Sapir wharf hypothesis?

Question

my niece is took a survey college course in anthropology and has come across the sapir wharf hypothesis. she has some questions and i dont remember much of their theory at all. can someone give me the major points with a small description. remember that it was a survey course and she is a freshman.

Answer 1

It's spelled Sapir-Whorf.  You can search the internet for more information.  Basically, it says that the way a language is structured shapes the way a society thinks.  One example would be that, in English, there are masculine, feminine, and inanimate pronouns.  English speakers therefore classify everybody as male or female (because "it" isn't used for people) even though some people don't fit this gender binary.  However, in some cases, it could be said that societal patterns shape the language (possibly creating a circle of society shaping language shaping society).  An example here would be that snow is very important to the arctic Native Americans so their language has many different words to describe snow (which isn't nearly as homogeneous as English suggests).  Another example would be common metaphors that express certain attitudes.  For example, American English metaphors like "wolf at the door", "hungry as a wolf", "thrown to the wolves", and "have a wolf by the ears" all perpetuate a negative attitude towards wolves even though attitudes towards wolves have mellowed in the last 50 years.

Answer 2

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is basically that "users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward different types of observations... and hence are not equivalent as observers but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world.

Its fundamental principles are LINGUISTIC DETERMINISM which is that the way one thinks is determined by the language one speaks, and LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY, that differences among languages must therefore be reflected in the differences in the worldviews of their speakers.

Whorf studied differences between the Hopi (an Apache language) and Standard US English. He found that the Apache have "no words, grammatical forms, constructions, or expressions referring to what we call time"--past, present, or future, and this affects their "habitual thought/behavior." While speakers of Standard English "tend to analyze reality as objects in space: the present and future are thought of as 'places', and time is a path linking them, other languages, including many Native American languages, are oriented towards process. To monolingual speakers of such languages, the concrete/spatial metaphors of Standard US English grammar may make little sense." He said this explains why western cultures are so preoccupied with records and calenders, etc. in comparison with other cultures.

Though the hypothesis was revolutionary its influence died down quickly. Eric H. Lenneberg pointed out that "a demonstration that certain languages differ from each other suggests but does not prove that the speakers of these languages differ from each other as a group in their psychological potentialities."

It's possible that both language and world view are a result of environment. For example, there are many names for makes and models of cars in US English, but this is only because there ARE many makes and models of cars in the US. In a small African tribe, there would be no use for those words. So it could be that language is merely a reflection of a society's culture and pre-existing world view.

I don't know, did that make sense? I'm not good at simplifying things....