A Basic Course in Anthropological Linguistics (Studies in Linguistic ...

138 A BASIC COURSE IN ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTICS
paraphrases used above to convey the various meanings of the terms used by
the Eskimo to refer to seals show that there are ways in which the resources
of any language can be used to communicate cross-culturally.
THE WHORFIAN HYPOTHESIS
The seeds of the WH were planted by Boas and his students at Columbia
University in the 1920s, among whom Edward Sapir in particular devoted his
career to determining the extent to which the language of a culture shaped the
thought patterns of its users. Sapir was fascinated by the fact that every culture
developed its own particular lexical and grammatical categories that largely
determined the ways in which individuals in the culture came to view the
world:
Human beings do not live in the object world alone, nor alone in
the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very
much at the mercy of the particular language system which has
become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an
illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without
the use of language and that language is merely an incidental
means of solving specific problems of communication or
reflection. The fact of the matter is that the “real world” is to a
large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the
group (Sapir 1921: 75).
The idea that language shapes reality, incidentally, caught the attention of
the Gestalt psychologists in the 1930s. Carmichael, Hogan, and Walter, for
instance, conducted a truly remarkable experiment to test the idea in 1932.
The researchers found that when they showed subjects a picture and then
asked them later to reproduce it, the reproductions were influenced by the
verbal label assigned to the picture. The drawing of two circles joined by a
straight line, for instance (figure 1 on page 139), was generally reproduced as
something resembling “eyeglasses” (figure 2 on page 139) by those subjects
who were shown the eyeglasses label. On the other hand, those who were
shown the dumbbells label tended to reproduce it as something resembling
“dumbbells” (figure 3 on page 139):