Saphir Whorf: Determinism and Relativtism

Question 1

What is the Saphir-Whorf theory?

Answer 1

That individual’s thoughts and actions are determined by the language or languages that individual speaks. Certain thoughts of an individual in one language cannot be understood by those who live in another language. With the addition that culture having a significant impact on language.

Question 2

How can this be supported by the Hopi study?

Answer 2

They found that their language, gave a different and unique understanding of how time worked compared to the English conception of time g.g. past, present and future.

Question 3

What is the strong version of the Saphir-Whorf theory?

Answer 3

Named linguistic determinism, states that all human thoughts and actions are bound by the restraints of language,

Question 4

What is evidence (1) to support linguistic determinism?

Answer 4

the Inuit people think more intelligently about snow because their language contains more sophisticated and subtle words distinguishing various forms of it.

Question 5

What is evidence (2) to support linguistic determinism?

Answer 5

Peter Gordan of Colombia University, found that the language spoken by the Piraha tribe contains only three counting words 1, 2 and many. He conducted a series of experiments and found that the Piraha tribe had difficulty recounting numbers higher than three.

Question 6

What did else did Peter Gordan find?

Answer 6

The people of Piraha could not accurately tell the difference between ‘four’ and ‘five’ objects, therefore proving that the tribe’s language determines its people’s thought.

Question 7

What is evidence (3) to support linguistic determinism?

Answer 7

If there is a connection between thought and language. language must influence thought, he gives of an example of a boy wanting to use the toilet, but he saw the sign on the toilet door which read ‘out of use’, he read it and thus did not open the door. Therefore, proving that the language on the door influenced the boy’s thought.

Question 8

What is argument (1) against linguistic determinism?

Answer 8

‘Language Instinct’ by Steven Pinker, Steven criticized Whorf’s claim that the Hopi language is a timeless language giving this quote ‘“Then indeed, the following day, quite early in the morning, at the hour when people pray to the sun, around that time when he woke up, the girl woke the girl again.” -< If it was indeed timless how did the girl know when to wake the other girl up?

Question 9

What else did Pinker had say about linguistic determinism?

Answer 9

Pinker also wrote that if language determines thought then how can victims of stroke or apasha exhibit the capability of thought without the language i.e. through the use of expression

Question 10

What evidence did Pinker give to support his refute?

Answer 10

The case of people who were raised without language, he used an example of named Ildefonso, who was a 27-year-old deaf and mute Mexican immigrant who taught sign language, after that he started to communicate with “Schaller” and told her events from the past. If language determines thought, Ildefonso wouldn’t be able to think.

Question 11

What is Linguistic relativity?

Answer 11

people who speak different languages perceive and think about the world quite differently from one another.

Question 12

Can you give an example?

Answer 12

The number and the type of basic colour words of a language determine how a person sees the rainbow.

Question 13

What is evidence (1) supporting linguistic relativity?

Answer 13

Lenburg and Roberts (1995) were linguists that conducted a ‘cross-linguistic comparison of colour recognition between speakers’ of Zuni tribe and English speakers.

Question 14

What was different between the way the Zuni tribe described colour and English speakers?

Answer 14

In Zuni only one word is used to refer to yellow-orange spectrum. For English speakers, they use 2 words to refer to each colour independently. They said that ‘differences in codability leads to differences in colour perception’

Question 15

What is evidence (2) supporting Linguistic relativity?

Answer 15

Linguists Kay and Kempton (1984) said that language is a part of cognition. They found that English speakers tend to exaggerate the discrimination of colours close to the lexical category boundary. Whereas the Trahulara speakers do not have separate terms to differentiate between green and blue.

Question 16

What is argument (1) against linguistic relativity?

Answer 16

that despite the studies based on colour codability, universally humans around the world according to Osgood have ‘a common meaning system’ also known as universalism and is supported by linguists more than relativism.

Question 17

What is universalism?

Answer 17

The idea that all humans are biologically the same. Links with Chomky’s idea of ‘Nativism’ that all humans possess the innate ability to learn language and that every language in the world despite it’s phonological differences, it possess the same grammatical features.

Question 18

Who refuted the Inuit study and what did he find?

Answer 18

Pollum in his book, The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax. He shows that while the Inuit people may have different names for snow, other languages transmit the same ideas using phrases instead of single wars.

Question 19

What did Dr. Roger Brown refute about linguistic relativism?

Answer 19

That there is much more evidence pointing toward cognitive universalism rather than linguistic relativity.

Question 20

How can this be supported? (a.k.a argued against linguistic relativism) (1)

Answer 20

Berlin and Kay’s colour study (1969) found that universal focus colours and differences only in the boundary of colours in the spectrum. Regardless of language and culture with their differences in colour vocabularies, they still possess the same colour spectrum. Speakers are still able to sort colour chips based on the eleven focus colours

Question 21

How can this be supported? (a.k.a argued against linguistic relativism) (2)

Answer 21

Davies cross-cultural colour sorting test (1998) found universalism to be strong as there was an obvious pattern in the similarity of colour sorting behaviour between English speakers (it has eleven basic colours, Russian (12 have two colours for blue) and Setswana which only has five.

Question 22

What language which needs more research could be able to disapprove linguistic relativity?

Answer 22

Dr James Cooke Brown created an artificial language to prove that language could still determine thought without culture called LOGLAN. Since Saphir Whorf said that culture strongly influences language, without it there wouldn’t be no thought. He created this language to see if though would still be present without the culture.

Question 23

What has he been able to find through artificial language?

Answer 23

When language influences culture it makes the viewer see think about language metaphysically. Unlike LOGLAN which forces the user to see language disambiguated. Although thought is still present.