Judging from how the Times magazine’s excerpt from Guy Deutscher’s new book has been one of the most read pieces in the paper for over a week now, the book is on its way to libating readers ever eager for the seductive idea that people’s languages channel the way they think--that is, that grammar creates cultural outlooks.
“Oooh-mmmm!” I heard in a room once when a linguist parenthetically suggested that the reason speakers of one Native American language have prefixes instead of words to indicate mixing, poking, and sucking on food is because they are “culturally” attuned to such things.
But don’t we all cherish poking and sucking? As cool as it would be if grammar were thought, the idea is a myth--at least in any form that would be of interest beyond academic psychologists.
Deutscher is to be commended for noting that the original version of this idea has not held up. Fire-inspector-by-day Benjamin Lee Whorf claimed in the thirties that Hopi has no way to indicate tense, and thus created a cyclical sense of time among its speakers. But Hopi has plenty of words and suffixes to indicate tense, and the whole idea that Hopi was a substrate for a mystical frame of mind has fallen to pieces.
But Deutscher’s idea is that a new thread of work is showing that language does create thought patterns nevertheless. The upshot is supposed to be that human groups are going about with their grammatical structures lending them fascinatingly different Ways of Looking at the World.
Deutcher’s favorite evidence is peoples who sense direction not as a matter of front and back but as north, south, east and west. In their languages you say not “in front of me” but “west of me” and so on--meaning that where if we were turned around after saying something was in front of us we’d say that it was now in back of us, speakers of these languages would still say that it was west of them.
Neat. But are these people’s languages making them sensitive to direction rather than position--or is it, as almost anyone would intuit, that the culture focuses on direction and thus the language does? Americans have a plethora of terms referring to psychology--complex, affect, syndrome, superego, compensation. Yet who would say that it’s the English language that makes us sensitive to these things? It sounds like something a Martian anthropologist might come up with, too eager for the exotic to perceive--or settle for--the more mundane truth. . . .
See this post concerning the extract from Deutscher's book to which McWhorter alludes: http://philosophysother.blogspot.com/2010/08/deutscher-guy-does-your-language-shape.html.
Read the rest of McWhorter's piece here: http://www.tnr.com/blog/john-mcwhorter/77631/dont-believe-the-hype-about-aborigines-yiddish-or-ebonics?passthru=NTYzYWMzYjE4YWIxYTA3ZmYwNDA3M2EyNDE0NTM3ODU.
Showing posts with label Topics: Communication: Linguistics: Whorf. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Topics: Communication: Linguistics: Whorf. Show all posts
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Sunday, August 29, 2010
Deutscher, Guy. "Does Your Language Shape How You Think?" NEW YORK TIMES August 26, 2010.
Deutscher, Guy. Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages. London: Metropolitan, 2010.
Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short article that set in motion one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the 20th century. At first glance, there seemed little about the article to augur its subsequent celebrity. Neither the title, “Science and Linguistics,” nor the magazine, M.I.T.’s Technology Review, was most people’s idea of glamour. And the author, a chemical engineer who worked for an insurance company and moonlighted as an anthropology lecturer at Yale University, was an unlikely candidate for international superstardom. And yet Benjamin Lee Whorf let loose an alluring idea about language’s power over the mind, and his stirring prose seduced a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we are able to think.
In particular, Whorf announced, Native American languages impose on their speakers a picture of reality that is totally different from ours, so their speakers would simply not be able to understand some of our most basic concepts, like the flow of time or the distinction between objects (like “stone”) and actions (like “fall”). For decades, Whorf’s theory dazzled both academics and the general public alike. In his shadow, others made a whole range of imaginative claims about the supposed power of language, from the assertion that Native American languages instill in their speakers an intuitive understanding of Einstein’s concept of time as a fourth dimension to the theory that the nature of the Jewish religion was determined by the tense system of ancient Hebrew.
Eventually, Whorf’s theory crash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims. The reaction was so severe that for decades, any attempts to explore the influence of the mother tongue on our thoughts were relegated to the loony fringes of disrepute. But 70 years on, it is surely time to put the trauma of Whorf behind us. And in the last few years, new research has revealed that when we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways. . . .
Read the rest here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?src=me&ref=general.
Seventy years ago, in 1940, a popular science magazine published a short article that set in motion one of the trendiest intellectual fads of the 20th century. At first glance, there seemed little about the article to augur its subsequent celebrity. Neither the title, “Science and Linguistics,” nor the magazine, M.I.T.’s Technology Review, was most people’s idea of glamour. And the author, a chemical engineer who worked for an insurance company and moonlighted as an anthropology lecturer at Yale University, was an unlikely candidate for international superstardom. And yet Benjamin Lee Whorf let loose an alluring idea about language’s power over the mind, and his stirring prose seduced a whole generation into believing that our mother tongue restricts what we are able to think.
In particular, Whorf announced, Native American languages impose on their speakers a picture of reality that is totally different from ours, so their speakers would simply not be able to understand some of our most basic concepts, like the flow of time or the distinction between objects (like “stone”) and actions (like “fall”). For decades, Whorf’s theory dazzled both academics and the general public alike. In his shadow, others made a whole range of imaginative claims about the supposed power of language, from the assertion that Native American languages instill in their speakers an intuitive understanding of Einstein’s concept of time as a fourth dimension to the theory that the nature of the Jewish religion was determined by the tense system of ancient Hebrew.
Eventually, Whorf’s theory crash-landed on hard facts and solid common sense, when it transpired that there had never actually been any evidence to support his fantastic claims. The reaction was so severe that for decades, any attempts to explore the influence of the mother tongue on our thoughts were relegated to the loony fringes of disrepute. But 70 years on, it is surely time to put the trauma of Whorf behind us. And in the last few years, new research has revealed that when we learn our mother tongue, we do after all acquire certain habits of thought that shape our experience in significant and often surprising ways. . . .
Read the rest here: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?src=me&ref=general.
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