and intellectual horizons. He explicitly acknowledged something that in the hullaballoo around Whorf a century later tended to be overlooked, namely that, in principle, any thought can be expressed in any language. The real differences between languages, he argued, are not in what a language is
What exactly this “inner force” is, what ideas precisely it “stimulates” speakers to formulate, and how in practical terms it might do so always remained rather elusive in Humboldt’s writings. As we’ll see, his basic intuition may have been sound, but despite the detailed knowledge that he amassed about many exotic languages, his statements on the subject of the mother tongue’s influence on the mind always remained in the higher stratosphere of philosophical generalities and never really got down to the nitty-gritty of detail.
In fact, in his voluminous musings on this subject, Humboldt abided by the first two commandments for any great thinker: (1) Thou shalt be vague, (2) Thou shalt not eschew self-contradiction. But it may have been exactly this vagueness that struck a chord with his contemporaries. Following Humboldt’s lead, it now became fashionable among the great and the good to pay tribute to language’s influence on thought, and as long as one didn’t feel the urge to provide any particular examples, one could freely indulge in resonant but ultimately hollow imagery. The renowned Oxford professor of philology Max Muller declared in 1873 that “the words in which we think are channels of thought which we have not dug ourselves, but which we found ready made for us.” And his nemesis across the Atlantic, the American linguist William Whitney, may have concurred with Muller in nothing else but agreed nevertheless that “every single language has its own peculiar framework of established distinctions, its shapes and forms of thought, into which, for the human being who learns that language as his mother-tongue, is cast the content and product of his mind, his store of impressions,… his experience and knowledge of the world.” The mathematician and philosopher William Kingdon Clifford added a few years later that “it is the thought of past humanity imbedded in our language which makes Nature to be what she is for us.”
Throughout the nineteenth century, however, such statements remained on the level of occasional rhetorical flourishes. It was only in the twentieth century that the slogans began to be distilled into specific claims about the alleged influence of particular grammatical phenomena on the mind. The Humboldtian ideas now underwent a rapid process of fermentation, and as the spirit of the new theory grew more powerful, the rhetoric became less sober.
What was it in the air that catalyzed this reaction? One reason must have been the great (and wholly justified) excitement about the enormous advances that linguists were making in understanding the outlandish nature of Amerindian languages. Linguists in America did not need to pore over manuscripts from the Vatican library to unearth the structure of the native languages of the continent, as there were still dozens of living native languages to be studied in situ. What is more, in the century that separated Sapir from Humboldt, the science of language had experienced a meteoric rise in sophistication, and the analytic tools at linguists’ disposal became incomparably more powerful. When these advanced tools began to be applied in earnest to the treasure hoard of Native American languages, they revealed grammatical landscapes that Humboldt could not have dreamed of.
Edward Sapir, like Humboldt a century before him, started his linguistic career far from the open vistas of American languages. His studies at Columbia concentrated on Germanic philology and consisted of things rather reminiscent of the pedantic collections of obscure verbal forms in ancient tongues that he derided in the passage I quoted earlier. Sapir credited his conversion from the dusty armchair of Germanic philology to the great outdoors of Indian languages to the influence of Franz Boas, the charismatic professor of anthropology at Columbia who was also the pioneer in the scientific study of the native languages of the continent. Years later, Sapir reminisced about a life-changing meeting at which Boas summoned counterexamples from this, that, or the other Indian tongue to every generalization about the structure of language that Sapir had previously believed in. Sapir began to feel that Germanic philology had taught him very little and that he still had “everything to learn about language.” Henceforth, he was to apply his legendary sharpness of mind to the study of Chinook, Navajo, Nootka, Yana, Tlingit, Sarcee, Kutchin, Ingalik, Hupa, Paiute, and other native languages, producing analyses of unmatched clarity and depth.
In addition to the exhilaration of discovering weird and exotic grammars, there was something else in the air that pushed Sapir toward the formulation of his linguistic relativity principle. This was the radical trend in the philosophy of the early twentieth century. At the time, philosophers such as Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein were busy decrying the pernicious influences of language on the metaphysics of the past. Russell wrote in 1924: “Language misleads us both by its vocabulary and by its syntax. We must be on our guard in both respects if our logic is not to lead to a false metaphysic.”
Edward Sapir, 1884-1939
Sapir translated the claims about language’s influence on philosophical ideas into an argument about the influence of the mother tongue on everyday thoughts and perceptions. He started talking about the “tyrannical hold that linguistic form has upon our orientation in the world,” and as opposed to anyone before him, he went on to inject such slogans with actual content. In 1931 he advanced the following example for how one specific linguistic difference should affect speakers’ thoughts. When we observe a stone moving through space toward the earth, Sapir explained, we involuntarily divide this event into two separate concepts: a stone and the action of falling, and we declare that “the stone falls.” We assume that this is the only way to describe such an event. But the inevitability of the division into “stone” and “fall” is just an illusion, because the Nootka language, which is spoken on Vancouver Island, does things in a very different way. There is no verb in Nootka that corresponds to our general verb “fall” and that can describe the action independently of a specific falling object. Instead, a special verb, “to stone,” is used to refer to the motion of a stone in particular. To describe the event of a stone
Such concrete examples of “incommensurable analysis of experience in different languages,” Sapir says, “make very real to us a kind of relativity that is generally hidden from us by our naive acceptance of fixed habits of speech… This is the relativity of concepts or, as it might be called, the relativity of the form of thought.” This type of relativity, he adds, may be easier to grasp than Einstein’s, but to understand it one needs the comparative data of linguistics.
Unfortunately for Sapir, it is exactly by forsaking the cozy vagueness of philosophical slogans and venturing into the freezing drafts of specific linguistic examples that he exposes the thin ice on which his theory stands. The Nootka expression “it stones down” is undoubtedly a very different way of describing the event, and it certainly sounds strange, but does this strangeness mean that Nootka speakers necessarily have to
We can test this if we apply Sapir’s argument to a slightly more familiar language. Take the English phrase “it rains.” This construction is actually quite similar to the Nootka “it stones down,” because the action (falling) and the object (water drops) are combined into one verbal concept. But not all languages do it in this way. In my mother tongue, the object and the action are kept apart, and one says something like “rain falls.” So there is a profound difference in the way our languages express the event of raining, but does this mean that you and I have to
At the time, no one thought of stumbling over such molehills. The excitement about the-largely factual- strangeness of expression in American Indian languages was somehow taken as sufficient to deduce the-largely fictional-differences in their speakers’ perceptions and thoughts. In fact, the party was just beginning, for onto the stage now steps Sapir’s most creative student, Benjamin Lee Whorf.
Whereas Sapir still kept a few toes on the ground and on the whole was reluctant to spell out the exact form
