Benjamin Lee Whorf (1956)

SCIENCE AND LINGUISTICS,

from : “Language, Thought, and Reality”

“The familiar saying that the exception proves the rule contains a good deal of wisdom, though from the standpoint of formal logic it became an absurdity as soon as “prove” no longer meant “put on trial.” The old saw began to be profound psychology from the time it ceased to have standing in logic. What it might well suggest to us today is that, if a rule has absolutely no exceptions, it is not recognized as a rule or as anything else; it is then part of the background of experience of which we tend to remain unconscious. Never having experienced anything in contrast to it, we cannot isolate it and formulate it as a rule until we I so enlarge our experience and expand our base of reference that we encounter an interruption of its regularity. The situation is somewhat analogous to that of not missing the water till the well runs dry, or not realizing that we need air till we are choking” (p.208).

“Two fluent speakers, of English let us say, quickly reach a point of assent about the subject matter of their speech; they agree about what their language refers to. One of them, A, can give directions that will be carried out by the other, B, to A’s complete satisfaction. Because they thus understand each other so perfectly, A and B, as natural logicians, suppose they must of course know how it is all done. They think, e.g., that it is simply a matter of choosing words to express thoughts. If you ask A to explain how he got B’s agreement so readily, he will simply repeat to you, with more or less elaboration or abbreviation, what he said to B. He has no notion of the process involved. The amazingly complex system of linguistic patterns and classifications, which A and B must have in common before they can adjust to each other at all, is all background to A and B” (p.211).

“...the background phenomena with which it deals are involved in all our foreground activities of talking and of reaching agreement, in all reasoning and arguing of cases, in all law, arbitration, conciliation, contracts, treaties, public opinion, weighing of scientific theories, formulation of scientific results. Whenever agreement or assent is arrived at in human affairs, and whether or not mathematics or other specialized symbolisms are made part of the procedure, THIS AGREEMENT IS REACHED BY LINGUISTIC PROCESSES, OR ELSE IT IS NOT REACHED” (p.212).

“We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds - and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it in this way - an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language. The agreement is, of course, an implicit and unstated one, BUT IT’S TERMS ARE ABSOLUTELY OBLIGATORY; we cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees.

.... 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, or can in some way be calibrated” (pp.213-214).

1) In English we divide most of our words into two classes, which have different grammatical and logical properties.

‒          Class 1 we call nouns,..e.g., ‘house, man’;

‒          Class 2, verbs, e.g., ‘hit, run.’

‒          Our language thus gives us a bipolar division of nature.

‒          But nature herself is not thus polarized.

2) In the Hopi language, ‘lightening, wave, flame, meteor, puff of smoke, pulsation’ are verbs - events of necessarily brief duration cannot be anything but verbs.

‒          Hopi actually has a classification of events (or linguistic isolates) by duration type, something strange to our modes of thought.

‒          On the other hand, in Nootka, (Vancouver Island), all words seem to us to be verbs, but really there are no classes 1 and 2; we have, as it were, a monistic view of nature that gives us only one class of word for all kinds of events. ‘ A house occurs’ or ‘it houses’ is the way of saying ‘house,’ exactly like ‘a flame occurs’ or ‘it burns.’

‒          These terms seem to us like verbs because they are inflected for durational and temporal nuances, so that the suffixes of the word for house event make it mean long-lasting house, temporary house, future house, house that used to be, what started out to be a house, and so on.

Hopi has one noun that covers every thing or being that flies, with the exception of birds, which class is denoted by another noun.

‒          The former noun may be said to denote the class (FC-B)-flying class minus bird.

‒          The Hopi actually call insect, airplane, and aviator all by the same word, and feel no difficulty about it.

‒          The situation, of course, decides any possible confusion among very disparate members of a broad linguistic class, such as this class (FC-B).

‒          This class seems to us too large and inclusive, but so would our class ‘snow’ to an Eskimo.

‒          We have the same word for falling snow, snow on the ground, snow packed hard like ice, slushy snow, wind-driven flying snow-whatever the situation may be.

‒          To an Eskimo, this all-inclusive word would be almost unthinkable; he would say that falling snow, slushy snow, and so on, are sensuously and operationally different, different things to contend with; he uses different words for them and for other kinds of snow.