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Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’ from LOCKE to LUCY 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 Harry Hoijer (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 Benjamin Lee Whorf’s papers in 1956 (cf. p.27) - these are traced largely, but not exclusively, to German language 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 anthropologists 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 philosophy 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 concept 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 Bertrand Russell (1872– 1970), and in Viennese logical positivism, reflected in the work of Rudolf Carnap (1891–1970). Joseph identifies Charles Kay Ogden (1889–1957) as the key link between Cambridge and Vienna, whose influential book of 1923 The Meaning 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 culture is structured, as argued 3 in his “The Status of Linguistics as a Science” (1929). This paper, he suggests, like others of Sapir’s writings from 1923 on, takes up the rhetoric of metaphysical garbage almost exclusively. Whorf, in turn, drawn by Sapir to structuralism 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 Alfred Korzybski (1879–1950), founder of the General Semantics movement in the United States. 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 worldview 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 Max Black 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 Wilhelm von Humboldt (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 Aristotle’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 ‘linguistic relativity 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 Franz Boas (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 languages 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 Philadelphia anthropologist 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 cultures 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 Ethnology, 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 ethnolinguistics in North America and SWH The success story of Boasian ethnolinguistics was largely the result of his institutionalization of the subject at Columbia University 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.
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