My presentation for Anthropological Linguistics graduate class at the University of the Philippines Diliman.

1. Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis Jessie G. Varquez, Jr. Anthro 270. 10 August 2011.

3. The limit of my language is the limit of my world.

4. people's thoughts are determined by the categories made available by their language

6. Who are they?

7. Critiques

9. Duranti, Alessandro. 1997. Linguistic Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

11. “It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and that language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems in communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the “real world” is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached.” Sapir, Edward. 1949. The Status of Linguistics as a Science. In D. G. Mandelbaum (ed.), Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture and Personality (pp. 160–6). Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

12. “From this fact proceeds what I have called the “linguistic relativity principle,” which means, in informal terms, that users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward different types of observations and different evaluations of externally similar acts of observation, and hence are not equivalent as observers, but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world.” Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1956. Linguistics as an Exact Science. In J. B. Carroll (ed.), Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf (pp. 220–32). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

13. Famous example Empty drum analysis although the physical, non-linguistic situation is dangerous (“empty” drums contain explosive vapor) speakers take it to mean “innocuous” because they associate the word empty with the meaning “null and void” and hence “negative and inert”

14. Lucy, John A. 1992. Grammatical Categories and Cognition: A Case Study of theLinguistic Relativity Hypothesis. Cambridge University Press.

15. Whorf’s biographical sketch Holds chemical engineering degree from MIT and worked as fire inspector at Hartford Fire Insurance Company an avid reader of Middle America prehistory and Maya archaeology. Whorf later studied Hebrew in order to read the Old Testament Taught a required course, on “Problems of American Indian Linguistics” to anthropology graduate students at Yale while Sapir was away for a sabbatical leave

16. Intellectual tradition

20. When we hear or read, we usually remember the gist, not the exact words, so there has to be such a thing as a gist that is not the same as a bunch of words. And if thoughts depended on words, how could a new word ever be coined? How could a child learn a word to begin with? How could translation from one language to another be possible?

21. But the more you examine Whorf's arguments, the less sense they make. Take the story about the worker and the "empty" drum. The seeds of disaster supposedly lay in the semantics of empty, which, Whorf claimed, means both "without its usual contents" and "null and void, empty, inert." The hapless worker, his conception of reality molded by his linguistic categories, did not distinguish between the "drained" and "inert" senses, hence, flick . . . boom! But wait. Gasoline vapor is invisible. A drum with nothing but vapor in it looks just like a drum with nothing in it at all. Surely this walking catastrophe was fooled by his eyes, not by the English language. The language instict

22. But it is wrong, all wrong. The idea that thought is the same thing as language is an example of what can be called a conventional absurdity: a statement that goes against all common sense but that everyone believes because they dimly recall having heard it somewhere and because it is so pregnant with implications.

24. metaphors are means of viewing one kind of experience in terms of another, and

26. “It looks different from my point of view.”

29. Post-war positivism further eclipsed the humanistic linguistics that neither Sapir nor Whorf were around to defend. Again, Whorf’s most contentious positions are deeply grounded in Boasian anthropology, in the intersection of linguistics and ethnology around the study of the American Indian. Again, this is the context which has been obscured in recent readings of Whorf.

30. The end – daghangsalamat! The object lesson here is that the Whorfian tradition within Americanist anthropology is not necessarily incompatible withthe rationalist and universalist agendas of cognitive science. Whorf, like Sapir, explored the foundations of what today is called ethnolinguistics as a critical part of his linguistic relativity principle.