the Middle East, an
academic study in its truest sense began in the 19th century (Joseph, 2014). By the 19th century, the
age of colonialism was well underway and most of the world was under the dominion of European
nation states.
This colonization imbibed in the colonizing states an attitude of supremacy – both racial
and logical, and this thinking was replicated in several streams of European thought – anthropology
being chief among them. Borrowing from the racially charged atmosphere of anthropology was
the study of linguistics, with mainstream linguists adopting a belittling stance towards oral
languages and lingual traditions (Kay & Kempton, 1984). The works of Boas and his students were
instrumental in showing that unwritten languages were just as systematic and logically coherent
as European languages. Among Boas’ students – we have Sapir, and similarly Sapir had a student
– Whorf, who extended upon the Boasian perspective on linguistics (Kay & Kempton, 1984).
Sapir elucidated the Boasian study with the statement:
Both simple and complex types of language of an indefinite number of varieties
may be found spoken at any desired level of cultural advance. When it comes to
linguistic form, Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the
headhunting savage of Assam. (Sapir, 1921)
And Whorf explained the Boasian thought that the world was “a kaleidoscopic flux of
impressions which have to be organized in our minds… largely by the linguistic system in our
minds.” (Whorf, 1940)
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Brown (1976) summarized these lucid statements of Sapir and Whorf into two hypotheses
which I quote:
“1. Structural differences between language systems will, in general, be paralleled
by non-linguistic cognitive differences, of an unspecified sort, in the native
speakers of the two languages.
2. The structure of anyone’s native language strongly influences or fully determines
the world-view he will acquire as he learns the language.” (Brown, 1976)
Kay and Kempton (1984) state that Whorf’s followers posit a third hypothesis based upon
the two proposed which state that “the semantic systems of different languages vary without
constraint” (Kay & Kempton, 1984). These radical ideas of Whorf derive themselves not only from
Sapir but also from Whorf’s study of the Hopi language and the differences in how a Hopi speaker
and an European distinguish the concept of time (Hussein, 2012) through which he derived that
abstract difference in classifying systems was greater than vocabulary differences alone (Hussein,
2012), a view supported by the conclusions to the two experiments described by Kay and
Kempton(1984).
Having defined the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, I will now proceed to describe how different
languages differentiate between abstract and common thinking between languages belonging to
the same language family, same linguistic group and between languages belonging to different
language families, finally relating them with my experiences with the Indo-European language,
Gujarati.
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Body:
Explaining Whorf (1940) made his statement the world was organized by the linguistic
system in our minds, we can use the example of doctors, engineers, professors and differentiate
their linguistic patterns from common people (Hussein, 2012). Doctors, for example find it easier
to use complex physiological and pharmaceutical terms on a daily basis; engineers can describe
physical phenomenon with astounding ease; professors frequently use abstract terminologies in
their conversations – all of which is rare and complex for the friendly neighbourhood grocer or
milkman to comprehend.
These differences arise out of constant usage of these terms – in a manner that the cognitive
abilities evolve in a significantly manner than of the average man. We can expand this thought
process to include abstract qualities such as time, sex, number cases in different languages.
Among these the differences in the perception of time has formed the basis of much of
Whorf’s theory. Whorf based his theory on the now-discarded notion that the Hopis did not
quantify time while European languages did (Engle, 2016). Further examples include: the concept
of time varies between cultures as linear and circular. Most of the cultures in the Indosphere view
time as circular – with events that occurred occur in the future, a view stranger to most Westerners
who have a linear version of time (Engle, 2016). However, even among linear perception of time,
there are immense variations of thought processes, such as among the Malagasy-speakers of
Madagascar who the future as ‘something that sneaks up from behind’, while the past is laid out
before us; radically different from the Western viewpoint that the past is behind, but the future lies
ahead of us (Engle, 2016).
A radical extension of the Sapir-Whorf theory and the relation of cognition with linguistic
perceptions of time is displayed in The Story of Our Life – where strange alien life-forms are able
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to write sentences, paragraphs and explain complex phenomenon within a logographic system; but
unlike the Japanese Kana or Egyptian hieroglyphics, these aliens are able to condense their
thoughts into a single semagram – a circular pattern that is equivalent to writing a thought in a
sentence structure with similar ease no matter which direction we start writing. When the
protagonist, a linguist dells into the study of the language, she has ‘visions of the future’, thus in a
massively over-exaggerated application of Sapir-Whorf, the author has tried to portray the SapirWhorf hypothesis (Engle, 2016).
Unlike this radical example, the differences between the Hopi-speakers and the English,
French or German (Standard Average European, SAE) that Whorf noted were that while the Hopis
viewed time as an ongoing set of processes, SAE speakers saw time as events that occurred, occur,
and that will occur (signifying the ability of SAE speakers to quantify time); and thus the Hopis
were unable to segment time, however SAE speakers could successfully segment time (Hussein,
2012). However, even as SAE are a part of the Indo-European family, the separate evolutions of
the of the Indo-European branch have seen different concepts of quantified time. SAE speakers
differentiate time such as yesterday, today and tomorrow, Sanskrit and languages descended from
Sanskrit with their cyclical view of time, represent tomorrow and yesterday (and even the concept
of death – tied in with the belief in reïncarnation) with the same word - kāḷa/kāla.
When similar test was held to determine linguistic relativity between Navajo
speakers and English speakers – wherein Navajo children and English-speaking children were
given objects with distinct shapes and colours to classify, it was found that Navajo-speaking
children consistently classified objects according to their shapes, but English-speaking children
grouped them in accordance to their colours. An important factor to note is that Navajo is
composed of cryptotypes i.e. classifications between objects occurred in terms of shapes and
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animacy (Lee, 1996), while English is a phenotypical language with overt and covert markers for
genders (with distinctions of he/she/it). This proves that speech patterns cognition, and since
speech is patterned by language, language patterns (albeit indirectly) cognitive capabilities.
Meanwhile another method of understanding linguistic relativity is understanding a
person’s sense of orientation (Calderon, De Pascale, & Adamou, 2019). Recent research has
suggested that mental representations result from a combination of linguistic abstraction, perpetual
experience as well as cultural and recent experiences (Bylund & Panos, 2017) (Casasanto &
Bottini, 2014).
While studying the Gurundji people of Australia, they were given a simple memory task –
looking at a row of animals and arranging them after turning 180°. The Gurundji speakers made
use of geocentric principles (cardinal directions) to place the animals in an attempt to recreate the
scene, however more educated and English speakers, when given the same task made use of
egocentric orientation (left and right to the individual) to recreate the animal positions (Meakins,
Jones, & Algy, 2016). A similar study conducted with the Yucatec Mayas yielded similar
geocentricity on the lines of the Gurundji peoples (Le Guen, 2011). This supports the Whorfian
hypothesis of linguistic relativity.
Another proof of linguistic relativity is given via placement events. Placement events occur
when an object is taken and placed at a certain location (Koster & Cadierno, 2018). Placement
events have been studied because different languages have displayed significant variations in
placement verbs (Ameka & Levinson, 2007) (Kopecka & Narasimhan, 2012).
For example, in German the verbs for placement are expressed with respect to the
horizontal – legen (lay down) and stellen (to stand up), while in Spanish, the verbs depict the action
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– poner (to put) and dejar (to leave in place). This distinction allows the categorization of
languages into two categories: verb-framed languages such as Spanish and satellite-framed
languages such as German (Talmy, 2000). This relative lingual differences result in Dutch children
learning German, a Germanic language with more ease than French, a Romance language
(Kopecka & Narasimhan, 2012).
I will now relate the examples described above to my experience with speaking two
languages: English and Gujarati.
One of the most striking differences between Gujarati and English is the sentence structure.
Gujarati is written using the Gujarati script, an abugida evolved from the Devanagari script to
facilitate faster and more rounded (cursive) writing (Shastri, 2014). In a manner similar to how the
Mandarin script affected the reading and comprehension patterns of students from Hong Kong
(Hoosain, 1986), learning the Gujarati script impacted my cognitive abilities.
The Gujarati languages follows the Sanskrit language in semantics and grammar. The
Gujarati language derives its words from the concept of dhatu (root), with every word deriving its
meaning from the root of the word. While reading Gujarati, as well as reading most of the IndoAryan languages that are not heavily influenced by Perso-Arabic and Turkish loanwords, you tend
to focus upon the root of the word, its etymology to understand the meaning of word given.
Reading Brahmic scripts, especially North Indian Brahmic scripts, you tend to develop a
strange pattern of reading a word, with your eye being wary of the diacritic marks that envelop the
written consonant from all ends, along with the deadly case of conjunct consonants – creating a
compact script that tries to represent every phoneme possible in Indian languages within a single
glyph. Complex conjunctions such as the ścchva from śvāsōścchvāsa (શ્વાસોશ્છ્વાસ) being
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represented by a single glyph – શ્છ્વ. The pattern of reading is rarely just horizontal, but similar
to hieroglyphics where the characters were grouped into boxes for aesthetic pleasure (Manley &
Collier, 1998), the characters in Gujarati too are grouped for aesthetic beauty and functionality.
However, the most defining feature about Gujarati is that is among the rare Indo-European
languages that not just discriminates between a formal and an informal ‘you’, but also it has an
inclusive and an exclusive ‘we’.
The t-v distinction has been highly commented upon, and English possessed the t-v
distinction until not too long ago. The informal ‘you’ i.e. thou, thee and thy are passed into
antiquity as the social distinctions that existed once in the feudal age, no longer exist. But in
Gujarati, the informal ‘you’ – tu and the formal ‘you’ – tame still exists, denoting not just social
classes and hierarchies, but denoting the sex of addressee with tu reserved for women tame
reserved for men and people older than the addressor.
Furthermore, Gujarati also has the distinction between the inclusive and exclusive ‘we’ –
with the inclusive ‘we’ denoted by āpaṇe and the exclusive ‘we’ denoted by the term ‘āpḍe’. This
distinction furthers a segmentation of the Gujarati language dividing the world into exclusive
halves – which are often not compatible with each other – facilitating the process of tribalism and
the formation of closed group of like-minded and socio-economically similar individuals (a
habitus) (Mehta, 2020) furthering tribalism and a division of the society.
In Gujarati authority and respect are shown via deference to person’s age, and prestige is
equally awarded through merit; this has led Gujarati society to obey and defer to an older man
irrespective of his social standing, but in an English speaking environment, instead of deference,
English speakers are more compassionate and try ensure the well-being of the senior man. Thus,
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we can show the distinctions between the two cultures, and give another example to the SapirWhorf hypothesis.
Conclusion:
Thus through the arguments presented above, I have given a brief overview of the SapirWhorf hypothesis and its major postulate that language defines thinking patterns (Whorf, 1940)
(Kay & Kempton, 1984).
I have followed various experiments and researches and come to the conclusion that there
is some truth to Whorf’s statement (Calderon, De Pascale, & Adamou, 2019) (Hussein, 2012)
(Koster & Cadierno, 2018), tying them up to the arguments provided in Cognition by Brown
(1976) that demonstrated the Boasian arguments.
I have also ensured to look at how different scripts affect cognitive patterns (Hoosain,
1986) and the evolution of the Gujarati script (Shastri, 2014). I have given examples from my
personal usage and observation of Gujarati and English – differentiating between the two
(borrowing from the patterned difference between German and Spanish, SEA and Hopi etc.) (Le
Guen, 2011) (Bylund & Panos, 2017) (Ameka & Levinson, 2007).
And at last, I would like to end the essay hoping to have successfully established my views
on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
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