sign in sign up
<<
Home , Benjamin Lee Whorf, Edward Sapir, Harry Hoijer

E.F.K. Koerner

Towards a ‘Full Pedigree’ of the ‘Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’ From LOCKE to LUCY

Series A: General & Theoretical Papers ISSN 1435-6473 Essen: LAUD 1998 (2., unveränderte Auflage 2006) Paper No. 455

Universität Duisburg-Essen

E.F.K. Koerner

University of Ottawa (Canada)

Towards a ‘Full Pedigree’ of the ‘Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’ From LOCKE to LUCY

Copyright by the author Reproduced by LAUD 1998 (2., unveränderte Auflage 2006) Linguistic Agency Series A University of Duisburg-Essen General and Theoretical FB Geisteswissenschaften Paper No. 455 Universitätsstr. 12 D- 45117 Essen

Order LAUD-papers online: http://www.linse.uni-due.de/linse/laud/index.html Or contact: [email protected]

E. F. K. Koerner

Towards a ‘Full Pedigree’ of the ‘Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’ From LOCKE to LUCY

1. Introductory remarks In traditional scholarship concerning the intellectual roots of the so-called ‘Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis’ - a term perhaps first used by (1904–1976) in 1954 in a paper at a conference devoted to the subject, but probably made more widely known through John B. Carroll’s (b.1916) posthumous edition of ’s papers in 1956 (cf. p.27) - these are traced largely, but not exclusively, to German theory of the 17th (e.g., Leibniz) through the early 19th century, which, in Humboldt’s version, connects the ‘inner form’ of a language with the particularity of a world view of the nation that speaks it. This traditional view (surveyed in Koerner 1992) has recently been challenged by Joseph (1996) and, where Whorf’s work in general is concerned, by Lee (1996) in her monograph treatment of Whorf’s ‘theory complex’ (especially chapter 3). In this short paper the argument is made that these positions concerning intellectual indebtnedness are not mutually exclusive, but that an allowance should be made for the presence, latent or keenly felt, of two distinct but at least loosely connected layers of influence discernible in the work of North American linguists and from Whitney to Whorf and his followers. So while the first, perhaps more general and less explicit kind of influence (at least where Whorf is concerrned) derives from a fairly long-standing tradition in German of language, appropriate room should definitely be given to the more immediate sources of the idea that one’s native language determines individual and cultural patterns of thought which Joseph has documented so carefully. He, for one, distinguishes these more immediate sources from the version of this idea held by Herder and, notably, by Humboldt (which he dubs the ‘magic key’ view), whereby language is seen as embodying the national mind and unfolding in line with the Romantic of history, in contrast to the other version (dubbed by him ‘metaphysical garbage’), which envisions language developing within an evolutionary view of history and which is seen as introducing obstacles to logical thought. This latter view, Joseph holds, appears to have been commonplace in Cambridge analytical philosophy, represented most prominently by Alfred North Whitehead (1861–1947) and (1872– 1970), and in Viennese logical , reflected in the work of (1891–1970). Joseph identifies (1889–1957) as the key link between Cambridge and Vienna, whose influential book of 1923 The of Meaning, co-authored with Ivor Armstrong Richards (1893–1979), subtitled “The influence of language on thought and of the science of symbolism”, contains, Joseph demonstrates, many of the positions held by both Whorf and Sapir. According to Joseph, Sapir’s positive review of the same year of Ogden & Richards’ influential book marks a turning point from his view of language as a cultural product (as in Language, 1921) to a sort of template around which the rest of is structured, as argued

3

in his “The Status of as a Science” (1929). This paper, he suggests, like others of Sapir’s writings from 1923 on, takes up the of metaphysical garbage almost exclusively. Whorf, in turn, drawn by Sapir to from originally mystical interests in language - beginning with his discovery in 1924 of the quasi-Cabbalistic writings of Antoine Fabre d’Olivet (1768–1825), likewise takes up this ‘garbage’ line, interweaving it with ‘magic key’ only in the two years between Sapir’s death and his own. Joseph - in his important, indeed ground-breaking study on the subject - also investigates other influences on Whorf, for instance the writings of the analytic philosopher Count (1879–1950), founder of the General movement in the . As a result, my own paper, like my previous research on the subject, can be regarded as dealing more with part of the general intellectual climate that informed American scholarship during much of the 19th and the early 20th century, than with most of the direct, textually traceable sources of the so-called Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis that Joseph has identied.

2. The Humboldtian tradition of linguistic In line with this pre-understanding, the present paper is not intended to essay an analysis of all the various interpretations that have been made of the so-called Sapir-Whorf-Hypothesis (henceforth: SWH) over the past fifty and more years (cf. Trager 1959 and Fishman 1960, for early attempts at a systematization), a variety that caused in 1969 to throw up his arms in despair, suggesting that “an enterprising Ph.D. candidate would have no trouble in producing at least 108 versions of Whorfianism” (p.30). Instead, I would like to offer a tentative historical overview of the subject, which may shed additional light on the transmission of ideas found in SWH whose sources are usually seen, almost exclusively, in observations made by (1767–1835), the great intellectual mover in 19th-century language studies, linguistic philosophy, and education in general. However, as Christmann (1967) has already shown, essential ingredients of the idea can be found in the writings of a number of 17th- and 18th-century thinkers, among them Vico and Herder, with the result that Justice (1987:56) spoke of a “Vico–Herder–Humboldt–Sapir–Whorf hypothesis”, referring in a note to a “full pedigree” (p.93), which still awaits elaboration. In 1992, Robert Pula added another wrinkle to the lineage by musing about a ‘Nietzsche– Korzybski–Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis’. Others, such as Bock (1992:248), go as far back as to ’s Rhetoric, though I believe we are on safer ground by referring to Leibniz (Heintz 1973) as a forerunner of the ‘point de vue’ idea or suggesting Locke’s Essay of 1690 as Leibniz’s main source of inspiration (Weimann 1965), and much less so 18th- century French thinkers (cf. Haßler 1976) as possible sources for the ‘ principle’ as SWH has frequently been called since Whorf’s (1940a) paper. Since Sampson (1980:81), for example, can trace some general observations contained in SWH back only as far as (1858–1942), Sapir’s teacher at Columbia - though

4

without offering any specific evidence for the connection, it seems important that we are reminded of the fact that Humboldt had been in contact with North American scholars interested in American Indian during the 1820s and 1830s (cf. Müller-Vollmer 1976), and that it did not require Boas’ arrival in North America to transmit Humboldtian ideas of language and mind. In fact, in 1885, one year before Boas’ departure from Germany, the Daniel Garrison Brinton (1837–1899) published an English translation of a manuscript (since lost) by Humboldt on the verb in Amerindian languages (Brinton 1885). Ten years earlier, in 1875, the most influential American linguist of the second half of the 19th century, William Dwight Whitney (1827–1894), had written the following in his book The Life and Growth of Language which we could easily trace back to observations made by Humboldt — though clearly mediated through the writings of Heymann Steinthal (1823–1899) whom he mentioned as one of his major sources of inspiration in 1867:1 Every single language has [...] its own peculiar framework of established distinc- tions, its shapes and forms of thought, into which, for the human being who learns that language as his “mother-tongue”, is cast the content and product of the mind, his store house of impressions, however acquired, his experience and knowledge of the world. This is what is sometimes called the “inner form” of language, the shape and cast of thought, as fitted to a certain body of expression. (Whitney 1875:21-22) In addition to Brinton, who can be shown to have held views strongly influenced by Humboldt — compare his remark that there is “a fixed relation between the idiom and the ideas of a people” (Brinton 1891:33) — it could be shown that many other scholars in the United States working on American Indian languages and held very similar positions. Arguably the most influential among these was John Wesley Powell (1834– 1902), a Western explorer who became head of the Geological Survey of the Smithsonian Institution and, within it, of the Bureau of American , which he organized in 1879, well before Boas’ arrival on the scholarly scene (cf. Powell 1877, 21880). It remains true, however, that the training of students in anthropological linguistics by Boas, given his German background and his ethnolinguistic interests, had a reinforcing impact on North American scholarship with regard broadly Humboldtian ideas of language and mind, as we shall see in what follows.

3. Humboldtian in North America and SWH The success story of Boasian ethnolinguistics was largely the result of his institutionalization of the subject at during the late 1890s and the

1 Since Whitney is known for his attacks on Steinthal and August Schleicher (1821–1868) in the 1870s, it is importantt to remember that both are singled out as the two scholars “whose works (he) had constantly upon (his) table” in the preface to his Language and the Study of Language (New York: Charles Scribner, 1867), pp.vi-vii.

5

training of students in anthropological-linguistic fieldwork, with Alfred Louis Kroeber (1876–1960) being the first to complete his doctorate there in 1901. Within linguistics proper, it was undoubtedly (1884–1939) who turned out to be Boas’ most gifted student (Ph.D., 1909). It is to no small extent through Sapir and the various anthropologists and linguists trained by him that we can trace the continuing line of Humboldtian ideas in 20th-century American linguistics, which includes Charles Frederick Voegelin (1906–1986), trained first by Kroeber in anthropological research and subsequently in linguistics by Sapir, during his Yale years. Hoijer too, a student of Kroeber’s and Sapir’s successor at the in 1931, whose role in the organized debate of SWH during the 1950s cannot be underestimated (Hoijer ed. 1954), can be mentioned as well as the work of other Sapir students such as Stanley S. Newman (1905–1984), (1909–1967), and Mary R. Haas (1910–1996), and in turn their various students. In the present context, however, particular mention must of course be made of the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941), who attended Sapir’s lectures at Yale during the mid-1930s, and of George L. Trager (1909–1992), who collaborated with Whorf on (remote) linguistic relationships among American Indian languages and taught briefly at Yale. After all, it was Trager who first collected and published Whorf’s ‘metalinguistic’ papers in 1950, stirring the interest in the ‘Whorf Hypothesis’.

3.1 Boas and the ‘inner form’ of language Before proceding any further, it should first of all be firmly established that Boas was indeed much imbued with Humboldtian linguistic ideas, as has recently been carefully illustrated, with the help of primary German archival sources, in Bunzl’s (1996) essay, which also traces the use Boas made of ideas from comparative Indo-European philology. Liss (1996), in her contribution to the same volume, “German Culture and German Science in the Bildung of Franz Boas”, describes Boasian Geisteswissenschaft in relation to the German Romanticist ideal of self-cultivation, Bildung, which was so central to Humboldtian thought, and suggests how Boas’s personal Bildung leads him to new contexts for applying and elaborating the Volksgeist research program. Indeed, given the established fact that (1744–1803) was one of Humboldt’s sources of inspiration, it is interesting to note that Boas, while a student at the University of Bonn in the summer of 1877 (when he was just 19 years old), bought a 40-volume set of Herder’s works (Kluckhohn & Prufer 1959:8). Many years later, in his paper on “The History of ” (1904), Boas refers to Herder’s voluminous Ideen zur Geschichte der Menschheit (1784–1791) in which he found “perhaps for the first time the fundamental thought of the culture of mankind as a whole [...] clearly expressed” (p.514). This reference to Herder is also of interest because, as has been recently proved beyond doubt by Stephen Murray (1985), it must have been around that time that Edward Sapir, then pursuing graduate studies in German and Anthropology at Columbia University, met Boas. As a matter of fact, Sapir enrolled in Boas’ Anthropology 5

6

course on “American Languages” in the Fall of 1903. It would therefore not be surprising if Boas had had something to do with the choice of the subject of Sapir’s M.A. thesis, completed in 1905, on “Herder’s Ursprung der Sprache”. It is true that Humboldt is rarely mentioned in Boas’ writings; as has recently noted, “Boas was notoriously poor at citing his intellectual predecessors” (1987:31). However, in his writings Boas does refer to the work of a number of 19th-century Humboldtians such as the anthropologist Adolf Bastian (1826–1905), whom he served as an assistant at the Royal Ethnographic Museum in Berlin during 1885–1886, the Leipzig psychologist (1832–1920), and, especially, the linguist Heymann Steinthal (1823–1899).2 In his 1904 paper mentioned earlier, for instance, Boas makes the following revealing : It is necessary to speak here of one line of anthropological research that we have hitherto disregarded. I mean the linguistic method. The origin of language was one of the much-discussed problems of the nineteenth century, and, owing to its relation to the development of culture, it has a direct anthropological bearing. The intimate ties between language and ethnic were expressed by no one more clearly than by Steinthal, who perceived that the form of thought is molded by the whole social environment of which language is part. Owing to the rapid change of language, the historical treatment of the linguistic problem had developed long before the historic aspect of the natural sciences was understood. The genetic relationship of languages was clearly recognized when the genetic relationship of species was hardly thought of. With the increasing knowledge of languages, they were grouped according to common descent, and, when no further relationship could be proved, a classification according to morphology was attempted. To the linguist [such as Steinthal and other 19th-century Humboldtians: KK], whose whole attention is directed to the study of the expression of thought by language, language is the individuality of a people, and therefore a classificaion of languages must present itself to him as a classification of peoples. No other manifestation of the mental life of man can be classified so minutely and definitely as language. In none are the genetic relations more clearly established. It is only when no further genetic and morphological relationship can be found, that the lin- guist is compelled to coördinate languages and can give no further clue regarding their relationship and origin. No wonder, then, that this method was used to classify mankind, although in reality the linguist classified only languages. The result of the classification seems eminently satisfactory on account of its definiteness as compared with the result of biological and cultural classifications. (Boas 1974 [1904]:28-29) This lengthy quotation is interesting for a variety of reasons, and not only because of Boas’ explicit reference to Steinthal (cf. Bunzl [1996:63-71], for details), professor of general linguistics at the University of Berlin since 1862. It is revealing in that it may help explain his life-long interest in linguistic classification, which was one of Steinthal’s preoccupations too, albeit on genetic rather than typological grounds, and Boas’ motives for engaging in this kind of work. It should be pointed out, however, that Boas would probably

2 In his 647-page collection of papers published toward the end of his life (Boas 1940) there are frequent references to Bastian (e.g., pp. 13, 270-273 passim, 306, 435, 444, etc.) and to Wundt (e.g., 319, 456, 458, 476, 485, etc.), but I have not found a reference to Steinthal (the volume has no index). However, few of the papers included there deal with general linguistics or address questions of the relationship between language and mind, i.e., the central areas of Steinthal’s interest.

7

not have endorsed Sapir’s well-known chapter 6 in Language on “Types of Linguistic Structure” (Sapir 1921:127-156); he was too much aware of the limitations of such undertakings. It is true that Boas was not a student at the University of Berlin where Steinthal taught, but the two had met during the period that Boas was Bastian’s assistant; the American Philosophical in Philadelphia has a letter from Steinthal to Boas dated 15 Sept. 1888 in its archives (Stocking 1974:455). According to Jakobson (1944:188), Boas later “regretted never having attended” Steinthal’s lectures, and Lowie (1943:184) reports that Boas once told him that his aim was to realize Steinthal’s goals. That Boas used Humboldt’s concept of ‘inner form’ in his characterization of the diversity of Amerindian languages and tended to see languages as conditioning the world views of those speaking them, has been pointed out by Hymes (1961; cf. Stocking 1968:159). However, Boas remained highly critical of the respects in which the Herder-Humboldt tradition carried the germ of later stereotyping and misconception about the languages and cultures of peoples such as the American Indians. As Lucy (1985:81) has noted, “late in his life Boas (1942:181-183) gave a very cautious endorsement of ideas similar to those adopted by Whorf.” However, Lucy’s contention is probably quite wrong. As Robert E. MacLaury reminded me recently (p.c.), and what he suspects to be Boas’ “first self-inspired statement” on ‘linguistic relativity’, Boas pronounced the following in 1909, at the celebration of the 20th anniversary of the openning of Clark University, which was published in American Psychologist a year later: The behavior of primitive man and of the uneducated demonstrates that such linguistic classifications never rise into consciousness, and that consequently their origin must be sought, not in rational, but in automatic mental process. In various cultures these classifications may be founded on fundamentally distinct principles. A knowledge of the categories under which in various cultures experience is classified will, therefore, help to an understanding of early psychological processes. Differences of principles of classification are found in the domain of sensations. For instance: it has been observed that colors are classified in quite distinct groups according to their similarities, without any accompanying in the ability to distinguish shades of color. What we call green and blue is often combined under a term like “gall-color,” or yellow and green are combined into one concept which may be named, “color of young leaves.” In course of time we have been adding names for additional hues which in earlier times, in part also now in daily life, are not distinguished. The importance of the fact that in speech and thought the word calls forth a different picture, according to the classification of green and yellow or green and blue as one group can hardly be exaggerated. (Boas 1910:377, quoted from the slightly revised version in The Mind of Primitive Man [New York: Macmillan, 1911], p.190) So while the first lengthy quotation from Boas’ 1904 paper illustrates his intellectual heritage with regard to his linguistic and ethnological thinking generally, the second citation from a

8

statement made five years later would attest more clearly Boas’ ideas adumbrating the linguistic relativity principle which is the focus of this colloquium, perhaps not so much what he has to say about the perception and naming of colour than his references to psychological processes generally and linguistic classifications specifically. Indeed, since Whorf named only Boas and Sapir as his sources of inspiration of this issue - and not anyone else in the Humboldtian tradition that I have been particularly concerned with, it would probably be quite fruitful to look much more closely into Boas’ writings for other such passages. In the present paper, I shall deal mainly with the transmission of the so-called Humboldtian world-view idea. It is true of course that the linguistic tradition associated with the name of Wilhelm von Humboldt is much richer and more varied than that. It can be characterized grosso modo as the line of research that was preoccupied with subjects that were neglected or ignored by 19th-century ‘mainstream’ linguistics, namely, the study of non-Indo-European, especially ‘exotic’, languages, and the investigation of grammatical categories in many languages throughout the world - a subject that Boas (e.g., 1911:67), Sapir (1921:86-126 passim; 1931), Whorf (1956:67-111 passim), and their successors took a strong interest in. To this Humboldtian tradition should be added work in typological (in contrast to genetic) classification of diverse languages, on semantics and the psychology of language, and the relationship between language structure and social and cultural organization. All of these tie in, in one way or another, with the Weltanschauungshypothese, although Whorf, for his part, referred only to Boas and Sapir as his intellectual sources on this subject. An adequate treatment of the Humboldtian research program, however, would go beyond the scope of a single paper. It is hoped, however, that by tracing the transmission of mainly one facet of the Humboldtian linguistic tradition, the field will be opened for further - and deeper - scholarly research.

3.2 Humboldt, Sapir and the so-called Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis The Herder–Humboldt line of linguistic thinking was clearly drawn by one of Boas’ most distinguished students, Edward Sapir (1884–1939) in his M.A. thesis, mentioned earlier, where he compares Herder’s views with Humboldt’s and discusses Herder’s influence on Humboldt (Sapir 1984[1907]:385-388). In these pages Sapir also refers to a work by Steinthal (1858), in which Steinthal contests the correctness of this filiation, which had previously been put forward by Haym (1856). The Humboldt–Sapir connection has been explored much more fully by Drechsel (1988), especially with regard to the ‘inner form’ concept (cf. Sapir 1921:115) and the so-called ‘Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’. Indeed, it is this Weltanschauungstheorie, which has occupied anthropological linguists especially during the 1950s and 1960s (cf. Brown 1967, Miller 1968, Penn 1972, for historical treatments), and which would therefore best serve to illustrate the continuing presence of Humboldtian ideas

9

in North American linguistics. Accordingly, this paper will be largely devoted to tracing the transmission of this idea.3 Already in a letter to Friedrich Schiller of 1798, written several years before he had first made contact with a non-Indo-European language (such as Basque in 1801 and American Indian languages seven years later during his sojourn in Rome, where he got access to the materials amassed by Lorenzo Hervás y Panduro in the Vatican Library), Wilhelm von Humboldt adumbrated his Weltansicht hypothesis in the following manner: Die Sprache stellt offenbar unsre ganze geistige Tätigkeit subjektiv (nach der Art unsres Verfahrens) dar, aber sie erzeugt auch zugleich die Gegenstände, insofern sie Objekte unseres Denkens sind […]. Die Sprache ist daher, wenn nicht überhaupt, doch wenigstens sinnlich das Mittel, durch welches der Mensch zugleich sich selbst und die Welt bildet oder vielmehr seiner dadurch bewusst wird, dass er eine Welt von sich abscheidet. [“Language appears to present to us subjectively our entire mental activity (in a manner of our procedure), but it generates at the same time the objects in as much as they are objects in our thinking […]. Language is, therefore, if not altogether, at least in terms of perception, the means by which [each] human being constructs at the same time himself and the world or, by which he, rather, becomes conscious of himself by discriminating between himself and the world.”] (Cited after Heeschen 1977:133-134; translation mine: EFKK) More than ten years later, in his 1812 Essai sur les langues du Nouveau Continent, originally drafted for a project by his brother Alexander but never published during the author’s life-time, Wilhelm von Humboldt noted that “le monde dans lequel nous vivons est [...] exactement celui dans lequel nous transplante l’idiôme que nous parlons [the world in which we live … is exactly that into which the language we speak transplants us]” (Gesammelte Schriften III, p.332). Many years later, in 1827, after his retirement from public office and following several years of exchanges between himself and John Pickering (1777–1846) as well as Peter Stephen Du Ponceau (1760–1844), Humboldt presented a paper to the Prussian Academy entitled “Über den Dualis”, in which he put forward his idea of language as the mirror of the mind and as determining the world-view of the speaker in the following terms: Die Sprache ist durchaus kein blosses Verständigungsmittel, sondern der Abdruck des Geistes und der Weltansicht des Redenden. [“Language is by no means a mere means of communication, but the mirror of the mind and of the world view of the speaker.”] (Gesammelte Schriften VI, p.23) Similar observations can be found in many other places in Humboldt’s writings (see Penn [1972:19-22] for further references). Yet these few citations above may suffice to characterize what has been called Humboldt’s Weltanschauungstheorie, his theory of the interrelationship between language and world view, and, more specifically, between

3 The Humboldtian interest in language typology could serve as another such line of tradition from the work of Steinthal, August Friedrich Pott (1802–1887), Georg von der Gabelentz (1840–1893) and others to Boas, Sapir, and his students to the work of Joseph H. Greenberg (b.1915) and his associates from the later 1950s onwards.

10

linguistic structure and the particular manner in which a speaker of a given language conceptualizes his universe. One more citation from Humboldt’s posthumous magnum opus may serve to round out the picture, where he declares that [...] there resides in every language a characteristic world-view. As the individual sound stands between man and the object, so the entire language steps in between him and the nature that operates, both inwardly and outwardly, upon him. He surrounds himself with a world of sounds so as to assimilate and process within himself the world of objects. These expressions in no way outstrip the measure of the simple truth. Man lives primarily with objects, indeed, since feeling and acting in him depend on his presentations, he actually does so exclusively, as language presents them to him. (Humboldt 1988[1836]:60) Boas, in his famous Introduction to Volume I of the Handbook of American Indian Languages, written in 1908, stated the following, which clearly echoes Humboldt: Inferences based on peculiar forms of classification of ideas, and due to the fact that a whole group of distinct ideas are expressed by a single term, occur commonly in the terms of relationship of various languages; as, for instance, in our term uncle, which means two distinct classes of father’s brother and mother’s brother. Here also, it is commonly assumed that the linguistic expression is a secondary reflex of the customs of the people; but the question is quite open in how far the one phenomenon is the primary one and the other the secondary one, and whether the customs of the people have not rather developed from the unconsciously developed terminology [...]. Finally, a few examples may be given of cases in which the use of descriptive terms of certain , or the metaphorical use of these terms, has led to peculiar views or customs. [...] the peculiar characteristics of language are clearly reflected in the views and customs of the peoples of the world. (Boas 1911:72-73) Whereas Humboldt appears to have affirmed that the language we are speaking determines our way of looking at things, Boas was hedging, allowing for a possibly reciprocal influence between language and thought (which was not actually excluded by Humboldt). Sapir, who had completed his doctorate under Boas in 1909, made a much more forceful statement twenty years later, after having worked with American Indian languages for many years, regarding the interrelationship between language and world-view. Speaking at a joint meeting of the Linguistic Society of America and various other American learned held in New York City in December 1928, Sapir stated: Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression of 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. [...] We see and hear and otherwise experience very largely as we do because of the language habits of our community predispose certain choices of interpretation. (Sapir 1929:209-210 = 1949:162)

11

In view of the opinion expressed by A. L. Kroeber thirty years after Sapir’s statement, namely, that the so-called ‘Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’ ought properly be called ‘Whorf’s Hypothesis’ alone (see Kroeber 1984[1959]:135-136), a position reiterated by others (e.g., Alford 1978), it seems important not to overlook Sapir’s argument expressed publicly before a large audience. As has observed on various occasions (1983 passim), the above quotation from Sapir is not an isolated observation concerning the ‘relativity principle’. Interestingly enough, given the recent suggestions that Whorf took this term from Einstein (e.g., Heynick 1983), Sapir, in his paper “The Grammarian and His Language”, published in a popular magazine in 1924, spoke of ‘relativity’ in the following terms (which has an unmistakingly Humboldtian ring to it): The upshoot of it all [i.e., the analysis of experience in different languages] would be to make very real to us a kind of relativity that is generally hidden from us by our naïve acceptance of fixed habits of speech as guides to an objective understanding of the nature of experience. This is the relativity of concepts or, as it might be called, the relativity of the form of thought. (Sapir 1949[1924]:159; also quoted in Hymes 1983:153-154) As Sapir’s influence on Whorf is undeniable (cf. Darnell [1990:375-382] for an account of their relationship), we might see in passages like these the source of Whorf’s inspiration. Indeed, we should at least cite another - much more forceful - statement of Sapir’s, published in Science, another public forum, somewhat later in order to dispel the mistaken idea that Whorf developed his ideas on the subject entirely independently of Sapir: Language […] not only refers to experience largely acquired without its help but actually defines experience for us by reason of its formal completeness and because of our unconscious projection of its implicit expectations into the field of experience […]. Such categories as number, , case tense, […] are not so much discovered by experience as imposed upon it because of the tyrannical hold that linguistic form has upon our orientation in the world. (Sapir 1931).

3.3 Traces of ‘Humboldtian’ ideas in the writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf It is true, however, that it was Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897–1941) - the chemical engineer and fire-insurance investigator by profession and the linguist by avocation, who had undertaken extensive research into the language Indians of (not in situ, but through an informant residing in New York City) during 1932–1935 - who went beyond what his predecessors had suggested concerning the relationship between cognition and grammatical categories. Indeed, it has been suggested by Regna Darnell (1990:380-382) that Whorf did so quite consciously, in an attempt to attract (largely non-linguistics) students to the course in American Indian linguistics which he was teaching at Yale during 1937–1938, substituting for Sapir who had taken sabbatical leave for the year. Thus, in a paper on “Science and Linguistics” published in a non-linguistic journal in 1940 (and frequently

12

reprinted in various places thereafter), Whorf was addressing notably scientists when he argued that the background linguistic system (in other words, the grammar) of each language is not merely a reproducing instrument for voicing ideas but rather is itself a shaper of ideas, the program and guide for the individual’s mental activity, for his analysis of impressions, for his synthesis of his mental stock in trade. (Whorf 1956[1940a]: 212) In the same paper he noted further (p.213): 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 of our minds. As as result, Whorf (p.214) held that 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. These are not the only places in which Whorf discussed his ‘relativity principle’ (cf. Whorf 1956: 240, 252, and elsewhere, e.g., Whorf 1950[1936]) - Sapir, as we have seen, had earlier spoken of the “relativity of the form of thought” (1924:158), but in Whorf’s case it cannot be doubted that he was alluding to Einstein when he spoke of “a new principle of relativity”, given that the journal for which he had drafted his article was M.I.T.’s Technology Review. Whorf’s 1940 paper has become the locus classicus of what has ever since been called ‘the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’. No doubt, these above statements are the most forceful ones, but Whorf made similar statements in other ‘metalinguistic’ papers first assembled by his fried George L. Trager in 1949 and later included in the collected papers edited by John B. Carroll (Whorf 1988[1956]). There is no indication that Whorf ever referred to Humboldt in his writings, published and unpublished (cf. Lee 1996). Sapir too made no direct references to Humboldt after his 1905 M.A. thesis either, as far as I know, and so the argument of influence may be somewhat farfetched in either case. Yet to speak of a latent tradition to think in Humboldtian terms that goes back to at least the last quarter of the 19th century in America may not be illegitimate. Passages in Whorf like the following appear at least to echo Humboldtian terms, when he argued for mental through the direct experience of linguistic diversity: I believe that those who envision a world speaking only one tongue, whether English, German, or Russian, or any other, hold a misguided ideal and would do the evolution of the human mind the greatest disservice. Western culture has made, through language, a provisional analysis of reality and, without correctives, holds resolutely to that analysis as final. The only correctives lie in all those other

13

tongues which by aeons of independent evolution have arrived at different, but equally logical, provisional analyses. (Whorf 1956 [1941b]:244) It is interesting to note that as recent as 1985 John A. Lucy charged that “despite this interest, few undertook the empirical and theoretical tasks necessary to seriously investigate and develop his [i.e., Whorf’s] ideas” (p.89). Typically, Lucy, a psycho-sociologist, focuses on Whorf’s conceptual distinction between ‘overt’ and ‘covert’ categories in language (76-80), taking Whorf’s work on Hopi at face value (81-89).While it is true that the interest in the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis among North American anthropologists and linguists somewhat abated during the 1960s and 1970ss - compared to the early 1950s, during which altogether four meetings were held in the United States on the subject within a span of three years (cf. Hymes [1983:174-176] for details) as against only two during the 1970s (see Pinxten 1976; McCormack & Wurm 1977), there are no indications that the issue has been abandoned because of the difficulty, if not sheer impossibility, of verifying its basic correctness. Interestingly enough, Paul Kay, for instance, who in 1969 together with a colleague, published the result of experiments dealing with colour perception and naming (Berlin & Kay 1969), which supposedly refuted SWH, fifteen years later reports on a study in which he and another researcher conclude their new research into the matter, saying: “A more cautious Whorfianism seems to be supported by the results reported here” (Kay & Kempton 1984:77).

4. Concluding remarks In 1963 Hymes spoke of “the gradual remission of amnesia as to the past anthropological history of the problems dramatized by Whorf”, and referred to the fact that Whorf himself never regarded his ideas as revolutionary but “saw his work as deriving from Sapir and Boas”, adding that the “record of continuity is in fact much longer, going back, of course, to Wilhelm von Humboldt” (Hymes 1983:16). In this short paper, I have sketched only the transmission of the so-called ‘Weltanschauungstheorie’ from Humboldt to 20th-century American ethnolinguistics. While the history is far from being complete, a systematic classification of the accumulated discussion over the past fifty years, since Whorf’s seminal paper of 1940, appears desirable. The list of references provided in Koerner (1995:218-240) may serve as basis for someone willing to take on this demanding task. The 1990s witness a revival of interest in SWH, now more often associated with Whorf’s writings, probably because his formulations have been particularly provocative and challenging to anthropologists, sociologist, philosophers and psychologists (cf. Bock 1992). Several recent publications and related activities seem to suggest such an increased attention: I am referring to the various contributions to the festschrift in honour of Joshua A. Fishman, The Influence of Language on Culture and Thought (Cooper & Spolsky 1991) and the convening of a symposium on ‘Rethinking Linguistic Relativity’ in Ocho Rios, Jamaica, on 3–11

14

May 1991, co-chaired by John J. Gumperz & Stephen C. Levinson, the proceedings of which have now been published (Gumperz & Levinson 1996). 1992 saw the publication of two monographs by John A. Lucy, one entitled Language Diversity and Thought with the subtitle “A reformulation of the linguistic relativity hypothesis”, the other dealing with Grammatical Categories and Cognition and based on empirical studies conducted by the author comparing the grammar of American English with that of Yucatec Maya, an indigenous language of southeastern (Lucy 1992a, b). For the present survey, the first- mentioned book is of particular interest as it offers, in the first two chapters, an historical account of the development of SWH beginning with Boas, but not venturing at all into its - the name of Humboldt, for instance, is not mentioned once in the 300 pages of narrative (cf. Lee 1994 for a critique). The work of Alfred Bloom (1981), based on experiments conducted during his tenure at the University of Hong Kong, receives ample treatment (Lucy 1992a:208-252). No doubt, judging from the discussions it engendered, Bloom’s investigation of hypothetical and theoretical thinking common among speakers of English versus its seemingly marginal presence among speakers of Chinese (Cantonese) - on so-called counterfactual reasoning - appears to be still one of the most interesting studies on the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis to date (cf. Lardiere 1992, for a recent discussion). Even in Europe - though the active involvement of psycholinguists from North America like Herbert Clark, , John Lucy and others cannot be overlooked — there has been a revival of interest in SWH, not in the form of a ‘naïve Neo-Whorfianism’, as the director of the research team on ‘’ at the Max Planck Institute of in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, assures us, but in an ongoing, carefully controlled effort, begun several years earlier, to verify empirically the ‘Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’ (Senft 1994:428n1) of ‘the linguistic determination of conceptual organization’ (ibid., p.413). The International Symposium ‘Humboldt and Whorf Revisited: Universal and culture-specific conceptualizations in grammar and lexis’, scheduled to take place at Gerhard Mercator University, Duisburg, Germany, 1–4 April 1998, thus appears to become much more than mere stock-taking of the world-wide - and clearly much more interdisciplinary and profound, if various contributions to the recent volume edited by Gumperz and Levinson (1996), notably Slobin’s, are any guide - discussion of the subject over the past fifteen or more years.

References* Alford, Danny K[eith] H[awkmoon]. 1978. “The Demise of the Whorf Hypothesis: A major revision in the history of linguistics”. Proceedings of the 4th Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, 485-499. Berkeley, Calif. Berlin, Brent & Paul Key. 1969. Basic Color Terms: Their universality and evolution. Berkeley & Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press.

* For a much fuller bibliography on the (pre-)history of the ‘Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis’, see Koerner, Professing Linguistic Historiography (Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1995), 218-240.

15

Black, Max. 1969. “Some Troubles with Whorfianism”. Language and Philosophy: A symposium ed. by Sidney Hook, 30-35. New York: New York Univ. Press. Bloom, Alfred H. 1981. The Linguistic Shaping of Thought: A study on the impact of language on thinking in China and in the West. Hillsdale, N.J.: Laurence Earlbaum. Boas, Franz. 1904. “The ”. Science 20.513-524. (Repr. in Boas 1974.23-36.) Boas, Franz. 1911. “Introduction”. Handbook of American Indian Languages, Part I (= Bureau of American Ethnology, Bulletin 40), 1-83. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. (Repr., among other places, in American Indian Languages ed. by Preston Holder, 1-81. Lincoln, Nebr.: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1966.) Boas, Franz. 1942. “Language and Culture”. Studies in the History of Culture: The disciplines of the humanties, 178-184. Menasha, Wis.: George Banta. Boas, Franz. 1974. A Franz Boas Reader: The shaping of , 1883-1911. Ed. by George W. Stocking, Jr. New York: Basic Books. (Repr., Chicago & London: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1982.)Bock, Philip K. 1992. “World View and Language”. International Encyclopedia of Linguistics ed. by William Bright, vol.IV, 248-251. Oxford & New York: Oxford Univ. Press. Brinton, Daniel Garrison. 1885. “The Philosophic Grammar of American Languages, as set forth by Wilhelm von Humboldt; with the translation of an unpublished memoir by him on the American verb”. Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 22.306-354. Brinton, Daniel Garrison. 1891. The American Race: A linguistic classification and ethnographic description of the native tribes of North and South America. New York: Hodges; Philadelphia: David McKay. Brown, Roger Langham. 1967. Wilhelm von Humboldt’s Conception of Linguistic Relativity. The Hague: Mouton. Bunzl, Matti. 1996. “Franz Boas and the Humboldtan Tradition: From Volksgeist and Nationalcharakter to an anthropological concept of culture”. Stocking 1996.17-78. Christmann, Hans Helmut. 1967. Beiträge zur Geschichte der These vom Weltbild der Sprache. Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner. Cloeren, Heinz-Joseph. 1988. Language and Thought: German approaches to in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Cooper, Robert L. & Bernard Spolsky, eds. 1991. The Influence of Language on Culture and Thought: Essays in honor of Joshua A. Fishman’s sixty-fifth birthday. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Darnell, Regna. 1987. Daniel Garrison Brinton: The “fearless critic” of Philadelphia. Philadelphia: Dept. of Anthropology, Univ. of Pennsylvania. Darnell, Regna. 1990. Edward Sapir: Linguist, anthropologist, humanist. Berkeley & Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press. [See esp. the chapter on “Whorf and the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis” (375-382).] Drechsel, Emanuel J. 1988. “Wilhelm von Humboldt and Edward Sapir: Analogies and homologies in their linguistic thought”. In Honor of : From the Haas festival conference on native American linguistics ed. by William F. Shipley, 225-264. Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Fishman, Joshua A. 1960. “A Systematization of the Whorfian Hypothesis”. Behavioral Science 5.323-339. Gipper, Helmut. 1972. Gibt es ein sprachwissenschaftliches Relativitätsprinzip? Untersuchungen zur Sapir- Whorf Hypothese. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Gumperz, John J. & Stephen C. Levinson, eds. 1996. Rethinking Linguistic Relativity. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press. Haßler, Gerda. 1976. “Ansätze zur Diskussion um ein sprachliches Relativitätsprinzip in der Auseinandersetzung Turgots mit Maupertuis”. Zeitschrift für Phonetik, Sprachwissenschaft und Kommunikationsforschung 29.491-494. Haym, Rudolf. 1856. Wilhelm von Humboldt: Lebensbild und Charakteristik. Berlin: R. Gaertner. Heeschen, Volker. 1977. “Weltansicht - Reflexionen über einen Begriff Wilhelm von Humboldts”. Historiographia Linguistica 4.159-190.

16

Heintz, Günter. 1973. “‘Point de vue’: Leibniz und die These vom Weltbild der Sprache”. Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 27.86-107. Heynick, Frank. 1983. “From Einstein to Whorf: Space, time, matter and reference frames in physical and linguistic relativity”. Semiotica 45:1/2.35-64. Hoijer, Harry. 1954. “The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis”. Language in Culture: Proceedings of a conference on the interrelations of language and other aspects of culture ed. by H. Hoijer, 92-105. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press. Humboldt, Wilhelm von. 1904[1812]. “Essai sur les langues du Nouveau Continent”. Gesammelte Schriften III, 300-341. Humboldt, Wilhelm von. 1827. Ueber den Dualis. Berlin: Königl. Akad. der Wissenschaften, 1828. (Repr. in Gesammelte Schriften VI, 4-30 [1907].) Humboldt, Wilhelm von. 1836. Über die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts. Berlin: Königl. Academie der Wissenschaften. [English transl., On Language: The diversity of human language-structure and its influence on the mental development of mankind, by Peter Heath, with an Introduction by Hans Aarsleff. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1988.] Humboldt, Wilhelm von. 1903-1936. Gesammelte Schriften. Herausgegeben von der Königlichen Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. 17 vols. Berlin: B. Behr. (Repr., Berlin: W. de Gruyter, 1967-1968.) Hymes, Dell H. 1961. “On Typology of Cognitive Styles in Language (with examples from Chinookan)”. Anthropological Linguistics 3:1. 22-54. Hymes, Dell H. 1983. Essays in the History of . Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Jakobson, Roman. 1944. “Franz Boas’ Approach to Language”. International Journal of American Linguistics 10.188-195. (Repr. in Selected Writings by R. Jakobson, vol.II: Word and Language, 477-488. The Hague: Mouton, 1971.) Joseph, John E. 1996. “The Immediate Sources of the ‘Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’”. Historiographia Linguistica 23:3.365-404. Justice, David. 1987. The Semantics of Form in Arabic in the Mirror of European Languages. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Kay, Paul & Willett Kempton. 1984. “What Is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?”. 86.65-79. Kluckhohn, Clyde & Olaf Prufer. 1959. “Influences during the Formative Years”. The Anthropology of Franz Boas: Essays on the centenary of his birth ed. by , 4-28. , Calif.: Howard Chandler. Koerner, E. F. Konrad. 1992. “The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: A preliminary history and a bibliographical essay”. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 2:2.173-198. (A further extended and updated version is included as Chapter 10 in Koerner, Professing Linguistic Historiography, 203-240. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1995.) Kroeber, Alfred L. 1984[1959]. “Reflections on Edward Sapir, Scholar and Man”. Edward Sapir: Appraisals of his life and work. ed. by Konrad Koerner, 131-139. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Lardiere, Donna. 1992. “On the Linguistic Shaping of Thought: Another response to Alfred Bloom”. Language in Society 21:2.231-251. Lee, Penny. 1994. “New Work on the Linguistic Relativity Question”. Historiographia Linguistica 21:1/2.173-191. Lee, Penny. 1996. The Whorf Theory Complex: A critical reconstruction. Amsterdam & Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Liss, Julia E. 1996. “German Culture and German Science in the Bildung of Franz Boas”. Stocking 1996.155-184. Lowie, Robert H. 1943. “The Progress of Science: Franz Boas, anthropologist”. Scientific Monthly 56.183-184.

17

Lucy, John A. 1985a. “Whorf’s View of the Linguistic Mediation of Thought”. Semiotic Mediation: Sociocultural and psychological perspectives ed. by Elizabeth Mertz & Richard J. Parmentier, 74- 97. Orlando, Fla. & London: Academic Press. Lucy, John A. 1985b. “The Historical Relativity of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis”. The Quarterly Newsletter of the Laboratory of Comparative Human Cognition 7.103-108. Lucy, John A. 1991. “Whorf, Benjamin Lee”. International Dictionary of Anthropologists ed. by Christopher Winters, 756-758. New York & London: Garland. Lucy, John A. 1992a. Language Diversity and Thought: A reformulation of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. (= Studies in the Social and Cutural Foundations of Language, 12.) Cambridge & New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, xi, 328 pp. [This and the subsequent item go back to the author’s Univ. of Chicago dissertation directed by .] Lucy, John A. 1992b. Grammatical Categories and Cognition: A case study of the linguistic relativity hypothesis. (= Studies in the Social and Cutural Foundations of Language, 13.) Ibid., xv, 211 pp.[Based on a study of Yucatec Mayan.] Lucy, John A. 1997. “Linguistic Relativity”. Annual Review of Anthropology 26.291-312. Malotki, Ekkehart. 1979. Hopi-Raum: Eine sprachwissenschaftliche Analyse der Raum-Vorstellungen in der Hopi-Sprache. Tübingen: Gunter Narr. Malotki, Ekkehart. 1983. Hopi Time: A linguistic analysis of the temporal concepts of the . Berlin: Mouton. Martin, Laura. 1986. “‘Eskimo Words for Snow’: A case study in the genesis and decay of an anthropological example”. American Anthropologist 88:2.418-423. McCormack, William C. & Stephen A. Wurm, eds. 1977. Language and Thought: Anthropoogical issues. The Hague: Mouton. Miller, Robert L. 1968. The Linguistic Relativity Principle and Humboldtian Ethnolinguistics: A history and appraisal. The Hague: Mouton. Müller-Vollmer, Kurt. 1976. “Wilhelm von Humboldt und der Anfang der amerikanischen Sprachwissenschaft: Die Briefe an John Pickering”. Univer-salismus und Wissenschaft im Werk und Wirken der Brüder Humboldt ed. by Klaus Hammacher, 259-334. Frankfurt/Main: V. Klostermann. Müller-Vollmer, Kurt. 1990. “From to Signification: The Herder–Humboldt controversy”. Johann Gottfried Herder: Language, history, and the enlightenment ed. by Wilhelm Koepke, 9-24. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House. Murray, Stephen O. 1985. “A Pre-Boasian Sapir?”. Historiographia Linguistica 12.267-269. Ogden, C. K. & I. A. Richards. 1923. : A study of the influence of language upon thought and of the science of symbolism. London: Methuen; New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. Penn, Julia M. 1972. Linguistic Relativity versus Innate Ideas: The origins of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in German thought. The Hague: Mouton. Pinxton, Rik, ed. 1976. versus Relativism in Language and Thought: Proceedings of a colloquium on the Sapir-Whorf hypotheses. The Hague: Mouton Powell, John Wesley. 1877. Introduction to the Study of Indian Languages with Words, Phrases, and Sentences to be Collected. Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office. (2nd rev. and extended ed., 1880.). Pula, Robert P. 1992. “The Nietzsche–Korzybski–Sapir–Whorf Hypothesis?”. Etc.: A Review of 49.50-57. Pullum, Geoffrey K. 1991. “The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax”. The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax and Other Irreverant Essays on the Study of Language by G. K. Pullum, 159-171. Chicago & London: Univ. of Chicago Press. [“Appendix: Yes, but how many really?” (168-171).] Sampson, Geoffrey. 1980. “The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis”. Schools of Linguistics: Competition and evolution by G. Sampson, 81-102. London: Hutchinson; Stanford, Cal.: Stanford Univ. Press.

18

Sapir, Edward. 1907[1905]. “Herder’s ‘Ursprung der Sprache’”. Modern Philology 5.109-142. (Repr., with a Foreword by Konrad Koerner [349-354], in Historiographia Linguistica 11.355-388 [1984].) Sapir, Edward. 1921. Language: An introduction to the study of speech. New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co. (Repr., 1939.) Sapir, Edward. 1923. “An Approach to Symbolism”. The Freeman 7, 22 Aug. 1923, 572-573. [Review of Ogden & Richards 1923.] Sapir, Edward. 1929. “The Status of Linguistics as a Science”. Language 5.207-214. (Repr. in Sapir 1949.160-166.) Sapir, Edward. 1931. “[Conceptual Categories in Primitive Languages]”. Science 74.578. (Repr. in Lan- guage in Culture and Society ed. by Dell Hymes, p.128. New York: Harper & Row, 1964.) Sapir, Edward. 1949. Selected Writings of Edward Sapir in Language, Culture, and Personality. Ed. by David G. Mandelbaum. Berkeley & Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press. [Frequently reprinted, most recently in 1988.] Senft, Gunter. 1994. “Ein Vorschlag, wie man standardisiert Daten zum Thema ‘Sprache, Kognition und Konzepte des Raumes’ in verschiedenen Kulturen erheben kann”. Linguistische Berichte No.154.413-429. Slobin, Dan I. 1996. “From ‘Thought and Language’ to ‘Thinking for Speaking’”. Gumperz & Levinson 1996.70-96. Steinthal, Heymann. 1858. Der Ursprung der Sprache im Zusammenhang mit den letzten Fragen alles Wissens: Eine Darstellung der Ansicht Wilhelm v. Humboldts, verglichen mit denen Herders und Hamanns [...]. 2nd rev. and enl. ed. Berlin: Ferdinand Dümmler. Stocking, George W., Jr. 1974. “The Boas Plan for the Study of American Indian Languages”. Studies in the History of Linguistics: Traditions and paradigms ed. by Dell Hymes, 454-484. Bloomington & London: Indiana Univ. Press. Stocking, George W., Jr. ed. 1996. Volksgeist as Method and Ethic: Essays on Boasian and the German anthropological tradition. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press. Sweet, Paul R. 1989. Review of Humboldt (1988[1836]). Historiographia Linguistica 16:3.387-392. Trager, George L. 1959. “The Systematization of the Whorf Hypothesis”. Anthropological Linguistics 1:1.31-35. Weimann, Karl-Heinz. 1965. “Vorstufen der Sprachphilosophie Humboldts bei Bacon und Locke”. Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie 84.498-508. Whitney, William Dwight. 1875. The Life and Growth of Language. New York: D. Appleton & Co.; Lon- don: H. S. King. Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1940a. “Science and Linguistics”. Technology Review (M.I.T.) 42: 6.229-231, 247- 248 (April 1940). (Repr. in Whorf 1956.207-219.) Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1940b. “Linguistics as an Exact Science”. Technology Review (M.I.T.) 43:1.61-63, 80-83 (Dec. 1940). (Repr. in Whorf 1956.220-232.) Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1941a[1939]. “The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behavior to Language”. Lan- guage, Culture, and Personality: Essays in memory of Edward Sapir ed. by , A. Irving Hallowell & Stanley S. Newman, 75-93. Menasha, Wis.: George Banta for Sapir Memorial Publication Fund. (Repr. in Whorf 1956.134-159.) Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1941b. “Languages and Logic”. Technology Review (M.I.T.) 43.250-252, 266, 268, 272. (Repr. in Whorf 1956.233-245.) Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1942. “Language, Mind, and Reality”. The Theophist (Madras, ) 63:1.281-291. (Repr. in Whorf 1956.246-270.) Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1945[1937]. “Grammatical Categories”. Language 21.1-11. Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1950[c.1936]. “An American Indian Model of the Universe”. International Journal of American Linguistics 16.67-72. Ed. from MS by George L. Trager & Edward A. Kennard. (Repr. in Whorf 1956.57-64.) Whorf, Benjamin Lee. 1956. Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected writings […]. Ed. with an Introduction by John B. Carroll. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. (18th printing, 1988.)

19