The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

1. The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis Rodolfo Celis Beaver College Linguistics Read disclaimer first

2. Benjamin Lee Whorf • April 24, 1897 – July 26, 1941. • Never trained formally as a linguist, though eventually came to be recognized as a leader in the field and held important university positions. • Worked for the Hartford Insurance Company as a fire prevention inspector, a job he was extremely successful at, becoming a high-ranking corporate officer at Hartford.

3. Benjamin Lee Whorf • The job required constant travel, and Whorf would use these trips as linguistic data-gathering opportunities; there is also evidence that the Company was proud of his scholarly accomplishments and granted him liberal leaves. • He became especially preoccupied with the Hopi language, as compared to what Whorf called “SAE” or Standard Average European (languages). • At the time, there was an explosion of scholarly interest in the incredible diversity and “exotic” structures of the native languages of the Americas.

4. Benjamin Lee Whorf • On a trivial, but important biographical note, an important early influence on Whorf was the work of the French mystic/scholar Fabre d’Olivet (1768-1825) and his (1815-16) La langue hébraïque restituée. • This work by d’Olivet attempted to show that the hidden meanings of the Book of Genesis could be elucidated by an analysis au fond of the structure of the trilateral Hebrew root. Each letter of the Hebrew alphabet, according to him, contained an inherent meaning . . . . • Whorf did not take the Biblical exegesis seriously, but he was powerfully influenced by the method d’Olivet used for arriving at the “meanings” of the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. The systematic comparison and contrast largely prefigures the method used by modern linguist to study the phoneme.

5. Benjamin Lee Whorf • An important development in Whorf’s life and career was when he met up, in the fall of 1931, with the great linguist and anthropologist, Edward Sapir (1884-1939), who had just come from the linguistics department at the University of Chicago to the anthropology department at Yale University. • Whorf promptly enrolled in the Ph.D. degree program so that he could take Sapir’s classes, though he had absolutely no interest in getting a Ph.D. or becoming a professional academic. • In the spring of 1932, Sapir put him in touch with a native speaker of Hopi, who happened to live in New York City! This was to have a profound influence on Whorf’s work. In 1938, Whorf was able to spend some time on a Hopi reservation in Arizona.

6. Current situation of Hopi according to Ethnologue HOPI [HOP] 5,264 speakers over 5 years old who speak Hopi at home, including 40 monolinguals (1990 census), out of a 6,500 population (1977 SIL). 989 speakers were 5 to 17 years old, 3,309 were 18 to 54, 388 were 55 to 64, 578 were 65 and older (1990 census). Several villages in northeast Arizona, with small numbers in Utah and New Mexico. Uto-Aztecan, Northern Uto-Aztecan, Hopi. Language use is vigorous except for some younger ones who prefer English. NT 1972. Bible portions 1929-1962.

7. Working with Hopi, Whorf became taken with the opinion that the strange grammar of Hopi might betoken a different mode of perceiving and conceiving things on the part of the native speaker of Hopi. • He even felt that certain types of science could be better handled in English than in Hopi – “the Hopi actually have a language better equipped to deal with . . . vibratile phenomena than is our latest scientific terminology.”

9. Disclaimer • This presentation not for distribution, and intended only for purposes of instruction between C. Rodolfo Celis and his friends and students. For sake of exposition, quotes in this presentation may be unattributed; citations will be informal at best, these gaps to be filled in verbally. No commercial value may be placed on these slides.