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"^ O S 5 ^i^3NYS0^-^- --^ > ^ - ^ "^UQNVSOl^ "Q^, > 'jaruuuzn-' ( LANGUAGE, THOUGHT, and REALITY TECHNOLOGY PRESS BOOKS in the SOCIAL SCIENCES The Scanlon Plan: A Frontier in Labor-Management Cooperatiox Edited by Frederick G. Lesieur The Inflationary Spiral: The Experience in China, 1939-1950 By Chang Kia-Ngau The Tao of Science: An Essay on Western Knowledge and Eastern Wisdom By R. G. H. Siu Soviet Education for Science and Technology By Alexander G. Korol The Economics of Communist Eastern Europe By Nicolas Spulber On Human Communication: A Review, a survey, and a Criticism By Colin Cherry Location and Space-Economy By Walter Isard Science and Economic Development: New Patterns of Living By Richard L. Meier Moscow AND the Communist Party of India By John H. Kautsky Language, Thought, and Reality By Benjamin Lee Whorf Edited by John B. Carroll The Terms of Trade: A European Case Study By Charles P. Kindleberger Machine Translation of Languages Edited by W. N. Locke and A. D. Booth An American Policy in Asia By W. W. Rostow and R. W. Hatch Nine Soviet Portraits By Raymond A. Bauer The Prospects for Communist China By W. W. Rostow and others Labor Mobility' and Economic Opportunity By Members of the Social Science Research Council Nationalism and Social Communication By Karl W. Deutsch Industrial Relations in Sweden By Charles A. Myers Pressures on Wage Decisions By George P. Shultz The Dollar Shortage By Charles P. Kindleberger Mid-Century: The Social Implications of S<.ientific Progress Edited by John E. Burchard Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine By Norbert Wiener The Movement of Factory Workers By Charles A. Myers and W. Rupert Maclaurin /> /?. 7f. »^ LANGUAGE, THOUGHT, and REALITY SELECTED WRITINGS OF BENJAMIN LEE WHORF Edited and with an introduction by JOHN B. CARROLL Foreword by STUART CHASE Published jointly by The Technology Press of Massachusetts Institute of Technology and John Wiley & Sons, Inc. New York London FOURTH PRINTING, DECEMBER, 1959 Copyright © 1956, by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology All rights reserved. .This book or any part thereof must not be reproduced in any form without the written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 56-5367 Printed in the United States of America College Library ^7 . FOREWORD Once in a blue moon a man comes along who grasps the relationship between events which have hitherto seemed quite separate, and gives mankind a new dimension of knowledge. Einstein, demonstrating the relativity of space and time, was such a man. In another field and on a less cosmic level, Benjamin Lee Whorf was one, to rank some day perhaps with such great social scientists as Franz Boas and William James. He grasped the relationship between human language and human thinking, how language indeed can shape our innermost thoughts. We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity, which holds that all observers are not led by the same physical e\ idence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated. Indo-European languages can be roughly calibrated—English, French; German, Russian, Latin, Greek, and the rest; but when it comes to Ghinese, Maya, and Hopi, calibration, says Whorf, is structurally diffi- cult if not impossible. Speakers of Chinese dissect nature and the universe differently from Western speakers. A still different dissection is made by various groups of American Indians, Africans, and the speakers of many other tongues. Whorf was a profound scholar in the comparatively new science of linguistics. One reason why he casts so long a shadow, I believe, is that he did not train for it. He trained for chemical engineering at M.I.T., and thus acquired a laboratory approach and frame of reference. The work in linguistics was literally wrung out of him. Some driving inner compulsion forced him to the study of words and language— not, if you please, the mastery of foreign languages, but the why and how of lan- guage, any language, and its competence as a vehicle for meaning. 1157200 VI FOREWORD As a writer, I have long been interested in semantics, sometimes de- fined as "the systematic study of meaning." It does a writer no harm, I hold, to know what he is talking about. Whorf, using linguistics as a tool for the analysis of meaning, has made an important contribution to semantics. No careful student of communication and meaning can afford to neglect him. One might add that no philosophical scientist or scientific philosopher can afford to neglect him. Linguistics, he boldly proclaims, "is fundamental to the theory of thinking, and in the last analysis to all human sciences." He is probably right. Every con- siderable ad\ance in science, such as quantum theory, involves a crisis in communication. The disco\erers have to explain first to themselves, and then to the scientific world, what has been found. iWhorf as I read him makes two cardinal hypotheses: First, that all higher levels of thinking are dependent on language. Second, that the structure of the language one habitually uses influ- ences the manner in which one understands his environment. The picture of the universe shifts from tongue to tongue. tp 11 'I'hcre is a good deal of competent scientific support for the first hy- pothesis. I'he biologist, Julian Huxley, for instance, declares that "the evolution of verbal concepts opened the door to all further achieve- ments of man's thought." Language, observes Whorf, is the best show man puts on. Other creatures have developed rough communication systems, but no true language. Language is cardinal in rearing human young, in organizing human communities, in handing down the culture from generation to generation. Huxley goes so far as to venture that adaptation through the culture, depending, of course, on language, may be displacing the biological processes of evolution. When the next Ice Age moves down, for instance, instead of growing more fur, homo sapiens may step up the production of air-conditioning units. The power to reason constitutes the "uniqueness of man," to philos- ophers as well as biologists. Unprotected by claws, teeth, thick hide, flcetncss of foot, or sheer strength, homo sapiens has to think his way out of tight places. It has been his chief weapon for survival. Probably everyone experiences brainstorms too fast to be \crbal. In writing, I frequently have them. But before I can handle such bolts FOREWORD Vll from the blue, I must verbalize them, put them into words for sober reflection, or discussion. Unverbalized brainstorms do not get any- where on paper. Perhaps driving a car furnishes a good analogy for Whorf's initial hypothesis. Light waves and sound waves are enough to guide the driver's hand on the wheel along straight roads. But threading his way through a cloverleaf intersection, or reading a road map, will require a good deal more than reflex action. The first, a \ery clever chimpanzee might learn to do; the second is forever beyond it. Ill The Greeks, so active mentally, and so reluctant to exert themselves in observation post and laboratory,^ were the first to inquire into logic and reason. The Sophists were apparently the Madison Avenue boys of the Aegean, teaching young men how to capsize an opponent in de- bate or legal case, and to choose the most effective slogans in political campaigns. Aristotle inxented the syllogism, and fashioned his Three Laws of Thought, beginning with the Law of Identity, A is A, now and forever—against which we semanticists sometimes protest. The Greeks took it for granted that back of language was a universal, uncontaminated essence of reason, shared by all men, at least by all thinkers. Words, they believed, were but the medium in which this deeper effulgence found expression. It followed that a line of thought expressed in any language could be translated without loss of meaning into any other language. This view has persisted for 2500 years, especially in academic groves. Whorf flatly challenges it in his second major hypothesis. "A change in language," he says, "can transform our appreciation of the Cosmos." The day-by-day experience of skilled translators at the United Na- tions goes a long way to support him. Edmund S. Glenn of the State Department, for instance, aided by a grant from the Rockefeller Foun- dation, has waded through masses of U.N. transcriptions, looking for differences in concepts due to language.- An English speaker in one of Mr. Glenn's cases says "I assume"; the French interpreter renders it "I 1 James Harvey Robinson, the historian, lays it to the large number of slaves. - Peter T. White, "The Interpreter: Linguist Plus Diplomat." New York Times Magazine, November 6, 1955. Vlll FOREWORD deduce"; and the Russian interpreter "I consider"— By that time the assumption idea is gone with the wind! After isolating twenty similar instances, Mr.