Whorfian Linguistic Determinism and the Search for “Indo-Europeans”

[Guest guest]

" But while we all know when drawing on common sense that thoughts can't be

pushed around by words, many people hold the opposite belief when they

intellectualize. The idea that the language people speak controls how they

think—is a recurring theme in intellectual life. It was popular among

twentieth-century behaviorist, who wanted to replace airy-fairy notions like

" beliefs " with concrete responses like words, whether spoken in public or

muttered silently. In the form of the Whorfian or Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (named

after the linguist Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Lee Whorf), it was a

staple of courses on language through the early 1970's by which time it had

penetrated the popular consciousness as well. (While writing this book, I

(Pinker) had to stop telling people that it was about " language and thought "

because they all assumed it was about how language SHAPED thought—the only

relation between the two that occurred to them.). The cognitive evolution in

psychology, which made the study of pure thought possible, and a number of

studies showing meager effects of language on concepts, appeared to kill the

hypothesis by the 1990s', and I gave it an obituary in my book The Language

Instinct (Pinker 2007, p. 124, parentheses and emphasis in the original).

" The nagging problem with Linguistic Determinism is that the many ways in which

language might be related to thought tend to get blurred together, and banal

observations are often sexed up as radical discoveries (Pinker 2007, p. 125). "

" As it happens the words for snow in languages like Yupik and Intuit are

probably no more numerous than in English (it depends on how you count), but

that hardly matters. The idea that Eskimos pay more attention to varieties of

snow BECAUSE THEY HAVE MORE WORDS FOR IT is so topsy-turvy (can you think of ANY

OTHER REASON why Eskimos might pay attention to snow?) that it's hard to believe

it would be taken seriously were it not for the feeling of cleverness it affords

at having transcended common sense. Not only does a Whorfian explanation of

Eskimo words for snow reverse cause and effect, but it exaggerates the depth of

cognitive difference between the peoples involved in the first place. As

Newsweek noted, even if an Eskimo typically does pay more attention to varieties

of snow, all it would take is a shovelful of slush to get a non-Eskimo to notice

the differences (Pinker 2007, pp. 125-126, parentheses and emphasis in the

original). "

" The stock of words in a language reflects the kinds of things its speakers deal

with in their lives and hence think about. This, of course is a non-Whorfian

interpretation of the Eskimo-snow factoid. The Whorfian interpretation is a

classic example of the fallacy of confusing correlation with causation. In the

case of varieties of snow and words for snow, not only did the snow come first,

but when people change their attention to snow, they change their words as the

result. That's how meteorologists, skiers, and New Englanders coin new

expressions for the stuff, whether in circumlocutions (wet snow, sticky snow) or

in neologisms (hard pack, powder, dusting, flurries). Presumably it didn't

happen the other way around—that vocabulary show-offs coined new words for snow,

then took up skiing or weather forecasting because they were intrigued by their

own coinages (Pinker 2007, p. 127). "

Comment: Whorfian Determinism is very much alive in Indo-European linguistics

when they try to locate the original " Indo-European " speakers based on

reconstructed words for horse, wheel and the chariot. People pay more

attention to weather forecasts these days because they don't want their cars to

get stuck in snow; not because the English language itself originated in snow

capped mountains! The misleading and racially charged corollary of Whorfianism

is that Eskimos are too dumb to notice water in its various states of

precipitation. So they have a different word for each one.

Pinker, Steven (2007). The stuff of thought: language as a window into human

nature. London, England: Viking Penguin. ISBN: 978-0-670-06327-7

M. Kelkar