The Sapir-Whorf

Hypothesis: Relativism & Determinism

Nathaly Peñaloza- Armando Yánez- Felipe Soria- María Vivas

 Edward Sapir (1884-1939)
• Born on January 26 1884 in the town of Lauenburg
• His first language was Yiddish.
• His family moved to the United States in 1890
• He was admitted in Columbia in 1901.
• Studied Latin, Greek, and old germanic languages.
• Was influenced by Boas.
 Fieldwork
• Whishram Chinook Language (1905), Takelma (1906). Collaborations with
Kroeber in the “Yana” extinct language.
• He moved to Canada in 1910.
• He returned to California in 1915 to work with Ishi.
• In 1931 he became a professor in Yale, teaching B.L. Whorf his “impact of
culture in personality” theory.
 Linguistic Determinism
• Thoughts are determined by the categories proportioned by the language a
speaker uses.
• These categories do not belong to the “real world” but are imposed by the
culture.
• It explains superficially how humans know and discover about the world they
live in as it conceptualize experiences, knowledge, lexicon and allows
communication for us to participate within society.
 Principal Theories
1. DRIFT- Language is alive.
2. Differences between languages come from different ways of expressing experiences.
(Language range of lexicon)
3. Humans don’t live only in the objective world, language is their medium of
adjusting to society, a incidental mean to communicating with others.
4. Language creates paths to understand different realities.
 Origins of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
• Language as a living thing.
• Language as a mean of communication
• Different “worlds” create different languages.
• Language itself can change strong statements (Hopi: animate and non-
animante suffixes)
1. Focused mainly on Hopi and its animate and inanimate suffixes
2. “Cryptotypes”: semantic or syntactic features that are not part of the speech but
are understood by the speaker anyways. Couldn’t apply this notions to European
families.
3. Language gives its speakers the ability to convey certain knowledge more efficiently, as it gives the
lexicon and necessary perceptive to understand certain phenomena on advanced levels.
 “A mind which thinks at its own expense will
always interfere with language” Cohen
• Language has a positive influence over humans. (Expression,
communication, knowledge)
• Humans have a negative influence over language. (critical failures, lexicon
confusion, conceptual connotation and denotation)
• Humans are at the mercy of language, as it exerts a tyrannical hold over their
minds.
• Speakers are part of an absolutely obligatory agreement to conceptualize the
world in that certain way their language is able to do.
 Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941)

• A descendant of seventeenth-century English emigrants.

• After taking a degree in chemical engineering he began a career as a fire-
prevention inspector in Connecticut.
• Whorf learned lessons from his professional work which encouraged his
belief that world-view is molded by language.
• When Sapir moved to Yale University Whorf became a regular collaborator
of his and began to focus his attention mainly on Hopi, a language of
Arizona.
 Linguistic Relativism.
• Language does not determine the thought of a community about the world,
it just lead this thought.
• According to this theory the languages affect our thinking in different ways,
but this does not mean that we cannot open ourselves to new ways of
thinking.
 Covert Categories
• Words that resemble other nouns but they cannot be reduced to pronouns.
I live in it (that house-the basement)
I live in Kendal, I live in Bulgaria
• Whorf felt that such covert categories were more telling than the overt
categories of a language in establishing the world-view of its speakers.
• The distinction between animate and inanimate exists as a covert category in
Hopi. Any noun used to refer to a living being is pluralized in a special way.
 The Hypothesis
• A man´s language molds his perception of reality, or that the world a man
inhabits is a linguistic construct.
 Examples
• In the language Guugu Yimithirr, an indigenous language from Australia,
people use the cardinal points instead of “left” and “right” to give directions.
• This does not mean that this community does not understand the concept of
“left” and “right” but they have their own way to orientate in the world that
surround them.
 Color Investigation
• Berlin and Kay developed an investigation about colors to determine at what
extent color classification is universal.
• The result show that there are restrictions about the quantity of terms for
colors and that each language apply this terms in a really different way.
• According to the study made by Berlin and Kay there are eleven universal
colors which are: white, black, red, green, yellow, blue, brown, lilac, purple,
orange and grey.
• The speakers of a language use categories which are available in their mother
tongue to describe the world, this does not mean that they cannot see an
obvious reality but they create associations which are received from the
experience. (Hickman 1987: 73)