Sapir-Whorf hypothesis

In linguistics, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis (SWH) states that there are certain thoughts of an individual in one language that cannot be understood by those who live in another language. SWH states that the way people think is strongly affected by their native languages. It is a controversial theory championed by linguist Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Whorf.

First discussed by Sapir in 1929, the hypothesis became popular in the 1950s following posthumous publication of Whorf's writings on the subject. In 1955, Dr. James Cooke Brown created the Loglan language (which led to an offshoot Lojban) in order to test the hypothesis. After vigorous attack from followers of Noam Chomsky in the following decades, the hypothesis is now believed by most linguists only in the weak sense that language can have some small effect on thought.

Central to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is the idea of linguistic relativity--that distinctions of meaning between related terms in a language are often arbitrary and particular to that language. Sapir and Whorf took this one step further by arguing that a person's world view is largely determined by the vocabulary and syntax available in his or her language.

The extreme ("Weltanschauung") version of this idea, that all thought is constrained by language, can be disproved through personal experience: all people have occasional difficulty expressing themselves due to constraints in the language, and are conscious that the language is not adequate for what they mean. Perhaps they say or write something, and then think "that's not quite what I meant to say" or perhaps they cannot find a good way to explain a concept they understand to a novice. This makes it clear that what is being thought is not a set of words, because one can understand a concept without being able to express it in words.

The opposite extreme--that language does not influence thought at all--is also widely considered to be false. For example, it has been shown that people's discrimination of similar colors can be influenced by how their language organizes color names. Another study showed that deaf children of hearing parents may fail on some cognitive tasks unrelated to hearing, while deaf children of deaf parents succeed, due to the hearing parents being less fluent in sign language. Computer programmers who know different programming languages often see the same problem in completely different ways.

The Neuro-Linguistic Programming (NLP) analysis of the problem is direct: Most people do some of their thinking by talking to themselves. Most people do some of their thinking by imagining images and other sensory phantasms. To the extent that people think by talking to themselves they are limited by their vocabulary and the structure of their language and their linguistic habits. (However it should also be noted that individuals have idiolects.)

John Grinder, a founder of NLP, was a linguistics professor who perhaps unconsciously combined the ideas of Chomsky with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. A seminal NLP insight came from a challenge he gave to his students: coin a neologism to describe a distinction for which you have no words. Student Robert Dilts[?] coined a word for the way people stare into space when they are thinking, and for the different directions they stare. These new words enabled users to describe patterns in the ways people stare into space, which led directly to NLP — as pretty a validation of the weak hypothesis as one could ask.

Programming Languages The hypothesis is sometimes applied in computer science that programmers skilled in a certain language may not have a deep understanding of some concepts of other languages, though it is possible to have a superficial one. The Church-Turing thesis states that any language that can simulate a Turing machine can perform any effective algorithm.

Examples

• E-Prime -- considers the verb "to be" in terms of general semantics
• The Dispossessed -- describes a fictional anarchist culture where use of the possessive case is taboo
• The Languages of Pao -- science fiction novel depicting a social engineer who designs new languages for societies that wish to change their lot
• Babel-17 -- science fiction novel by Samuel R. Delany that supposes that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is strongly true, depicting a fictional language, Babel-17, which causes anyone who learns it to become a traitor to their political organisation.
• non-sexist language -- often promoted on the grounds that sexist attitudes are aided by sexist language
• gender-neutral pronouns such as spivak pronouns and sie and hir
• newspeak -- fictional language described in Nineteen Eighty-Four, designed to constrict thought to support the totalitarian regime of that book.
• Lojban -- a language designed to aid creative thinking and speed up all other thought, based on Loglan

See also: Johann Gottfried von Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Ferdinand de Saussure, Cognitive Science, Hans-Georg Gadamer