Language, Thought, and Reality : Selected Writings

293 Pages·1957·6.544 MB·

by  Benjamin Lee Whorf, John B. Carroll (ed.)

Language
c=::===
Thought
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and Reality
edited by John B Carroll
LANGUAGE,
THOUGHT,
and REALITY
BLANK PAGE
LANGUAGE}
THOUGHT,
and REALITY
SELECTED WRITINGS OF BENJAMIN LEE WHORF
Edited and with an introduction by
JOHN B. CARROLL
Foreword by STUART CHASE
THE MIT PRESS
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Cambridge, Massachusetts
Copyright © 19 56 by
the Mas·sachusetts Institute of Technology
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in
any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording, or by any illformation storage and
retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN 978-0-262-23003-2 (he. : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-262-73006-8 (pb. : alk. paper)
Library of Congress catalog card number: 56-5 367
Printed in the United States of America
30 29
FOREWORD
Once in a blue moon a man comes along who grasps the relationship
between events which have hitherto seemed quite separate, and gives
mankind a new din1ension of knowledge. Einstein, demonstrating the
relativity of space and ti1ne, was such. a n1an. In another field and on
a less cosmic level, Benjan1in Lee Whorf was one, to rank some day
perhaps with such great social scientists as Franz Boas and Willian1
James.
He grasped the relationship between human language and human
thinking, how language indeed can shape our innermost thoughts.
We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity, which holds
that all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same
picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar,
or can in some way be calibrated.
Inda-European languages can be roughly calibrated-English, French,
German, Russian, Latin, Greek, and the rest; but when it comes to
Chinese, Maya, and Hopi, calibration, says Wharf, is structurally diffi
cult if not impossible. Speakers of Chinese dissect nature and the
universe differently from Western speakers. A still different dissection
is made by various groups of American Indians, Africans, and the
speakers of many other tongues.
Whorf was a profound scholar in the con1paratively new science of
linguistics. One reason why he casts so long a shadow, I believe, is that
he did not train for it. He trained for chemical engineering at M.I.T.,
and thus ,acquired a laboratory approach and frame of reference. The
work in linguistics was literally wrung out of him. Some driving inner
compulsion' forced him to the study of words and language-not, if you
please, the n1astery of foreign languages, but the why and how of lan
guage, any language, and its competence as a vehicle for meaning.
v
Vl FOREWORD
As a writer, I have long- heen :interested in semantics, sometimes de
fined as "the systematic study of meaning." It does a writer no harm,
I hold, to know what he is talking about. Whorf, using linguistics as
a tool for the analysis of meaning, has n1ade an important contribution
to semantics. No careful student of communication and meaning can
afford to neglect him. One might add that no philosophical scientist
or scientific philosopher can afford to neglect him. Linguistics, he
boldly proclaims, "is fundamental to the theory of thinking, and in the
last analysis to all human sciences." He is probably right. Every con
siderable advance in science, such as quantum theory, involves a crisis
in communication. The discoverers have to explain first to themselves,
and then to the scientific world, what has been found.
Whorf as I read him n1akes two cardinal hypotheses:
First, that all higher levels of thinking are dependent on language.
Second, that the structure of the language one habitually uses influ-
ences the manner in which one understands his environment. The
picture of the universe shifts from tongue to tongue.
II
There is a good deal of competent scientific support for the first hy
pothesis. The biologist, Julian Huxley, for instance, declares that "the
evolution of verbal concepts opened the door to all further achieve
ments of man's thought." Language, observes Whorf, is the best show
man puts Other creatures have developed rough communication
OIL
systems, but no true language. Language is cardinal in rearing human
young, in organizing human comn1unities, in handing down the culture
from generation to generation. Huxley goes so far as to venture that
adaptation through the culture, depending, of course, on language, may
be displacing the biological processes of evolution. When the next Ice
Age moves down, for instance, instead of growing more fur, homo
sapiens may step up the production of air-conditioning units.
The power to reason constitutes the "uniqueness of man," to philos
ophers as well as biologists. Unprotected by claws, teeth, thick hide,
fleetness of foot, or sheer strength, homo sapiens has to think his way
out of tight places. It has been his chief weapon for survival.
Probably everyone experiences brainstorms too fast to be verbal. In
writing, I frequently have them. But before I can handle such bolts
..
FOREWORD Vll
from the blue, I must verbalize them, put them into words for sober
reflection, or discussion. Unverbalized brainstorms do not get any
where on paper.
Perhaps driving a car furnishes a good analogy for Wharf's initial
hypothesis. Light waves and sound waves are enough to guide the
driver's hand on the wheel along straight roads. But threading his way
through a cloverleaf intersection, or reading a road map, will require a
good deal more than reflex action. The first, a very clever chimpanzee
might learn to do; the second is forever beyond it.
III
The Greeks, so active mentally, and so reluctant to exert themselves
in observation post and laboratory/ were the first to inquire into logic
and reason. The Sophists were apparently the Madison Avenue boys
of the Aegean, teaching young men how to capsize an opponent in de
bate or legal case, and to choose the most effective slogans in political
campaigns. Aristotle invented the syllogism, and fashioned his Three
Laws of Thought, beginning with the Law of Identity, A is A, now and
forever-against which we semanticists sometimes protest.
The Greeks took it for granted that back of language was a universal,
uncontaminated essence of reason, shared by all men, at least by all
thinkers. Words, they believed, were but the medium in which this
deeper effulgence found expression. It followed that a line of thought
expressed in any language could be translated without loss of meaning
into any other language.
This view has persisted for 2500 years, especially in academic groves.
Wharf flatly challenges it in his second major hypothesis. "A change
in language," he says, "can transform our appreciation of the Cosmos."
The day-by-day experience of skilled translators at the United Na
tions goes a long way to support him. Edmund S. Glenn of the State
Department, for instance, aided by a grant from the Rockefeller Foun
dation, has waded through masses of U.N. transcriptions, looking for
differences in concepts due to language.2 An English speaker in one of
Mr. Glenn's cases says "I assume"; the French interpreter renders it "I
1 James Harvey Robinson, the historian, lays it to the large number of slaves.
2 Peter T. White, "The Interpreter: Linguist Plus Diplomat." New York Times
Magazine, November 6, 1955.
Vlll FOREWORD
deduce"; and the Russian interpreter "I consider" - By that time the
assumption idea is gone with the wind!
After isolating twenty similar instances, Mr. Glenn concludes that,
while the translation technique was smooth enough on the surface,
"the degree of comn1unication between the Russian and English-speak
ing delegates appears to be nil" in these cases.
If there is thus some difficulty an1ong Western peoples, all speaking
varieties of Inda-European, it is not surprising that a much wider chasm
yawns between languages from wholly different stocks-between the
language of Hopi Indians, say, and English. This is the field which
\Vhorf cultivated intensively, and on which he largely bases his concept
of linguistic relativity.
In English we say "Look at that wave." But a wave in nature never
occurs as a single phenomenon. A Hopi says "Look at that slosh."
The Hopi word, whose nearest equivalent in English is "slosh," gives
a closer fit to the physics of wave motion, connoting n1ovement in a
mass.
"The light flashed," we say in English. Something has to be there
to n1ake the flash; "light" is the subject, "flash" the predicate. The
trend of n1odern physics, however, with its emphasis on the field, is
away from subject-predicate propositions. Thus a Hopi Indian is the
better physicist when he says Reh-pi-"flash"-one word for the whole
performance, no subject, no predicate, no time element. We frequently
read into nature ghostly entities which flash and perform other miracles.
Do we supply them because some of our verbs require substantives in
front of them?
The thoughts of a Hopi about events always include both space and
time, for neither is found alone in his world view. Thus his language
gets along adequately without tenses for its verbs, and permits him to
think habitually in terms of space-time. Properly to understand Ein
stein's relativity a Westerner must abandon his spoken tongue and take
to the language of calculus. But a Hopi, Wharf implies, has a sort of
calculus built into him.
"The formal systematization of ideas in English, German, French,
or Italian seems poor and jejune"- in dealing with certain classes of
phenon1ena, when contrasted with the flexibility and directness of
Amerindian languages. vVhorf demonstrates the trouble we Westerners
FOREWORD IX
have with n1asculine and fe1ninine genders, and with our built-in, two
valucd, either-or logic.
Does the Hopi language show here a higher plane of thinking, a more
rational analysis of situations than our vaunted English? Of course it
does. In this field and in various others, English compared to Hopi
is like a bludgeon compared to a rapier.
For other classes of phenon1ena English might be the rapier and
Hopi the bludgeon. Both languages have been developed over the
ages, largely unconsciously, to meet the experiences and problems of
their speakers, and we cannot call one higher or more n1atnre than the
other. For, while hun1an societies vary widely in their supply and con
sumption of artifacts, the human mind, reflected in language, shows no
examples of primitive functioning. . . . "American Indian and African
languages abound in finely wrought, beautifully logical discriminations
about causation, action, result, dynamic or energic quality, directness
of experience, all matters of the function of thinking, indeed the quint
essence of the rational."
As you will see in Mr. Carroll's excellent biography, Whorf early in
his Indian language studies noted similarities between certain Mayan
inscriptions and that on an Aztec temple in Tepoztlan. I climbed to
that rocky shrine in the same year, 1930, though not to study the hiero
glyphics. \\Tith Aztec he combined studies in Maya and then in Hopi.
He found the last the most subtle and expressive of the three, and con1-
piled a Hopi dictionary, as yet unpublished. If he seems sometimes
more affectionate than coldly scientific about his Indian tongues, it is
easy to forgive him.
IV
Most of the above quotations I have taken from a monograph, also
hitherto unpublished, which Wharf wrote in 1936. You will find it at
page 65, and it deals with the thought processes of primitive peoples.
He had planned to send it to I-I. G. \Vells and H. L. Mencken, as well
as to various distinguished linguists like Sapir. I wish that he n1ight
have done so, for it brings together all his ren1arkable qualities: his
learning, his creative imagination, his idea of linguistic relativity, and
his hopes for the future. What the essay says to me, a layman, is in
essence this: