Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis
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Anthropology 350: Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis [Nancy McKee]: Okay, it’s lecture four, and today we get to talk about what is probably the most interesting and fun thing you can talk about when you’re talking about language and culture: the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. In fact, we have a whole list here—what we’re going to talk about, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, and I just made up these two subcategories and I was very proud of myself. I think they sound very romantic here. A world made of words that is how the lexicon or vocabulary of a given language kind of explores for us the world that produced it and how the grammar of given languages tell us something about the world of its speakers. But before we do any of that, we have one chore to take care of. We have a few little words. Remember our words that I gave you on the last video? Let’s see how well you did in writing them in IPA. Here, if we go to the overhead, there we have—blue looks better than red, doesn’t it? Well, I like to have a little variety. Here are our five words. Let’s see how well you did. Portion. Again, if you had a closed ‘o’ here, I could live with it. I think open ‘o’ is more accurate, but I could still live with it. ‘Shh,’ okay, a voiceless palatal fricative, you don’t want to have done this. That would be ‘jhh,’ okay. Then ‘en,’ schwa ‘n.’ Regulate. I think the biggest pitfall here might have been this. If you don’t have the ‘y’ in there, you’d have ‘regoolate,’ which wouldn’t be Standard English. And maybe you might have had some other symbol for that lower case ‘e,’ but this lower case ‘e’ is the sound ‘a’ and it’s the only symbol that would work. Jugular. Here, we got a ‘j,’ ‘juh,’ a voiced affricate, and because this syllable is stressed, you use the upside down ‘v’ or caret instead of schwa. Again, I—actually, I've heard people say juggler, but that isn’t what I said, and so you want to make sure that you have your nice ‘y’ there. ‘Er,’ remember ‘schwa’ ‘r.’ Methane. I don’t know why this word came to me. Oh, I guess ‘cause it was a chance to use a voiceless interdental fricative. ‘Thh.’ If you had this, it’s wrong because that’s voiced ‘thh,’ not methane. So no on that sucker. And picture. I think that the tempting problem with picture is that you know there’s a ‘t’ in it, and so you want to write a ‘t’ in IPA. So you might have a ‘p’ lurking around here somewhere, but remember, here we have an affricate and that affricate is a combination of a stop plus a fricative, and the stop is the ‘t,’ so it’s built in. Picture. I think that would be the problem there. Now, maybe just real fast, I could give you one sentence to write. Then I’ll give you your list of words that we’ll go over in the next episode and then we’ll move onto the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, okay? Now, you listen to me and you write down what I’m saying, and I’ll try to make it clear. This is the opening line of my very favorite poem. You might have to write more of this on your exam. I’m very partial and it’s very long. So there’s no end to the number of exams I can get out of it. I think I can do this until the day I retire. Okay, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray. Okay. The curfew tolls the knell. It doesn’t matter if you know what it means. It means the bell’s ringing, the nighttime bell, but who cares. Just write the sounds. The curfew tolls the knell. The curfew tolls the knell. Of parting day. Of parting day. Of parting day. The curfew tolls the knell of parting day. When I teach this class on campus, I sometimes have a friend of mine who teaches in the Anthropology department and who comes from England read pieces of murder mysteries, and I find it very difficult to write down what she’s saying and sometimes I find it difficult to understand what she’s saying. Okay, let’s take a look on the overhead and see how this looks. The. Now, if I were giving you a list of words and I gave you the word the, you would probably write this word here with an upside down v, with a caret, because when you give lists of words every one-syllable word is stressed. But when you have a sentence, and that's one of the points of doing whole sentences, then you realized that this word isn’t stressed at all. The curfew. It’s hardly—it’s just barely there. So, we use a schwa to indicate that it’s an unstressed syllable. And ‘thh.’ Remember— voiced. Voiced. Voiced. ‘Vvv.’ Voiced interdental fricative. Curfew, here we have an accented syllable, a stressed syllable. So we’re using a caret here. And again we’ve got to remember to put that ‘y’ in or it will be ‘cur-foo.’ The curfew tolls. Remember to put an ‘s’—a ‘z’ instead of an ‘s.’ My big failing is screwing that up. The knell. Again, this is hardly pronounced so you just slide right over it. So it’s a schwa. The knell, eh, that's the eh sound, the Greek epsilon. It’s the only sound that will work here. Of. The curfew tolls the knell of parting—and so this is hardly stressed at all, even though it’s a one-syllable word, so we use a schwa again. Parting. ‘Nnn.’ Don’t forget the ‘nn,’ and no ‘g,’ there's no 'g' sound, just ‘nnn.’ That velar nasal. Day. Nice little ‘e,’ lower case ‘e.’ Okay, that wasn’t too hard. Aren’t you getting better at this? Less freaked out by it? Good. Okay. Now here’s your list of words that we’re going to cover next time. So be ready. Write them down. Clock. Clock. Disaster. Disaster. Formulate. Formulate. Peaches. Peaches. Eggshell. Eggshell. Eggshell. Okay, that’s our—those are our calisthenics—our phonetic calisthenics for the day. Now it’s time to zoom directly into the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Yes! New camera for Sapir-Whorf. Now, the thing about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is that it wasn’t invented by Sapir or Whorf and isn’t a hypothesis. And also, it’s very hard to work with it and it’s very hard to know what to do with it, but it doesn’t go away because it’s really pretty ingenious. Edward Sapir was a German born American linguist. He was a son of a canter and he came to this country when he was five, I think. He was raised in New York as a bilingual German English speaking child and adult. And he came became a linguist and taught at Columbia, at Yale—probably other places that I don’t know about. What I always find hard to accept about Sapir is that his PhD dissertation was eighteen pages long. My PhD dissertation was three- hundred and fifty pages long and I would imagine that Sapir said more of value in his eighteen than I did in my three-hundred and fifty, and it’s always bothered me. Well, that’s who he was. He was a pretty traditional academic. His student, Benjamin Lee Whorf, was about as untraditional a student and as untraditional a linguist as you could ever imagine. He was, in fact, by training, not a linguist at all, but a chemical engineer. And he was apparently a lousy student at MIT, where he studied chemical engineering, and then he was employed by a giant insurance company as a safety inspector. But I think maybe not the kind of safety inspector that goes around from place to place and says, “Pardon me, ma’am. I got to inspect.” I think he was a kind of higher grade safety inspector than that. But his real love was not safety inspection or even chemical engineering, his real love was linguistics. And since he was employed as a chemical engineer and a safety inspector, he didn’t have to worry too much about academic convention, and he didn’t have to worry too much about whether he was consistent from article to article and from lecture to lecture. Instead, he could just follow up his own insights, his own ideas, and he didn’t have to worry about, really, what people thought about him. He had been a student of Sapir’s and of other people’s as well, but mostly, he was on his own trip, though he was very heavily influenced by Sapir. He thought about a lot of different stuff. He had—he investigated Mayan hieroglyphics, for example. His ideas about how to interpret them turned about to be completely wrong, but so were all the ideas of everybody as to how to interpret them, except Russians. Only Russians could figure that one out initially. Okay, so what’s a Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? Well, Sapir and Whorf both died quite young, they died in their fifties. And after their deaths—they died shortly before WW2—and I was born in the middle of World War II.