LING 200 Lecture Notes - Lecture 12: Blauw-Wit Amsterdam, Exoticism, Hopi Language
Monday, October 30th, 2017
Linguistic Relativity:
Perspective
• For the first part of the course we have been covering a range of topics on the individual level
• We looked at your brain on language and language cognition • We asked hat do ou ko,
he ou ko a laguage? • We explored the process of learning one language as a child
• For the rest of the semester, we will be covering a range of topics that look at language with a
wider angle lens
- Relativity- Language variation - Language change - Language contact - Language loss
Linguistic relativity
• Does language shape our view of the world?
• Hee ee ot talkig aout ou pesoal epeiee ith laguage, but facts about our
language (structure, lexicon, etc)
• (probably) common answer = YES
• What Ill t to oie ou of = NO
Background: Sapir and Whorf
• Edward Sapir (1884-1939) – extremely influential and important anthropological linguist
(Americanist)
• Benjamin Whorf (1897-1941) – fire prevention engineer and amateur linguistic
• Sapir• Non-industrial people are not savages, their worldview is as valid as our own •
Speakers of different languages have to pay attention to different aspects of reality
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• Sapir worked extensively on the indigenous languages of North America
- Non-industrial people are not savages, their worldview is as valid as our own
- He was especially interested in the relation between linguistic differences, and
differences in cultural world views
- Speakers of different languages have to pay attention to different aspects of
reality
Sapir and Whorf• Sapir-Whorf hypothesis holds that the structure of a language affects
its speakers' world view
• Core idea - there are certain thoughts of an individual in one language that cannot be
understood by those who live in another language.
Determinism vs. Relativism
• Linguistic determinism: the language we speak determines how we perceive and think about
the old. stog esio.
• Linguistic relativism: different languages encode different
categories and therefore speakers of different languages think about the
world in different ways.
e.g. Russian has words for dark blue (siniy) and light blue (goluboy), English uses the adjectives
dark and light to express this difference.
Whorf on Hopi
• Whofs lai
• In contrast to English Hopi does not treat the flow of time as a sequence of distinct,
countable instances, like "thee das" o "fie eas
• Rather – it treats time as a single process and that consequently it has no nouns referring to
units of time
• He proposed that this view of time was fundamental to Hopi culture and explained certain
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