Anthropology 350: Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
[Nancy McKee]: Okay, it’s lecture four, and today we get to talk about what is probably the most
interesting and fun thing you can talk about when you’re talking about language and culture: the
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. In fact, we have a whole list here—what we’re going to talk about, the
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, and I just made up these two subcategories and I was very proud of
myself. I think they sound very romantic here. A world made of words that is how the lexicon or
vocabulary of a given language kind of explores for us the world that produced it and how the
grammar of given languages tell us something about the world of its speakers. But before we do
any of that, we have one chore to take care of. We have a few little words. Remember our words
that I gave you on the last video? Let’s see how well you did in writing them in IPA. Here, if we
go to the overhead, there we have—blue looks better than red, doesn’t it? Well, I like to have a
little variety.
Here are our five words. Let’s see how well you did. Portion. Again, if you had a closed ‘o’ here,
I could live with it. I think open ‘o’ is more accurate, but I could still live with it. ‘Shh,’ okay, a
voiceless palatal fricative, you don’t want to have done this. That would be ‘jhh,’ okay. Then
‘en,’ schwa ‘n.’ Regulate. I think the biggest pitfall here might have been this. If you don’t have
the ‘y’ in there, you’d have ‘regoolate,’ which wouldn’t be Standard English. And maybe you
might have had some other symbol for that lower case ‘e,’ but this lower case ‘e’ is the sound ‘a’
and it’s the only symbol that would work. Jugular. Here, we got a ‘j,’ ‘juh,’ a voiced affricate,
and because this syllable is stressed, you use the upside down ‘v’ or caret instead of schwa.
Again, I—actually, I've heard people say juggler, but that isn’t what I said, and so you want to
make sure that you have your nice ‘y’ there. ‘Er,’ remember ‘schwa’ ‘r.’ Methane. I don’t know
why this word came to me. Oh, I guess ‘cause it was a chance to use a voiceless interdental
fricative. ‘Thh.’ If you had this, it’s wrong because that’s voiced ‘thh,’ not methane. So no on
that sucker. And picture. I think that the tempting problem with picture is that you know there’s a
‘t’ in it, and so you want to write a ‘t’ in IPA. So you might have a ‘p’ lurking around here
somewhere, but remember, here we have an affricate and that affricate is a combination of a stop
plus a fricative, and the stop is the ‘t,’ so it’s built in. Picture. I think that would be the problem
there.
Now, maybe just real fast, I could give you one sentence to write. Then I’ll give you your list of
words that we’ll go over in the next episode and then we’ll move onto the Sapir-Whorf
Hypothesis, okay? Now, you listen to me and you write down what I’m saying, and I’ll try to
make it clear. This is the opening line of my very favorite poem. You might have to write more
of this on your exam. I’m very partial and it’s very long. So there’s no end to the number of
exams I can get out of it. I think I can do this until the day I retire. Okay, Elegy Written in a
Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray. Okay.
The curfew tolls the knell. It doesn’t matter if you know what it means. It means the bell’s
ringing, the nighttime bell, but who cares. Just write the sounds. The curfew tolls the knell. The
curfew tolls the knell. Of parting day. Of parting day. Of parting day. The curfew tolls the knell
of parting day. When I teach this class on campus, I sometimes have a friend of mine who
teaches in the Anthropology department and who comes from England read pieces of murder
mysteries, and I find it very difficult to write down what she’s saying and sometimes I find it
difficult to understand what she’s saying.
Okay, let’s take a look on the overhead and see how this looks. The. Now, if I were giving you a
list of words and I gave you the word the, you would probably write this word here with an
upside down v, with a caret, because when you give lists of words every one-syllable word is
stressed. But when you have a sentence, and that's one of the points of doing whole sentences,
then you realized that this word isn’t stressed at all. The curfew. It’s hardly—it’s just barely
there. So, we use a schwa to indicate that it’s an unstressed syllable. And ‘thh.’ Remember—
voiced. Voiced. Voiced. ‘Vvv.’ Voiced interdental fricative. Curfew, here we have an accented
syllable, a stressed syllable. So we’re using a caret here. And again we’ve got to remember to put
that ‘y’ in or it will be ‘cur-foo.’ The curfew tolls. Remember to put an ‘s’—a ‘z’ instead of an
‘s.’ My big failing is screwing that up. The knell. Again, this is hardly pronounced so you just
slide right over it. So it’s a schwa. The knell, eh, that's the eh sound, the Greek epsilon. It’s the
only sound that will work here. Of. The curfew tolls the knell of parting—and so this is hardly
stressed at all, even though it’s a one-syllable word, so we use a schwa again. Parting. ‘Nnn.’
Don’t forget the ‘nn,’ and no ‘g,’ there's no 'g' sound, just ‘nnn.’ That velar nasal. Day. Nice little
‘e,’ lower case ‘e.’ Okay, that wasn’t too hard. Aren’t you getting better at this? Less freaked out
by it? Good.
Okay. Now here’s your list of words that we’re going to cover next time. So be ready. Write
them down. Clock. Clock. Disaster. Disaster. Formulate. Formulate. Peaches. Peaches. Eggshell.
Eggshell. Eggshell. Okay, that’s our—those are our calisthenics—our phonetic calisthenics for
the day. Now it’s time to zoom directly into the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Yes! New camera for
Sapir-Whorf. Now, the thing about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is that it wasn’t invented by Sapir
or Whorf and isn’t a hypothesis. And also, it’s very hard to work with it and it’s very hard to
know what to do with it, but it doesn’t go away because it’s really pretty ingenious.
Edward Sapir was a German born American linguist. He was a son of a canter and he came to
this country when he was five, I think. He was raised in New York as a bilingual German
English speaking child and adult. And he came became a linguist and taught at Columbia, at
Yale—probably other places that I don’t know about. What I always find hard to accept about
Sapir is that his PhD dissertation was eighteen pages long. My PhD dissertation was threehundred and fifty pages long and I would imagine that Sapir said more of value in his eighteen
than I did in my three-hundred and fifty, and it’s always bothered me. Well, that’s who he was.
He was a pretty traditional academic. His student, Benjamin Lee Whorf, was about as
untraditional a student and as untraditional a linguist as you could ever imagine. He was, in fact,
by training, not a linguist at all, but a chemical engineer. And he was apparently a lousy student
at MIT, where he studied chemical engineering, and then he was employed by a giant insurance
company as a safety inspector. But I think maybe not the kind of safety inspector that goes
around from place to place and says, “Pardon me, ma’am. I got to inspect.” I think he was a kind
of higher grade safety inspector than that. But his real love was not safety inspection or even
chemical engineering, his real love was linguistics. And since he was employed as a chemical
engineer and a safety inspector, he didn’t have to worry too much about academic convention,
and he didn’t have to worry too much about whether he was consistent from article to article and
from lecture to lecture. Instead, he could just follow up his own insights, his own ideas, and he
didn’t have to worry about, really, what people thought about him. He had been a student of
Sapir’s and of other people’s as well, but mostly, he was on his own trip, though he was very
heavily influenced by Sapir. He thought about a lot of different stuff. He had—he investigated
Mayan hieroglyphics, for example. His ideas about how to interpret them turned about to be
completely wrong, but so were all the ideas of everybody as to how to interpret them, except
Russians. Only Russians could figure that one out initially.
Okay, so what’s a Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? Well, Sapir and Whorf both died quite young, they
died in their fifties. And after their deaths—they died shortly before WW2—and I was born in
the middle of World War II. I was born in 1944, and I have the feeling that the academic world
was dramatically changed after people came back from the war and graduate schools were chalk
full, and all the people who had just finished degrees before the war were now teaching and there
was kind of an explosion of ideas. Well by that time, Sapir and Whorf were dead, but their
students were now professors, and they were teaching a whole new generation of students,
including my father. And many—the fathers of many people listening, no doubt. And what these
former students of Sapir and Whorf did was basically to collect all their writings, their lectures
and reflect on what it is they were talking about. Well one of the primary things that both Sapir
and Whorf talked about was the relationship between language and people’s habits of thought—
the way people talked, and the way people thought about the world. So they looked at the
structure of language, the way people talked, and the way they viewed the universe, and the way
all of that was put together in a cultural hole. And mostly people refer to this as language and
culture. Sapir and Whorf were both brilliant guys who were insightful and intuitive about
language beyond most people, including most linguists. And they talked a lot about ways in
which they thought language and thought might be related. Sometimes, when they were being
very enthusiastic, they would say stuff like language determines thought. The language you
speak determines the way you’re going to think. Sometimes, they were a little mellower and they
would say something more like, “Well, language very clearly reflects important cultural values.”
It’s a—a much milder thing to say. And then there were a lot of different statements in between.
Your book has collected a couple of quotes, mostly from Sapir. But if you read the collected
works of Sapir, you see a whole range of statements about the relationship between language and
thought. Neither—and Whorf was even more extreme in what he said than Sapir, and more likely
to vary from extreme enthusiasms about the—the directive power of language in human
thinking. But neither one of these two guys ever got together and said, “Well, this is our
hypothesis. Let’s see if we can prove it.” That’s what a hypothesis. It’s a statement that lends
itself to validation or invalidation. Neither one of those two guys ever got—ever produced a
hypothesis about language and culture that could have been validated or invalidated. So the
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is essentially the product of their students talking about the various
kinds of statements Sapir and Whorf themselves made. So it’s not a hypothesis and it wasn’t
made up by either one of the two principles. I like to think—but it doesn’t go away. It’s—it’s not
a hypothesis. Neither one of them made a single statement about it, but it doesn’t go away
because it’s so intriguing, it's so interesting, and it’s been so productive of interesting work and
interesting thought.
When I think about the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, I usually think about it as a continuum.
Ranging from the most extreme, language determines thought, to the most—to the mildest and
most conservative, like they’re related. And where I find the most useful statements are kind of
in the middle. I hate to think of myself of a person as someone who finds the most interesting
thing in the middle. I like to think of myself as more extreme. But it’s more usable. So the way
I’ve kind of put together the—what I consider to be the most useful way of thinking about the
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is this: language and codes and reinforces thought. What that really
means if you unpack it is that a given language will encode or put into words—give lexical and
grammatical shape to a particular view of the universe. Anthropologists are always talking about
world view, or weltanschauung, which is the original German for world view. And what I think
the most powerful Sapir-Whorf vision is is that languages reflect the weltanschauung, the world
view of a particular group of people. And they do that by putting elements of this world view
into the language itself, and I’ll show you how that works here in just a minute. And by so doing,
they reinforce it. Sapir and Whorf weren’t the first guys whoever thought about the connection
between language and thought. The Egyptians thought about it. The Greeks certainly thought
about it. I’ve seen eighteenth and nineteenth century—I don’t really know what they are—kind
of geography books, usually—that talk about how different languages reflect the kind of national
character if you—if you believe in such abstractions of particular groups of people. And they—
they’re usually pretty objectionable. They usually list whoever your enemies are at the time—the
Turks, the Germans, the English—as having terrible, objectionable personal habits that you can
tell just by listening to their language. So it wasn’t that Sapir and Whorf were the first guys to
think of this, but they were the first guys to look at it systematically and in a way that was not
based on ethnocentrism, that was not based on the idea that our language is best 'cause we’re
best.
When Sapir first started thinking systematically about this kind of stuff, he was thinking
primarily about words, about the lexical level. And then what Sapir—sorry, what Whorf added to
that was a very ingenious and complicated way of looking at grammar as reflecting certain habits
of thought and certain views of the universe and when you are talking about habits of thought or
certain views of the universe. When you’re talking about habits of thought, or world view,
neither Sapir nor Whorf was trying to say, you know, if you speak German you’re always going
to think like a German. So let’s look at some of the early investigations into this and see what we
come up with. Anthropologists are fascinated by the way people reckon systems of relatedness.
Kinship. And I’ll tell you, when I was a horrible undergraduate student taking anthropology
courses, I would go into my class, they’d be talking about kinship, there’d be little diagrams on
the blackboard, and I would fall immediately asleep. It did not make any sense to me that you
could get any insight at all out of kinship systems. Then of course I became a born again
graduate student and they began to become fascinating to me. So I’m going to see if I can
fascinate you and we’ll see if we can combine kinship systems with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
Alright. Now let’s do a little overhead here. There we go. Here is a traditional anthropological
kinship chart. If you’ve never taken anthropology, don’t worry about. Only those that have
would recognize this kind of a thing. It doesn’t seem to have caught on. Okay. I’ll show you how
they work. Right here, this square means a person of no specified gender. Could be either male
or a female. And if it’s colored in, it’s labeled ego, which is Latin for I, which is capital I. Me. It
is the person from whose perspective all these other terms are going to be applied. Okay? So here
we have ego and ego calls this person ‘fff,’ F, father, and this person M, mother. Circles mean
females. Triangles mean males. These little equal symbols mean—well they usually mean
married. Sometimes they just mean mated with, but we’re going to assume that we got
legitimacy here. Okay, so this is ego, who is this straight line, descended from this married
couple, father and mother, okay? These guys are ego’s siblings and he calls the male sibling
brother and calls the female sister sibling. A little sexist hold over here. You got to use ‘z’ for
sister because ‘s’ is taken up with son. It’s too late to fix that, you know? Okay, then ego calls
father sister aunt and father’s brother uncle. He calls mother’s sister aunt and he calls father’s—
sorry, mother’s brother uncle. And wouldn’t you know it, this is a perfect family. Each—there is
no death, no divorce, and each couple has had exactly two children, and what do you know?
They’re evenly spaced—I mean, they’re evenly spread between males and females. So ego calls
brother brother, sister sister. He calls these guys cousin. All of them. Cousin. On the mother side,
on the father side, they’re all cousins. Okay, now this kinship system is called the Eskimo
System. Well, what else might we want to call it? Well, we also might want to call it—what—
our own system. And if we look at it, what does it do? You could draw a line around these guys,
couldn’t you, because they’re set off from everybody else. What is this? It’s the nuclear family,
okay. This is a kinship system that distinguishes the nuclear family from all the rest of your
extended family. And the rest of the extended family are considered to be fairly equivalent, okay.
All cousins are the same. All parental siblings are the same, except by gender. So it doesn’t
distinguish the patrilateral, or father’s side, from the matrilateral, or mother’s side. As far as this
system is concerned, they’re the same. Well the danger is, of course, since this is our system, that
we consider it the real system. We have these words—father, mother, brother, sister—and we got
these other words—uncle, aunt, and cousin—and so what we do is to assume that not that this is
not one way of thinking about what to call people we’re related to. We have the absolute
conviction that this is the right way to do it, that this is the only way to do it. That it’s real. Well,
let me show you another system. The reason these have—the reason this is called Eskimo is
because it was first laid out explicitly for the Eskimo. And you might—who are now generally
called by other names, including Inuit—the—separating the nuclear family is usually found at
both extremes of the continuum of kind of organizational complexity, so that you find hunting
and gathering peoples who do this, like the Eskimo who are—they don’t do much hunting and
gathering up in the Arctic—and also, bushmen use an Eskimo system of kinship. They’re
hunting and gathering peoples. And at the extreme opposite end of organizational complexity,
folks like us, in state-level societies, we use this as well. The Eskimo and the Kung generally live
in very small, nuclear groups. So do we. Pretty interesting, isn’t it, that this is at both ends of the
continuum.
Alright, let’s look at another one. And you’ll recognize this one. There are actually about twelve
of these systems. I’m just going to show you three. Alright, take a look at this. I’m not sure how
many I’s are in Hawaiian. I hope two. Alright, look at this. Ooh, and this is a much tidier one
than the other one. Here’s ego again. He’s got father and mother, he’s got brother and sister. No
problem. But he calls mother’s sister and father’s sister mother. He calls mother’s brother and
father’s brother father. And he calls all his first cousins brother and sister. And if we’d made this
deeper to include the grandparental generation, or the first generation of offspring of ego, we
would find that he calls not only his first cousins—I mean, sorry, not only his own children son
and daughter, but he also calls the children of his cousins, whom he calls brother and sister, he
also calls them son and daughter. And he not only calls his parent’s parents grandmother and
grandfather, but he also calls all adults of that generation mother—grandmother and grandfather.
Well, what does this tell us? That the Hawaiians—poor guys—are so stupid they just couldn’t
figure out who their real mother and father was, who actually gave birth to them? No. You don’t
find people that stupid in the world. What you find is that what’s important to them is not the
same kind of biological connection that’s important to us, but something else. If you had to ask
yourself whether you think the Hawaiian—the native Hawaiians before contact with Europeans
lived in nuclear family groups or in extended family groups, what would you say? Well, I’m
willing to bet that you’d say they lived in extended family groups where you were likely to spend
time with your parent’s siblings and they would be likely to be looking after you and you think
of them as a mother and father. You—and since you were living with them, you’d think of what
we call cousins, as your brothers and sisters. What this does is to demonstrate that this is kinship
term that reflects—this is a kinship system that reflects very different values and a very different
social organization. And what are you saying to yourself now? The same kind of thing that I’ve
said to myself often enough. It’s hard to root it out. “Yeah, but that’s not the real relationship.
The real relationship is that only some of those guys are mothers and fathers and only some are
brothers and sisters.” That’s the problem, when you got a word for something, you tend to think
it’s real.
Alright, let me show you one other kinship system. And the only reason I use this one, aside
from the fact that it's pretty unusual—it's not unusual. I don't know why I said that. It's pretty
different than ours. The reason I use it is it's one of the very few I actually managed to learn and
can diagram without using a book. I had to learn it for my PhD exams many years ago.
This is the crow system were talking about. Crow Indians in northern—north central North
America. Okay. The crow system is called a matrilineal bi-fricate merging system. That is, it's
matrilineal in that people belong to the kinship group of their mothers, and membership in that
group is passed on through the female line only. So you belong to your mother’s kinship group,
not your father’s. And women pass on membership in their own kinship group, but men don’t.
Okay? So look at this system now.
Alright, here's ego, our friend ego. Brother, sister, mother, mother, father, that doesn't change
much. But we call mother's sister mother and father's sister—whoops—father's sister. We call
mother’s brother mother's brother, but—whoops—we call father—father's brother father. That's
a little hard to get a grip on for us. But it gets even more complicated if you look at the cousin
generation. You call your own siblings brother and sister, and you also call mother’s sister's kids
brother and sister, and father’s father's kids brother and sister. You call father’s sister’s kids
father sister and father. And you call mother’s brother’s kids son and daughter.
Well, well, well we got a real problem here. What does this stuff tell us? Well, it tells us one
really important thing that we can figure out especially if we know that this is a matrilineal
system. This separates mother’s side of the family from father’s side of the family because you
belong to the same kinship group as mother’s side but not to the same kinship group as father's
side. In a system like this, your mother’s brother is likely to be the important male in teaching
you the—in teaching you the role and obligations in life, and he has a special name here. Now,
who's your ideal—who's your ideal person to marry in a society like this? Very often, it's going
to be father’s sister’s kid. Many tribal groups prefer to marry first cousins, but they think of their
first cousins as being quite, quite different from each other, okay? So what this does—your
ideal—ego's ideal marriage partners would be these guys, and what are they called? They're
called father and father’s sister. Well, that doesn’t sound like the name of somebody you'd
marry, but it does because remember father belongs to a different kinship group, and most people
want to marry outside their own kinship group, but in—but marry a close relative anyway. So
you would marry outside your own lineage, 'cause that's your mother’s side, into your father’s
side, and what do you know? They're called father and father’s sister, and what that really means
is male or female of a different lineage. A perfect group of people to marry. We don’t have to go
deeply into Crow kinship to get a grip on this, but what I want to show you is that just by looking
at the names people give their relatives, and this is the—this is among the earliest stuff that Sapir
worked on. You can find some really interesting stuff. It shows you how language on the basis of
individual words reflects cultural values. If you think about daily life in America, you can think
of a—of a really interesting and a kind of depressing way to use this lexical focus of the SapirWhorf Hypothesis. Think about the time and energy that members of minority ethnic groups, or
that women have spent trying to get public use of different terms to refer to them. Why is that? Is
that because these people believe that just saying African American instead of nigger is going to
make a big difference in the way society works? Is that because women believe that if you refer
to them as woman instead of my girl, that there'll be a revolution? No, that isn’t the reason. The
reason is that whether they've heard of Sapir-Whorf or not, people generally do understand that
language and codes puts into words the values of a particular culture, and then because it does
that, it reinforces those values. So if you're inclined to use words like beaner or chink or jap,
that's—that doesn’t create negative views of minority groups, but it certainly does reinforce
them. And that's why people struggle so hard to make sure that those terms aren't publicly used.
Public use reinforces that kind of thing.
Now, it’s pretty easy—it's intriguing, and I—because it's easy doesn't mean it's worthless. It's
pretty intriguing to look at the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis on a lexical, or word, basis. And I think
it’s pretty clear that once you have a word for something, you tend to believe it’s real. You tend
to believe that the only—that the way you organize words, the way your language organizes
words reflects the real deep underlying organization of the universe. And you can do that kind of
thing, it’s fun and it helps you understand the world. But now I want to show you a more
complicated way of doing the very same thing. And that's basically what Whorf did. Whorf
became fascinated by the Hopi language. The Hopi are a group of Pueblo Indians who lived in
New Mexico and Arizona. They live in those adobe apartment houses, and they speak a language
that fascinated Whorf. And it fascinated Whorf because he thought—and many people agree
with him—that the grammatical structure of this language, not the words, necessarily, but the
way the grammar worked—said something important about or demonstrated something
important about the way the Hopi looked at the way the world operated. And his studies of Hopi
language are really interesting.
Now I want to give you an example of one of Whorf’s arguments. And in order to do that, you
need to know the term S.A.E. Society of American Engineers, no. What Whorf meant when he
said S.A.E. was Standard Average European. It’s kind of a funny term because it—it treats
European languages—it lumps them together and says, “They're all pretty much alike.” And
that's healthy for us to see and hear and do from time to time since we tend to be fascinated by
the differences among these European languages which are really minimal compared to the
differences between say European languages and Hopi. So when I say S.A.E., you can, in your
mind, you can slide in English, French, or Portuguese. Anything, anything in Europe except—
not Finnish, not Hungarian. They're related to each other and they're not Indo-European
languages. And every linguist’s favorite ghost, the language of the Pyrenees. Bask, which is a
language that apparently dropped off Saturn, it's a language isolate. Nobody knows where it
came from. It has no known relatives. Okay, so aside from those languages, the languages of
Europe are standard average European in Whorf's terms. Alright, now, Whorf says—and he has
many arguments, many different aspects of Hopi grammar he takes on and compares to the
grammar of standard average European. I'm just going to give you a little sample. He says that
standard average European, S.A.E., languages have as their basic dimension space. And he says
it’s particularly true of languages that are descended from or heavily influenced by Latin. And he
says that Hopi, by contrast, has as its basic dimension of understanding the world time. Well, if
your basic dimension—basic cognitive dimension, how about calling it that—if your basic
cognitive dimension is space, then of course you think of the world as being populated by things.
And what is a thing in grammatical terms? Nouns are things. And that's exactly the case with
S.A.E. languages. They're loaded with nouns. They're obsessed with nouns. They're populated
heavily by nouns. They can’t really think except in nounishness, except in noun terms. Hopi, by
contrast, since according to Whorf, its basic dimension is not space at all, but time, what would
be—what would they be heavily populated by? Verbs. Of course, we even name verbs with a
word that's a noun. Think about the word time. What do we do with it? Well, in the first place,
it’s a noun for us. And what do we do with it? We spend it, we waste it, we use it wisely, or not
so wisely. We think of it as a thing. We're aware if we’re really pushed to the wall, we're aware
that we're metaphorizing time. That is, that we’re talking about time as if it were a thing, but the
fact of the matter is, unless you're pretty—oh, never trust somebody who says, “the fact of the
matter.” You just—you could sign off right then. It seems to me that when we’re doing that we're
talking about time in the only way we can. Unless we're physicists and—and are already at a
pretty advanced level, and I'm certainly not there. Most of us think of time as a thing. We cut it
into pieces and we name the pieces. Hours, days, we're just—we can't get out of thinking about
time as a thing. Now, the Hopi, by contrast—and this is true of a number of native American
languages, not all, and at this point it’s important to think that there is as much variety among
natives as there is among the languages of Europe and Asia combined. Native American
languages can be as different as English and Chinese and as totally unrelated to. But it is true that
there is a number of Native American languages in which the basic word is not a noun, but a
verb. And verbs are—have many, many, many different forms because what these languages—
and we'll just go back to Hopi and stick with Whorf's argument—what these languages are doing
is talking about how things happen. Not even so much when they happen as how they happen.
How they—how events unroll over time. Now, if you're talking about when things happen,
you're talking about verb tenses. English has a kind of unremarkable but relatively well
developed sense of verb tenses. It’s got past, present, and future, and compound tenses made out
of them. And of course, we're back in our same pitfall. We think of past, present, and future not
just as our language has decided to organize time, but as the real way time happens. Past,
present, and future. But Hopi doesn’t do that. Hopi thinks about things that have already
happened, the past and the present. Things that haven’t happened yet. The future. And then there
is a tense for things that are eternally true, as in humans are greedy. That's not a very Hopi thing
to say, okay. So they divide time up differently than we do. And they have a very highly
developed system of what linguists call aspect. How things unroll over time. Are they chronic?
Are they continuous? Are they punctual? That is, do they happen a lot but in individual pieces of
time? This aspectual system is highly developed in Hopi, very weakly developed in English. We
have what we call a—the present progressive tense. I am going. It’s really an aspect. It tells you
how something is happening over time. Well in Hopi, this is highly developed. Also, because
Hopi don’t think of time as a thing, but rather as an unrolling, a getting later, they don’t say, for
example, it takes ten days to get to Phoenix. Because that—do you ever see days in a little cluster
like that, in a little bag? No, you don't. We know you don’t either, but we're so used to that
metaphor that we don’t really think about it. The Hopi say—are more inclined to say something
like, “After the tenth day, you will arrive in Phoenix.” Because they think of time as unrolling,
unrolling, unrolling. Never little chunks of it that you could scotch tape together and put in a bag.
This is an example of Whorf’s attempt to use grammar as a way of exploring how a particular
language looks at the universe. Now, I want to show you a couple of other examples that both of
which I think make use of both grammar and the lexicon. Words. To illustrate something
interesting about a language, or the—or a view of the world. The first one, we have a nifty
graphic for. It’s a list of Navajo entities, or Navajo power categories. Now, just take a look at
that. The—I have always been fascinated by the Navajo so I am very partial to this—this very
kind of elegant little description of what goes on in Navajo syntax. And it's—was put together by
a linguist names Gary Witherspoon who went out to be a Mormon missionary to the Navajo but
married a Navajo woman and became an anthropologist instead. Okay, so if you're constructing a
sentence in Navajo, you have to know—and of course, the Navajo don't list this out and teach
this in school. They just know it, just the way we all learn our languages without learning
grammar officially. You have to know that a person has more intrinsic power than a large
animal, a medium animal or anybody below it on that list. But a large animal, or especially
important animal, has more power than a medium-sized animal, which has more power than a
small animal, which has more power than a bug, which has more power than natural forces like
winds and rivers, which has more power than plants and inanimate objects, which has more
power than abstractions, like old age and hunger. Okay, so like, big deal. What’s the linguistic
relevance of this list, of power categories? Well, works like this: you can’t construct a Navajo
sentence in which the subject has a higher number than the direct object, okay? You can’t say,
“A mosquito bit me.” Me is a person, right? You can’t say that. Why can't you say that? Because
a human being has more intrinsic power than a mosquito. I think intrinsic power, I—I should
have got an F in physics, and I never really did understand mass, but I think the Navajo notion of
intrinsic power is a lot like the physicist notion of mass. It’s true that a mosquito can give you
sleeping sickness and you'll die, but in the Navajo mind, a human shouldn’t let a mosquito bite
him, or her, because humans are just much higher up the scale, okay? So when you construct
Navajo sentence, you don’t say the horse kicked the man. It makes Navajos fall on the ground
laughing. It's such a stupid thing to say. 'Cause obviously, humans have much more intrinsic
power than a horse. Horses may be bigger, but humans have more intrinsic power. So what you
have to say is the man allowed himself to be kicked by the horse, or the man had himself kicked
by the horse. It’s pretty nifty. It's a pretty interesting layout of the way the Navajo conceive of
the world of power to be organized. And it shows up in the syntax of their language. And it took
Gary Witherspoon to lay that out for us so that we could understand what we were seeing.
Now, I want to show you one more thing, okay, so let’s aim on in here with the overhead. Here
are some examples of some interesting—this'll lead us into our next—our next lecture too—of
some interesting phrases of Tzeltal. Tzeltal is a language of the highland Maya. We've mentioned
it before, and the reason we've mentioned it before is that there is a giant Harvard project that has
worked off and on in highland Chapas with this langauge and a couple of others. Okay. Let’s
look at this. What can we see about this? Well one thing I'm going to tell you right away is that
there is no basic word for plant in Tzeltal. There is no basic word for animal, and there is no
basic word for human. There're word for man and woman and child and gopher and cherry tree,
but there are no basic words for plant, animal, or human. Does that mean that Tzeltal speakers
like aren’t tracking on the fact that these things exist in the universe? Nope. And if you look at
the way they talk, you can tell this. Take a look at this stuff now. This is a glottal stop, it's half a
question mark. It’s a voiced glottal stop. Osh-tehk-teh. I can't do it very well, they're full of
glottal stops. Osh-koht-ci. This apostrophe is a glottalization, and the 'c' is 'ts.' And osh-tul-winik
means three men, okay? Three men. There's trees, dogs, men, okay? And you can tell by looking
at these suckers that this is the little morpheme that means three. Osh. Well then what's this
morpheme? Tehk. Koht. Tul. This little morpheme is what you add onto the number, which is an
adjective here, to indicate what you're modifying. Tree, a plant. Dog, an animal. Man, a human.
So even though there aren’t separate words, the grammar indicates that people are tracking on
this big distinction.
So this will lead us into the topic of our next lecture, but we have a little bit of time in which I
want to show you an interview—a real short interview—that we did with Dr. Geoffrey Gamble
who used to be the chair of the Anthropology department and is now an associate provost here.
He worked with a native American group in north central California, and what I've done is to
ask—just ask him a couple questions about it to illustrate some aspects of the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis. He's—he's pretty interesting when he's talking about this group of people.
[Nancy McKee]: I’d like to ask you a couple of questions about what you did before you became
vice provost, when you were functioning in the field doing linguistic field work. What group did
you work with and where did they live?
[Dr. Geoffrey Gamble]: I worked with a group called the Wikchamni, and aboriginally, they
lived in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains just east of Visalia, California.
[Nancy McKee]: And how many of them were they left when you were there?
[Dr. Geoffrey Gamble]: Well, there are still folks that are left, but in terms of people that spoke
the language well that practiced some of the old cultural ways, there were probably a half dozen.
About six.
[Nancy McKee]: Wow. So what is it that made you decide to go and work with them?
[Dr. Geoffrey Gamble]: Partly, I got invited in. Somehow, rather, they discovered that I was
interested—at least one woman did, Cecil Silva, and she asked me to come in and—in her words,
write down their history. She was very concerned that she and her older sister were the two best
remaining speakers, and when they died, no one else would know the language. And she asked
me to come in and just write down the language and record their history.
[Nancy McKee]: So what did you—what was it like working with them? What did you actually
do?
[Dr. Geoffrey Gamble]: Initially, we just started sitting at a table and I would ask words and they
would tell me how to pronounce those words in their language. It quickly grew from that into,
one, a friendship. We became good friends. I spent a tremendous amount of time, almost every
day, with Cecil or one of her sisters, and we would do direct elicitation where I would just ask,
“How do you say the word for dog, how do you say this and that, how to get sentences,” but also,
I became part of the family in a kind of an external way, and overheard conversations. I got them
to tell stories, to talk about how they did things in their language. And some of the richest
material, of course, comes about in this course where they're talking to one another and telling
stories. They also decided to teach me some of the old ways, how to make baskets, how to
collect salt, or cook acorn in a basket full of water. And in doing so, I learned a lot about the
language at the same time.
[Nancy McKee]: Are there any speakers left today?
[Dr. Geoffrey Gamble]: There are people left that know some words, some sentences. About five
years ago, the California-Indian health service asked me to come down to meet with the woman
that had heard about me. She was in her late sixties, early seventies, and she knew a little bit of
Wikchamni for a bit, and actually, she got tears in her eyes because she said, “You sound just
like my grandmother,” and I said, “Well, it’s not surprising because she was one of the women
that I worked with early on.”
[Nancy McKee]: Wow. So the work that you were specifically aiming at was mostly structural,
but obviously you got some other kinds of insights into—kind of the world view as language
reflected it. Can you give me a couple examples of specifics?
[Dr. Geoffrey Gamble]: Sure. The language itself kind of provides a window into how people
think. I mean, that’s true for us as well as for others. One of the more interesting things as you're
learning a language is learning how to control the pronouns in the language, and of course, in
English we really recognize kind of singular pronouns and plural pronouns, and that's all you
have to worry about. In this language, they have three categories: singular, dual, and plural. Dual
meaning if there are two people involved, you use that pronoun as reference, so if you and I were
doing something together, we would say we two are doing something. I would say that. In
addition, though, they have the categories of exclusive and inclusive. So let's say for instance
that you and I are talking together, and I may wish to record that. I would say we—we two are
talking together, but I would say, we two, inclusive, you and I are both included, but I may want
to be reporting to you something where someone else and I did something, and I would say we
two, me and someone else, but not you, you're excluded, did something. So you can include or
exclude the person based upon the grammar. The same thing with plural. So if you walk into a
room and want to report that all of you together are going to do something, you'd say we all are
going to do something. Or you may walk in and say, “We all are doing something,” and it means
you and a bunch of other folks, but no one in the room is going.
[Nancy McKee]: Great, and you were telling me something else before we began about the word
for peck, which seemed interesting.
[Dr. Geoffrey Gamble]: Yeah, in fact—it’s very interesting when you're doing linguistic work
and you're asking the word for things, you often get the words for things, but you don’t
understand the cultural text behind it. Early on, I asked the word for pet—they had a pet dog—
and they told me that word, buhus, means pet, and a little animal, and for a couple years, I used
that word appropriately when I was referring to people and the pets they had around the house,
but I also heard that word used in other contexts, referring to animals that weren’t around, and
they would refer to them as pets. And I didn’t quite understand it, and it actually took me several
years, but as I gained insight into the culture, it became clear that the word is also used to refer to
spirit helpers, to symbols of power that are animals for these folks. And they're also referred to as
pets. In fact, when you look at the full meaning for this word, it’s very rich, encompassing the
spiritual aspects, some of the practical aspects of their life. And you can—any one word you get
may have any of these ramifications and it’s important to be alert to pick up any of these