Sorting Through Sophistries:
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
By Gabriel Blanchard
Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος ...
Should They Have Sent a Poet, Really?
Language is a curious thing. Some of the curiousest things about it are some of the most unobtrusive and difficult to explain—often, though not always, because it’s difficult to use a tool on itself. The late Geoffrey Nunberg’s 2004 essay collection, Going Nucular, explored a number of linguistic quirks, some of which uncover surprisingly profound ways our language impacts our reasoning. (Others are merely entertaining, as when he gives his definition of “postmodernism” in a chapter discussing the occasionally unpredictable behavior of prefixes and suffixes1; in the word “postmodern,” Nunberg says, post- appears to mean “once more without feeling.”)
Looming behind mere quirks, however, is a problem in the theory of language. This problem is widely known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or as linguistic relativity. It was made more familiar to the public by the 2016 film Arrival, in which a group of aliens called heptapods2 come to the Earth to help humanity, in return for the help that they will need from humanity, three thousand years from now. The aliens’ neurology and psychology are both radically, well, alien, and so is their language, going as far as to impart, to those humans who can learn it (spoiler in orange), the ability to perceive time differently—the way the heptapods themselves do.
A Rose of Any Other Shade
Now, to be clear, a change that radical is probably not really possible for human brains, and it certainly goes far beyond what academics mean by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. That hypothesis, discussed briefly in the film, is that language does not merely express human thought, but shapes what we are capable of thinking. The theory comes in two forms,3 strong and weak. The strong version is that language determines what we do and can think; the weak form is that language simply influences those things.
Difficulties of translation between languages abound as examples here, showing how ideas don’t quite line up between one culture and another. Many of these difficulties are fictitious, like the several hundred words the Inuktitut, a.k.a. “Eskimo,” languages ostensibly have for snow. In reality, they have around a dozen: this is more than English, but there’s no need to get silly about it. (Even English has around half a dozen words for it—snow, slush, flurries, frost, hail, and sleet all come to mind, and that’s assuming good old ice doesn’t count.)
However, there are other examples that make the point better. We’ve learnt a great deal since the 1960s about different cultures’ names for colors.4 In particular, we’ve learnt that they tend to follow a predictable hierarchy. Most languages have at least three basic color words, and many have more, ranging up to about a dozen. What’s striking is that what colors a given language has names for can be predicted pretty reliably, just by knowing how many basic color-words the language has. If it’s three, the colors are dark/black, light/white5 and red; if it has four, it’s those plus green or yellow; if it has five, it will have both green and yellow; with six, blue is added, and so on.6
There are exceptions to this pattern, though. The Himba language of northern Namibia is quite unusual: it has five basic colors, so we’d expect to find black, white, red, green, and yellow. But the Himba system has, roughly speaking: blackish, off–white, red, blue-green, and brown. Distinguishing colors the way Himba speakers do may leave them puzzled by differences we’d find intuitive, but it also gives them the ability to notice variations of tone that border on invisible to us (as the experiment described in this article relates).
If any man offend not in word, the same is a perfect man, and able also to bridle the whole body. ... [T]he tongue ... is an unruly evil, full of deadly poison.
The strong form of Sapir-Whorf underlies much of the theory of Newspeak in Orwell‘s famous dystopia. The aim of the Party was, by controlling language, to make revolt against itself unthinkable, in the most literal sense. Fortunately, the strong form of the theory is also provably incorrect—because if it were true, we’d never have found out. Some mutuality among people, no matter how limited, is needed before you can even realize that you don’t understand each other. We can safely label the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as a fallacy.
Is that it? Are we done?
Sapir-Whorf, the Soph’t Version
Well—no. As so often, there are deceits waiting in the wings. They don’t all come from the strong form of Sapir-Whorf; some come from the very simple fact that, though we know about them in principle, we forget in practice to account for differences in perspective, or the way language and context influence our outlook. A few decades ago, the British comedy show Yes, Prime Minister exhibited the power of context—and, as if for the sake of effrontery, did so via the Socratic method! Sir Humphrey Appleby, an experienced civil servant, tells his subordinate (a man named Bernard Woolley) that, with a very few exceptions, opinion polls are not to be trusted—not even taken with a grain of salt, but not trusted at all—because the pollsters, while reporting the answers honestly, don’t have to report how they elicit answers they want. Appleby displays the technique:
HA: Mr. Woolley, are you worried about the rise in crime among teenagers?
BW: Yes.
HA: Do you think there is lack of discipline and vigorous training in our Comprehensive Schools?
BW: Yes.
HA: Do you think young people welcome some structure and leadership in their lives?
BW: Yes. …
HA: Might you be in favour of reintroducing National Service [i.e., conscription]? … Yes or no?
BW: Yes.
HA: Of course, after all you’ve said you can’t say no to that. On the other hand, the surveys can reach opposite conclusions. Mr. Woolley, are you worried about the danger of war?
BW: Yes. …
HA: Do you think there’s a danger in giving young people guns and teaching them how to kill?
BW: Yes.
HA: Do you think it’s wrong to force people to take arms against their will?
BW: Yes.
HA: Would you oppose the reintroduction of conscription?
BW: Yes. [does a double-take]
HA: There you are, Bernard. The perfectly balanced sample.7
The Revenge of the Sophists
And our choice of words, or our acceptance of other people’s choice of words, can and does influence our thoughts, especially if we don’t pay attention to what words we choose. If we call something right-wing rather than conservative, or woke rather than progressive, or stagnant rather than unchanged, or irreligious rather than non-religious, or religious rather than Christian, or un-American rather than bad—why? As a rule, it is more important that we know the answer to this question than it is that we change one vocabulary item for another.
The canny reader may have noticed that, in that list of alternative synonyms, the first option is generally slightly negative. Is that really necessary? In a sense, yes. As C. S. Lewis points out in Studies in Words, “the human mind is generally more eager to praise and dispraise than to describe and define.” This is especially because we are social animals; we generally want to win the applause and welcome of this group and shock the sensibilities of that. This puts us at risk of liking and disliking things before we’ve even really done justice to what they are. And when we like or dislike something, we become increasingly reluctant to change our minds about it, even in the face of mounting evidence.
Typically, dislike is the harder of the two to interrogate and, if necessary, overcome; but liking can be an obstacle to fair judgment too. Think of pairs like refined versus educated, nobility versus landed class, devout versus practicing, loyal versus blinkered, or pristine versus unchanged.
But (you may be asking yourself) how is any of this “the revenge of the Sophists,” by any stretch? Well, we hinted at part of the answer last month, in discussing what we called “the Socratic fallacy”; knowing something and being able to articulate it are two distinct things, which the Socratic fallacy treats as one. Several of the smarter, more honest Sophists—who did exist, by the by; they included men like Prodicus, Isocrates, and even Protagoras8—took a particular interest in language; they paid attention to the difference between words and meaning, and for those who taught rhetoric professionally, part of their profession involved helping their students see the impact of perspective on their ideas and arguments. Protagoras trained his students to argue both sides of every case, not because both sides were equally morally valid (he may have believed that, but if so, what little survives of his writings doesn’t indicate it), but because he expected even the wrong side in any debate to have a point. And even if, as the present author does, we prize the moral and spiritual acumen of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle more highly than the subtlety of Protagoras, we can all the same concede that Protagoras had a point.
1E.g., take the suffix –able. Normally it means “susceptible or amenable to,” as in words like fixable or unthinkable. So why is it part of the word comfortable?
2Cleverly, in the film, the two heptapods that come to the US are nicknamed Abbott and Costello.
3Come at me, linguists. Broadly, to simplify, for the sake of a quiet life, there are two. Okay?
4Much of the following comes from Basic Color Terms: Their Universality and Evolution, a book by anthropologist Brent Berlin and linguist Paul Kay, first published in 1969. Their thesis changed in later editions in response to scholarly critique and refined research, but the gist will do for our purposes.
5As the number of color names increases, “dark” and “light” increasingly denote black and white.
6Color words are “basic” if they exist in isolation, rather than being lifted from something else: e.g., “red” is basic, but “rust” is named after the substance. English has nearly a dozen basic color words: black, white, red, yellow, green, blue, brown, grey, pink, purple, and orange. (Those last three come at the end because they all began as borrowings—the first from a flower called a “pink,” the next from the famous dye, and the third from the fruit. Cyan and magenta don’t count toward our total because, as loans from Greek and French, they represent a different sort of “borrowing.”)
7This dialogue comes from Yes, Prime Minister Season 1, Episode 2, “The Ministerial Broadcast.” The series was conceived and written by Antony Jay and Jonathan Lynn; this text was sourced via IMDb’s “Quotes” page for that episode.
8Pronounced prŏd-ĭ-kŭs, ī-sŏk-rà-tēz, and prō-tăg-ø-ràs. Prodicus in particular, according to some sources, actually taught Socrates.
Gabriēl Blancārdus ēditor prīnceps apud operārium Exāminis Classicæ Eruditiōnis est, atque dōmus ejus in Baltimōrā Mariaterræ.
If you enjoyed this piece, you might also like a three-part discussion from our “Great Conversation” series, going over signs in general, symbols in particular, and one of the most potent symbols in Western culture.
Published on 12th September, 2024. The tagline Ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος [en archē ēn ho logos] is the first line of the Gospel According to St. John, “In the beginning was the Word,” in its original Greek. If you’re wondering why the author thumbnail for this post is a picture of a manticore, take a look at our pronunciation guide—you may or may not find the explanation satisfying, but you will see the said manticore at a better advantage.