Whorf and the Linguistic Relativity Principle
The most famous proponent of the Linguistic Relativity Principle is Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941), who studied American Indian languages at Yale. However, the tradition of viewing language as providing a distinct world view can be traced back to his teacher at Yale, the anthropologist Edward Sapir (1884–1939), as well as to the linguistic anthropologist Franz Boas (1858 1942), and before that to the German linguist and philosopher Wilhelm Von Humboldt (1767–1835). Whorf was an intriguing and complex writer, who sometimes appeared to take a moderate line, and sometimes expressed a more extreme view of linguistic relativity (Lakoff 1987; Lee 1996). The following much-quoted excerpt states Whorf’s position:
We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organised by our minds – and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. (Whorf 1956: 213)
Setting aside the theoretical objections to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis put forth by proponents of the generative approach, there is independent empirical evidence against the strong version of the hypothesis. This evidence ori ginally came from work on colour categorisation. It may surprise readers who are only familiar with English to learn that some languages have an extremely small set of basic colour terms. These are terms that are morphologically simple (for example, bluish is excluded) and are not subsumed under another colour term (for example, crimson and scarlet are not basic colour terms because they fall within the category denoted by red). For instance, the Dani, a tribe from New Guinea, only have two basic colour terms in their vocabulary. The expression mola, which means ‘light’, refers to white and warm colours like red, orange, yellow, pink and purple. The expression mili, which means ‘dark’, refers to black and cool colours like blue and green. Yet, in colour experiments where Dani subjects were shown different kinds of focal colours (these are colours that are perceptually salient to the human visual system) they had little difficulty remembering the range of colours they were exposed to (Heider 1972; Rosch 1975, 1978). These experiments involved presenting subjects with a large set of coloured chips, from which they were asked to select the best examples of each colour; in later experiments, they were asked to recall what colours they had selected previously. If language entirely determines thought, then the Dani should not have been able to categorise and remember a complex set of distinct focal colours because they only have two basic colour terms in their language. In another experiment, Rosch taught the Dani subjects sixteen colour names based on words from their own language (clan names). She found that the names for the focal colours were learnt faster than names for non-focal colours. These findings illustrate that humans have common perceptual and conceptualizing capacities, as we noted earlier. Due to shared constraints, including environment, experience, embodiment and perceptual apparatus, we can, and often do, conceptualise in fundamentally similar ways, regardless of language. However, this does not entail that variation across languages has no influence on non-linguistic thought.
