Linguistics Encyclopedia.pdf

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people think and about what they believe, and used it to popularize linguistics. It is a
message which has retained its appeal, as evidenced, for instance, in the form of Lakoff
and Johnson’s enormously popular (in academic terms) book Metaphors We Live By
(1980).
Whorf’s most famous example of what Sapir (see Mandelbaum, 1949, p. 158) calls
‘the relativity of the form of thought’ comes from his article ‘An American Indian model
of the universe’, written in about 1936. Here he claims that ‘the metaphysics underlying
our language and thinking and modern culture’ imposes the two cosmic forms, time and
space, on the universe. We see space as static, three dimensional and infinite, and time as
subject to the three-fold division into past present, and future. Hopi, in contrast, imposes
on the universe two cosmic forms, manifested and manifesting/ unmanifest, or, they
might be called the objective and the subjective. The manifested, or objective, comprises
all that is, or has been, accessible to the senses, with no attempt to distinguish past from
present, but excluding future. The subjective, or manifesting, or unmanifest comprises
future and everything that we call mental—everything that appears in the minds of
people, animals, plants, and things.
This type of phenomenon led Whorf to comment, equally famously, that (1940;
reprinted in Carroll, 1956, p. 214)
No individual is free to describe nature with absolute impartiality, but is
constrained to certain modes of interpretation…. 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, (emphasis mine)
By ‘calibration’, Whorf means something very like translation, and the translatability
criterion has become central in modern theories of meaning (see PHILOSOPHY OF
LANGUAGE). Whorf appears to be saying that unless the languages of two cultures can
be translated into each other, we must assume that the world views of the two cultures
differ dramatically. Sapir omits the possibility of translation altogether in statements like
the following: ‘No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as
representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are
distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached;’
This hypothesis will be further discussed in PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE. Suffice
it to say here that the notion that translation is quite impossible between some languages
tends to be contradicted by the research carried out by Sapir and Whorf themselves;
presumably, since they are able to explain the differences between the languages under
study and our own, and explain them, moreover, in our own language, translation, in
some sense, has been possible. And clearly, if the hypothesis is to be useful to the areas
of study I mentioned above, there must be some common ground from which differences
in linguistic usage can be considered by the researcher.
K.M.