Transcript Occasionally one hears that the language which one

Language and Thought
Occasionally one hears that the language which one
speaks determines how one thinks.
Notice that if true, one could generate a
ranking of languages according to whether
one could think 20th century thoughts in
them.
One could say that some people are truly
more primitive than others because the
language they speak does not enable them to
think the kinds of things that peoples with
elaborate technologies think.
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Language and Thought con’t
This position was formally stated by Benjamin Lee
Whorf and Edward Sapir
Edward Sapir was a professional linguist
Benjamin Whorf was a fire inspector who
liked to learn exotic languages
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, linguistic determination:
states that people’s thoughts are determined by the
categories made available by their language, and its
weaker version, linguist relativity, stating that
differences among languuges cause differences in
the thoughts of their speakers
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Language and Thought con’t
The implication is heavy: the foundational
categories of reality are not “in” the world but are
imposed by one’s culture
An example of this way of thinking:
Whorf argued that Hopi might be
better suited then English for
discussions about physics
English inflects the verb for
tense and thereby
grammatically drags in time
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Language and Thought con’t
and confuses the discussion
Hopi does not require that a sentence
mentions time in any way.
The Whorf/Sapir Hypothesis has been
experimentally probed and no evidence for it has
ever been found.
For example, Navaho requires that nouns be
grammatically classified according to the
shape of their referents. But Navaho speakers
are no better than anyone else at classifying
objects by shape
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Language and Thought con’t
Pinker for example states unequivocally:
That it is wrong, all wrong. The idea that
thought is the dame thing as language is an
example of what can be called a
conventionally absurdity:
a statement that goes against all common
sense but that everyone believes because
they dimly recall having heard it somewhere
and because it is so pregnant with
implications
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Language and Thought con’t
other examples include: the fact that
we use only five percent of our brains, that
lemmings commit mass suicide, that the Boy
Scout Manual annually outsells all other
books, and that we can be coerced into
buying by subliminal messages
Think about it. We have all had the experience of
uttering or writing a sentence, then stopping and
realizing that it wasn’t exactly what we meant to
say.
To have that feeling, there would have to be a
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Language and Thought con’t
“ what we meant to say” that is different from what
we said.
Also, sometimes it is not easy to find any words
that properly convey a thought.
And if thoughts depended on words, how could a
new word ever be coined? How could a child learn
a word to begin with? How could translation from
one language to another be possible?
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The Hopi and Time
So let us look at Whorf’s statement that “Hopi does
not require that a sentence mention time in any way”
Whorf wrote that the Hopi language contains “no
words, grammatical forms, constructions, or
expressions that refer directly to what we call ‘time’,
or to past, or future, or to enduring or lasting.” He
suggested, too, that the Hopi had “no general notion
or intuition of TIME as a smooth flowing continuum
in which everything in the universe proceeds at an
equal rate, out of a future, through a present, into a
past.”
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The Hopi and Time con’t
Remarkable this would be indeed.
However, what do we make of the following
sentence translated from Hopi?
Then indeed, the following day, quite early in
the morning at the hour when people pray to
the sun, around that time then he woke up the
girl again.
Perhaps the Hopi are not as oblivious to time as
Whorf made them out to be.
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The Hopi and Time con’t
The anthropologist Ekkehart Malotki, who studied
the Hopi extensively, who reported this sentence,
also showed that Hopi speech contains tense,
metaphors for time, units of time, ways to quantify
units of time, and words like “ancient”, “quick”,
“long time”, and “finished”.
No one is really sure how Whorf came up with his
outlandish claims, but his limited, badly analyzed
sample of Hopi speech and his long-time leanings
toward mysticism must have contributed.
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Eskimos and Snow
A residue of this idea which persists like a bad
cold is that Eskimos (more properly Inuit and
Yupik peoples) have large numbers of words for
snow and that this is somehow indicative of a
special affinity that these people have for snow.
There are a number of technical problems
with this proposal.
1) What do we mean by word?
Are snow, snowy, snowier, and snowiest to be
counted as different words?
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Eskimos and Snowcon’t
These languages are richly inflected and a
single root could have potentially infinite
forms
2) The languages of the Inuit and Yupik are spoken
in Siberia, Greenland, Alaska, and Canada and
vary widely
3) These is wide variation between urban and rural
people
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Eskimos and Snow con’t
Given the technical problems and the rejection of
the Whorf/Sapir Hypothesis, why does this idea
persist?
Pullum argues that it is a result of
intellectual laziness
People are willing to accept and repeat
factoids without ever checking their validity
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The Origin of the Myth
The first reference in the literature to Eskimos and
snow is from Franz Boas in 1911
In making the point that some languages use
separate words to refer to related concepts,
another can use a single word and modify it
Thus, English has the single word snow
which we use to form other words: snow
storm, snow house, snow drift, but Eskimo
has aput “snow on the ground”, gana
“falling snow”
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The Origin of the Myth con’t
piqsirpoq “drifting snow” and qimuqsuq “ a
snow drift”
Whorf used the Boas reference in 1940 and inflated
the number of different kinds of snow, hinting that
Eskimos had a word for each one of them and
included a connection between the number of words
and Eskimos’ conceptual representation of the world.
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The Origin of the Myth con’t
“To an Eskimo, [a single word for snow] would be
almost unthinkable; he would say that falling snow,
slushy snow,and so on, are sensuously and operationally
different [and so] he uses different words for them and
other kinds of snow”
Whorf’s paper has been reprinted many times and is
thought to be a “classic”
Notice that his contrast between English and Eskimo is
misleading.
English also distinguishes between falling snow
and slush
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The Origin of the Myth con’t
Why should we think that snow feels different to an
Eskimo than to someone from the south?
Whereas Boas listed 4 words, Whorf now claims 7
words.
The next culprit is Roger Brown who writes in 1958 in
a discussion of Whorf that there are 3 words for snow
in Eskimo
We now have sources that claim that there are 3,
4, and 7 words for snow
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The Origin of the Myth con’t
This establishes a tradition of vacuity to claims
about Eskimos and snow
There is no responsibility for getting the
number right.
After Roger Brown, the Eskimo example enters the
popular culture
In the play The Fifth of July (1978) it is claimed
that there are 50 words
In a trivia encyclopedia (1984), the number is 9
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The Origin of the Myth con’t
In the New York Times (1984), the number is
100
On a weather forecast (1984), the number is 200
In the Science section of the New York Times
(1988), it is 4 dozen
The lesson from this is that myths are perpetuated when
people do not bother to investigate whether or not they
are true
Whorf for example never met a Native American
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The Right Answer
In the Dictionary of the West Greenlandic Eskimo
Language (1972) it cites just two words
aput “snow on the ground” and qanik “snow in
the air”
Linguists who actually work on languages of the North
are reluctant to enter the debate because of the technical
problems mentioned earlier
If terms like Eskimo, word, and snow are not
precisely defined it isn’t possible to answer a
question like, How many words does Eskimo
have for snow?
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The Right Answer con’t
Which language are we talking about?
What is a word?
How do we know that a word really refers to snow?
For example, one of the lists generated in
response to Pullum’s paper includes igluksaq
said to mean “snow for igloo making”
Actually, it is built from iglu “house” and
ksaq “material for” and could be applied
to plywood as well.
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The Right Answer con’t
If all these technical problems can be worked out then
one professional linguist will agree that there are about
12 words for snow.
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How Many Words in English?
Suppose that a dialect of Eskimo has 12 words for
snow.
Is this interesting? Remarkable?
Can we draw any conclusions from it?
Does it really mean that Eskimos have a
special affinity to snow?
Does it distinguish Eskimo in an
interesting way from any other language?
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How Many Words in English? Con’t
How many words for snow in English?
snow, slush, sleet, blizzard, powder, popcorn,
hardpack, crystal, avalanche, flurry, dusting,
flake
Borderline: frost, lime, hoar
Does this mean that English speakers also have a
special affinity for snow?
How many words in English for hair colour?
blond(e), brunette, towhead, platinum, sandy,
redhead, auburn, strawberry blonde, black etc.
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How Many Words in English? Con’t
How many words in English for horse?
horse, pony, nag, shetland, colt, foal, steed,
dobbin, mare, filly, stallion, gelding, bronco,
mustang, broomtail, bay, bayard, chestnut, gray,
grizzle, roan, sorrel, pinto, piebald, skewback,
calico, paint, etc.
It is unremarkable that fine distinctions are made
among objects that we commonly work with or are
exposed to
In other words, big deal!
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But how many words are there really?
How many Eskimo words for snow are there?
The languages that the Eskimo people speak around
the top of the world, in places as far apart as Siberia,
Alaska, Canada, and Greenland, differ quite a lot in
details of vocabulary.
Brody speaks of his experience living with the Inuit
of the eastern Arctic (Canada).
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But how many words are there really?
Brody states that the question about snow is, or has
become one of phenomenology rather than ethnography.
An ethnographer can explain the ways in which
a particular person or group of people describes
and responds to and manipulates the world.
A broad humanistic assumption stands
behind such work, namely that all people are
using the same kind of brain to achieve their
particular version of the human task, albeit in
varying circumstances
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Phenomenology
Pastoralists in the Arabian desert, farmers in the west of
Ireland, and Inuit in the High Arctic live in very
different circumstances.
They have very different ways of talking about
the world.
But according to the ethnographer, if they make
the necessary effort, people in each of these
societies can learn the language of the others.
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Phenomenology con’t
In this view, all languages are intertranslatable, and the
meanings that specific circumstances give to words are
also communicable
So we can say that the Inuktitut word for the sea
bird qaqudluk translated into English as
“fulmar”; and we can explain that the Inuit have
built into their word the sound a fulmar makes
(qaqu) and an infix that signifies wrongness or
unpleasantness (dlu), since the fulmar has an
unpleasant smelling gland at the base of its bill
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Phenomenology con’t
that makes it a bird one eats, if at all, only after
some careful preparation.
This is a simple example, but a different one would be a
matter of degree, not kind. Many words may be
necessary to achieve a good translation, but it usually can
be done.
Those who challenge this belief in the intertranslatability
of languages and cultures often look to the Inuktitut
words for snow to argue that the way the world in known
in language determines the speaker’s reality
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Phenomenology con’t
According to this view, the words of the Inuit
create the world as well as describe it.
That is to say,those who are not Inuit (or have
not been brought up in the language and
environment of the Inuit) are unable to know or
actually “see” the world that the Inuit know and
see.
Another way that this point has been made is in relation
to the nature of language itself: a person can explain
how a word in used and what it refers to, but the
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Phenomenology con’t
word’s meaning depends on knowing a web of contexts
and concealed related meanings.
A good example is the word “worship”: how can
anyone who has not lived in a society that
practices some form of religious worship
understand what the word really implies?
Therefore, it is held, the language of the Inuit cannot be
translated into the language of Qallunaat.
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Phenomenology con’t
The varieties of snow and ice are things that the Inuit
differentiate and talk about.
For example, the language for snow is integral to
making decisions that will determine success or
failure of hunting, and has vital importance in
assessing probable degree of comfort and
discomfort, as well as the dangers, of even a
short journey.
There is nothing surprising about the richness of
Inuktitut when it comes to snow.
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Phenomenology con’t
There may be grammatical forms in a language, for
example the forms in Athabaskan languages, to do with
motion and time, that may indeed be difficult for a
speaker of Indo-European languages to grasp.
Yet, even in these cases, the difficulty of
translation relates to unfamiliarity, not to any
seeming intrinsic incomprehensibility.
Learning to use words and grammar presents one kind
of problem; learning the meanings of words and the
intentions of grammatical devices presents another.
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Phenomenology con’t
In so far as one can learn the latter, the ethnographic
assumption about the intertranslatability of all
languages would appear to be sound.
In the debate about whether language creates reality or
reality creates language, perhaps we can have our cake
and eat it too. There are profound differences between
hunter-gatherers and other peoples, and these
differences are going to be evidenced in language.
On the other hand languages are for the most part
intertranslatable.
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Dialects
All speakers of English can talk to each other and pretty
much understand each other, yet no two speak exactly the
same.
Differences can be due to age, sex, state of health, size,
personality, emotional state, and personal idiosyncrasies.
The unique characteristics of the language of an individual
speaker are referred to as the speaker’s idiolect.
English may then be said to consist of some 4 000 000 000
idiolects, the approximate number of speakers of English
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Dialects con’t
Beyond these individual differences, the language
of a group of people may show regular variations
formthat used by other groups of speakers of that
language.
When the language spoken in different
geographical regions and among different social
groups shows systematic differences, the groups
are said to speak different dialects of the same
language.
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Dialects con’t
The dialects of a single language may thus be
defined as mutually intelligible forms of a language
that differ in systematic ways from each other.
Many North Americans encounter British
dialects that are so different as to be nearly
unintelligible; nevertheless, speakers of all
these dialects insist that they are speaking
English.
Speakers may eventually be able to detect
systematic differences between their dialects
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Dialects con’t
However, it is not always easy to decide whether the
systematic differences between two speech
communities reflect two dialects or two different
languages.
A rule-of -thumb: “When dialects become
mutually unintelligible these ‘dialects’ become
different languages”.
However, to define “mutually intelligible” is itself a
difficult task.
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Dialects con’t
Examples: Danish/Swedish/Norwegian
Hindi/Urdu
Mandarin/Cantonese
Conclusion:
A clear-cut distinction between language and
dialects has evaded linguistic scholars.
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Regional Dialects
Dialectal diversity develops when people are
separated from each other geographically and
socially.
The changes that occur in the language
spoken is one are or group do not
necessarily spread to another.
Dialect differences tend to increase proportionally
to the degree of communicative isolation between
groups.
North America and England in the 18th
century: communicative isolation
Ling 100: Week Ten
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Regional Dialects con’t
The political separation of Canada and the US has
encouraged dialectal differences.
Today, isolation is less pronounced because of the
mass media, and travel by jet, but even within one
country regionalism persists.
No evidence to show that any dialect
leveling is occurring.
A change that occurs in one region and fails to
spread to other regions of the language community
gives rise to dialect differences.
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Regional Dialects con’t
When enough such differences give the language
spoken in a particular region its own “flavour”,
that version of the language is referred to as a
regional dialect.
Examples: Boston/Newfoundland
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Accents
Regional phonological and phonetic distinctions
are often referred to as different accents.
Thus, accent refers to the characteristics of
speech that convey information about a
speaker’s dialect which may reveal in what
country or what part of the country the
speaker grew up.
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Dialects of North America
The regional dialects of American and Canadian
English alike find their roots in the speech of the
British colonists who settled North America in the
16th century through the 18th century, so it comes
as no surprise to discover that they are alike in
many respects, so much so that we may speak of
Canadian and American English as part of a larger
“North American English”.
Dialectical differences can be found
throughout both countries.
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Dialects of North America con’t
These differences are the result of:
phonological change
ex. r-less dialects
lexical differences
Do you call it a pail or a bucket? Do
you draw water from a faucet or from a
spigot? Do you pull down the blinds, the
shades, or the curtains when it gets dark?
Do you wheel the baby, or do you ride it or
roll it? In a baby carriage, a buggy, a
coach, or a cab?
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African American English
Most of the regional dialects of North America are,
to a great extent, free from stigma even though they
may be parodied by members of other dialect
groups.
One dialect in the US, however, had been a victim
of prejudice.
African American English (AAE)
As with any dialect there are systematic differences
between AAE and other forms of English, just as
there are with Australian and Canadian English etc.
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African American English con’t
Phonology of African American English:
A few similarities and differences between AAE and
dialects of Canadian English are as follows:
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African American English con’t
Syntactic Differences between AAE, AE, and CE
Syntactic differences also exist between dialects. It
is the syntactic differences that have often been used
to illustrate the “illogic” of AAE, yet just such
differences point to the fact that AAE is as
syntactically complex and a “logical” as AE or CE.
1) Double Negatives
2) Deletion of the Verb Be
3) Habitual Be
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