Through the Language Glass, Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages

Absence of complement clauses in many Australian languages: See Dixon 2006, 263, and Dench 1991, 196- 201. For Matses, see Fleck 2006. See also Deutscher 2000, ch. 10.

Finite complements are a more effective tool: Deutscher 2000, ch. 11.

A flurry of publications from the last couple of years: See most recently the collection of articles in Sampson et al. 2009.

6: CRYING WHORF

“The normal man of intelligence”: Sapir 1924, 149.

“what fetters the mind and benumbs the spirit”: Sapir 1924, 155.

“We shall no longer be able to see”: Whorf 1956, 212.

Data collection in the eighteenth century: In 1710, Leibnitz called for the creation of a “universal dictionary.” In 1713, he wrote to the Russian czar Peter the Great, imploring him to gather word lists from the numerous undocumented languages spoken in his empire. The idea was taken up at the Russian court in all earnestness two generations later, when Catherine the Great started working on exactly such a project, personally collecting words from as many languages as she could find. She later commissioned others to continue her work, and the result was the so-called imperial dictionary (Linguarum Totius Orbis Vocabularia Comparativa) of 1787, which contained words from over two hundred languages of Europe and Asia. A second edition, published in 1790-91, added seventy-nine more languages. In 1800, the Spanish ex-Jesuit Lorenzo Hervas published his Catalogo de las lenguas de las naciones conocidas, which contained more than three hundred languages. And in the early nineteenth century, the German lexicographer Christoph Adelung started compiling his Mithridates (1806-17), which was to collect vocabularies and the text of the “Our Father” from 450 different languages. On these compilations, see Muller 1861, 132ff.; Morpurgo Davies 1998, 37ff.; and Breva-Claramonte 2001.

The dictionaries revealed little of value about the grammar of exotic languages: There is one notable exception, Lorenzo Hervas’s Catalogo de las lenguas de las naciones conocidas, which contained grammatical sketches. Humboldt befriended Hervas in Rome and received from him materials on American Indian languages. Nevertheless, Humboldt did not have a high opinion of Hervas’s competence in grammatical analysis. In a letter to F. A. Wolf (March 19, 1803), he writes: “The old Hervas is a confused and unthorough person, but he knows a great deal, has an enormous amount of notes, and is therefore always useful.” As Morpurgo Davies (1998, 13-20, 37) points out, there is a natural tendency when assessing one’s own achievement to underplay the achievements of one’s predecessors. This may well be the case with Humboldt’s assessment of Hervas. Even so, it is undeniable that Humboldt took comparative grammar to an entirely different level of sophistication.

Missionary grammars: Jooken 2000.

“It is sad to see what violence”: Humboldt 1821a, 237. See also Humboldt 1827, 172.

“The difference between languages”: Humboldt 1820, 27. Humboldt did not invent this sentiment out of the blue, but previous claims to this effect were restricted mostly to observations about differences between the vocabularies of mainstream European languages. The French philosopher Etienne de Condillac, for example, commented on the difference between French and Latin in the connotations of words to do with agriculture. If grammatical differences were brought into the discussion at all, they never went beyond such banalities as Herder’s claim that “industrious nations have an abundance of moods in their verbs” (1812, 355).

“is not just the means for representing a truth”: Humboldt 1820, 27. On precursors to the idea, most notably Johann David Michaelis’s 1760 Prussian Academy prize essay, see Koerner 2000. Humboldt himself had already expressed the sentiment in vague form in 1798, before he had been exposed to non-Indo-European languages (Koerner 2000, 9).

“language is the forming organ of thought”: Humboldt 1827, 191.

“Thinking is dependent not just on language in general”: Humboldt 1820, 21.

“what it encourages and stimulates its speakers to do”: Humboldt 1821b, 287. “Sieht man blo auf dasjenige, was sich in einer Sprache ausdrucken lasst, so ware es nicht zu verwundern, wenn man dahin geriethe, alle Sprachen im Wesentlichen ungefahr gleich an Vorzugen und Mangeln zu erklaren… Dennoch ist dies gerade der Punkt, auf den es ankommt. Nicht, was in einer Sprache ausgedruckt zu werden vermag, sondern das, wozu sie aus eigner, innerer Kraft anfeuert und begeistert, entscheidet uber ihre Vorzuge oder Mangel.” Admittedly, Humboldt made this famous pronouncement for the wrong reasons. He was trying to explain why, even if no language constrains the possibilities of thought in its speakers, some languages (Greek) are still much better than others, because they actively encourage speakers to form higher ideas.

“the words in which we think are channels of thought”: Muller 1873, 151.

“every single language has its own peculiar framework”: Whitney 1875, 22.

“it is the thought of past humanity imbedded”: Clifford 1879, 110.

page 138 Boas’s influence on Sapir: It is often suggested that Franz Boas may also have inspired Sapir’s ideas about relativity. There are hints of this view in Boas 1910, 377, and a decade later (1920, 320) Boas made the argument more explicit in saying that “the categories of language compel us to see the world arranged in certain definite conceptual groups which, on account of our lack of knowledge of linguistic processes, are taken as objective categories, and which, therefore, impose themselves upon the form of our thoughts.”

“everything to learn about language”: Swadesh 1939. See also Darnell 1990, 9.

“Language misleads us both by its vocabulary and by its syntax”: Russell 1924, 331. Sapir was introduced to such ideas by the book The Meaning of Meaning: A Study in the Influence of Language upon Thought, by Ogden and Richards (1923).

“tyrannical hold that linguistic form”: Sapir 1931, 578.

“incommensurable analysis of experience in different languages”: Sapir 1924, 155. Whorf (1956 [1940], 214) later elaborated the principle of relativity: “We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity, which holds that all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar.”

“is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas”: Whorf 1956 (1940), 212.

“Some languages have means of expression”: Whorf 1956 (1941), 241; “Monistic view of nature”: Whorf 1956 (1940), 215.

“What surprises most is to find that various grand generalizations”: Whorf 1956 (1940), 216.

“has zero dimensions; i.e., it cannot be given a number”: Whorf 1956 (1940), 216; “to us, for whom time is a motion”: Whorf 1956 (1941), 151.

“no words, grammatical forms, constructions or expressions”: Whorf 1956, 57.

“a Hopi Indian, thinking in the Hopi language”: Chase 1958, 14.

“time seems to be that aspect of being”: Eggan 1966.

“relate grammatical possibilities”: This and the quotations that follow are from Steiner 1975, 137, 161, 165, 166.

page 147 Wir horen auf zu denken: Colli et al. 2001, 765.

“the limits of my language mean the limits of my world”: Wittgenstein 1922, §5.6.

“grammar performs another important function”: Boas 1938, 132-33. Boas also went on to explain that even when a grammar does not oblige speakers to express certain information, that does not imply obscurity of speech, since, when necessary, clarity can always be obtained by adding explanatory words.

“Languages differ essentially in what they must convey”: Jakobson 1959a, 236; see also Jakobson 1959b and Jakobson 1972, 110. Jakobson (1972, 107-8) specifically rejects the influences of language on “strictly cognitive activities.” He allows their influence only on “everyday mythology, which finds its expression in divagations, puns, jokes, chatter, jabber, slips of the tongue, dreams, reverie, superstitions, and, last but not least, in poetry.”

Matses: Fleck 2007.