Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf

by Benjamin Lee Whorf, John B. Carroll (Editor)

The pioneering linguist Benjamin Whorf (1897–1941) grasped the relationship between human language and human thinking: how language can shape our innermost thoughts. His basic thesis is that our perception of the world and our ways of thinking about it are deeply influenced by the structure of the languages we speak. The writings collected in this volume include important papers on the Maya, Hopi, and Shawnee languages as well as more general reflections on language and meaning.

Genres: Linguistics, Philosophy, Language, Anthropology, Nonfiction, Psychology, Science

290 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 1956

About the author

Bejamin Lee Whorf was an inspector for a fire insurance company who studied and wrote about language with his teacher, a Yale professor named Edward Sapir. Together they proposed what Whorf called the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis, commonly known as the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

Reviews

[Bryan--The Bee’s Knees · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dr. Louise Banks: If you immerse yourself into a foreign language, then you can actually rewire your brain.

Ian Donnelly: Yeah, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. It's the theory that the language you speak determines how you think and...

Dr. Louise Banks: Yeah, it affects how you see everything.

--From the 2016 film Arrival

It was interesting to run across this book only a few months after I'd seen this film--I didn't remember the name mentioned in the quote at the time, but after reading through Whorf's writings, it struck me that what he was talking about sounded a lot like what the characters in the film had been talking about. A quick search (thanks, IMDb!) proved it so, though the use the film puts it to is firmly in the realm of science-fiction. Whorf himself would probably have wanted to make more modest claims.

I've given this book five stars, but it comes with caveats--or maybe it just isn't your typical five star book. To me, I found Whorf's ideas fascinating--the absolute truth or falsity of them is immaterial, because thinking about what Whorf was saying really engaged me, kind of fired my imagination and literally opened up another way of viewing the world. Unfortunately, in the layout of this book, there are pieces that deal with pure linguistic topics (which were completely over my head) and, due to the nature of this collection, quite a bit of repetition. So by any kind of objective rating, one could easily rate the book 4 or even 3 stars. It's got a shaky beat and you really can't dance to it.

But measuring the book by that kind of objective criteria misses the point entirely, I think. What an original thinker! It's doubtful I can encapsulate his ideas in a review--I don't know I'd actually agree with the 're-wire your brain' idea, at least not from the readings in this book. It's more that a person is unconsciously predisposed, because of the language that he speaks, to interpret the phenomena that surrounds him in a particular way. Because these parameters are so ingrained, the speaker of that language doesn't even recognize he's bound by them, and assumes his interpretation is logical and the only possible way of interpreting the data he receives. Yet speakers of another language may have a completely different interpretation. This parallels Einstein's relativity theories, though instead of observers in different points, we have observers who speak different languages. It isn't that the phenomenon itself is different, just our way of relating to it can differ, if our language has taught us to.

Realizing that we are bound by our language can open us up to the idea that our way of ordering the world around us, which seems to be based on an intuitive logic, is not necessarily the only way of so ordering things, and that there might be more efficient ways. Thus, an English speaker, who segments the world in a particular way because of his language, might perceive classical Newtonian physics as simply an extension of common sense, but find quantum physics difficult to wrap his head around. Whorf posits that other languages, particularly Hopi, which he studied extensively, could better prepare the speaker for what English speakers might call advanced concepts (at least this English speaker), because that language has already taught its users to view the world in a way that dovetails with that picture of reality.

This book is a compendium of all of Whorf's writing--not all of it deals with the concept of how language influences thought. There are pieces here on Whorf's coining of the term cryptotype, which describes hidden aspects of a language, his work on Mayan hieroglyphics, and some linguistic work on the Shawnee language. These were of varying interest--I thought the explanation of crytotypes fascinating, though, as a layman, it took on for me the aspect of a 'fun fact'. Other discussions of linguistic investigations were hit or miss, depending on my level of understanding--Whorf gets into some highly abstract concepts (or at least they were highly abstract to me).

But a search of Whorf here on Goodreads only returns this single title, so if one is interested in reading his ideas as he presented them, this is your only choice. While there may be other books on linguistics that summarize or amplify Whorf's ideas, or seek to dispute them--it seems that the debate is still ongoing--this is the only collection by him I can find. Since it is my first exposure to these ideas, I put a high value on it, though I can imagine that a general survey of the field might be just as illuminating.

[Gary Bruff · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is probably one of the first works of either linguistics or anthropology that I ever read. I recall being blown away by the ‘Sapir-Whorf hypothesis’. With it, the world became vastly more interesting, and more full of potential, merely because our lens on ‘reality’ is perennially filtered by the more or less arbitrary permutations of the grammars we speak (or which speak us). But I have come over time to see the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis as largely a transference of liberal romanticism from the domain of the atomic bourgeois individual to the frontiers of lexico-grammatical diversity. Accordingly, nothing is true in absolute terms, but this means anything is potentially thinkable, is potentially doable. In fact, nearly anything becomes possible. The trouble for Whorf comes in his attempt to prove or demonstrate the radical otherness of the speakers of other tongues. His examples from English are familiar but not convincing. And his analysis of Native American languages seems to exaggerate the differences between Standard Average European and more ‘exotic’ formulae of reality.

But apart from his crackpot metaphysics, Whorf produced some important work in theoretical and typological linguistics. I would like to delve into Whorf’s ‘Grammatical Categories,’ which is as relevant today as when it was composed in the 1930’s. I think it is Whorf’s best work. Whorf begins his discussion of categories as he should, by questioning the validity of applying the labels of traditional European grammar to the categories found in other languages. Rather, Whorf proposes many divisions by which languages can be said to differ in their categories. As one example among many, some categories are selective, like nouns and verbs, while others are modulating, like case and tense. This anticipates some of the modern work of Baker on lexical categories as well as Muysken’s recent unraveling of functional categories. All languages have both lexical and functional categories, but languages will differ in how these super-categories have their ‘reactance’ in specific expressions. Some Native American languages like Hopi, for example, seem to lack a functional or formal noun/verb distinction, but have no problem applying modulation to words, maybe marking a ‘noun’ with progressive aspect or a ‘verb’ with plural number. Moreover, with polysynthetic languages, where words are composed of a potentially large number of bound morphemes, the distinction between noun and verb is generally meaningless, as is the contrast between word and sentence. This is because words in polysynthetic languages typically play the role of complete sentences and are composed of both nouny and verby pieces. Just as one language’s lexical categories might demonstrate variation in noun and verb relations, functional categories might divide up a language’s thought space in novel ways as well. Many Native American languages obligatorily mark a present/absent or visible/invisible contrast. Many Uto-Aztencan (and I would add Bantu and Chinese) languages modulate nouns with form classes, based roughly on shape or function, which do not seem to occur in most of the world’s other languages.

Yet despite being the consummate variationist, Whorf surprisingly makes a claim that bears relevance to the modern linguist’s universal grammar. For Whorf, the first degree of categories comprise things like objective case or past tense. These will show a wide spectrum of variation. But the second degree, that of case in general or tense in general, are far more likely to show up as members of a smaller yet more nearly universal set of grammatical categories.

But even in a great empirical and taxonomic work like ‘Grammatical Categories’, Whorf’s strange fatalist alienation tends to sneak in. Consider his claim that "the meaning of the individual lexeme is more or less under the sway of the entire sentence, and at the mercy of the manifold potentialities of connotation and suggestion which thereby arise.” To Whorf’s credit, he was almost alone in being willing to take linguistic and extralinguistic CONTEXT into consideration when discussing grammar and meaning. And while it is debatable that we are ever ‘held under the sway’ of our own words, or are ‘at the mercy’ of our grammar’s connotative potential, even if it is our language which speaks us, Whorf showed the world of linguistics that languages do in fact vary in complex and fascinating ways. Despite enormous effort, contemporary mainstream linguistics seems unable to account adequately for this variation in purely structural terms. And so just maybe, when we wish to regard speakers of other, perhaps wildly different, languages as our intellectual peers and equals, a bit of romanticism creeping in maybe never really hurt anyone.

[Liam Porter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whorf is attacked mercilessly for covert racism, essentialism and all other sorts of double-plus-non-good intellectual sins. But go back to what he wrote. You will find a mind who stood in awe at the power of language to frame experience and construct models of reality. He encouraged his peers to look beyond the indoeuropean horizons at languages which challenged the presumptions of what a language could be like.

Language and culture clearly interact. Whorf would say that language makes "channels" of thought customary. They allow spontaneous creativity within one generation, but it takes generations to set into structural rules:

How does such a network of language, culture, and behaviour come about historically? Which was first: the language patterns or the cultural norms? In main they have grown up together, constantly influencing each other. But in this partnership the nature of the language is the factor that limts free plasticity and rigidifies channels of development in the more autocratic way. This is so because a language is a system, not just an assemblage of norms. Large systematic outlines can change to something new only very slowly, while many other cultural innovations are made with comparative quickness. Language thus represents the mass mind; it is affected by inventions and innovations, but affected little and slowly, whereas to inventors and innovators it legislates with the decree immediate. p.165

Here, Whorf compares how explicit word order and the discrimination of verbs of movement provides the raw material for scientific inquiry. Despite claims that he was a covert white supremicist, Whorf claims that the Hopi languae would actually have a good chance of adapting to complex laws of physics, since their verbs of motion contain complicated discriminations between types of movement:

We are inclined to think of language simply as a technique of expression, and not to realize that language first of all is a classification and arrangement of the stream of sensory experience which results in a certain word-order, a certain segment of the world that is easily expressible by the type of symbolic means that language employs. In other words, language does in a cruder but also in a broader and more versatile way the same thing that science does. [...] We have just seen how the Hopi language maps out a certain terrain of what might be termed primitive physics. We have observed how, with very thorough consistency and not a little true scientific precision, all sorts of vibratile phenomena in nature are classified by being referred to various elementary types of deformation process [...] could be made with great appropriateness to a multiplicity of phenomena belonging entirely to the modern scientific and technical world - movements of machinery and mechanism, wave processes and vibrations, electrical and chemical phenomena - things that the Hopi have never known or imagined, and for which we ourselves lack definite names. p. 64

An interesting grammatical subject raised in the book is that of the exact logic behind phrasal verbs in English. Clearly "finish up" "clean up" and "beat up" contain some shared sense of finality. But how can these be codified and taught? Whorf raises the examples as much to demonstrate our complacency in the face of our own language's complexity as to investiage the question:

A covert linguistic class may not deal with any grand dichotomy of objects, it may have a very subtle meaning, and it may have no overt mark other than certain distinctive "reactances" with certain overtly marked forms. It is then what I call a CRYPTOTYPE. It is a submerged, subtle, and elusive meaning, corresponding to no actual word, yet shown by linguistic analysis to be functionally important in the grammar. For example, the English particple UP meaning "completely, to a finish," as in "break it up, cover it up, eat it up, twist it up, open it up" can be applied to any verb of one or two syllables initially accented, EXCEPTING verbs belonging to four special cryptotypes. One is the cryptotype of dispersion without a boundary; hence one does not say "spread it up, waste it us, spend it up, scatter it up, drain it up, or filter it up." Another is the cryptotype of oscillation without agitation of parts; we don't say "rock up a cradle, wave up a flag, wiggle up a finger, nod up one's head" etc. The third is the cryptotype of nondurative impact whihc also includes psychological reaction: "kill, fight, etc., hence wje don't say "whack it up, tap it up, slam it up, wrestle him up, hate him up." The fourth is the verbs of directed motion, move lift pull push put, etc., with which UP has the directional sense, "upward" or derived senses, even though the sense may be contradicted by the verb and hence produce an effect of absurdity, as in "drip it up." p.80

Whorf's appeals for the study of language to inform a study of the mind is quite hard to argue with in the terms he uses. In spite of the fact that there is great conformity for words like "sky" and "apple", we cannot expect the same for the division of nature into forces and movements. That languages can contain labels for things that others don't strongly implies that these semantic discriminations glow more brightly in the mind:

By more or less distinct terms we ascribe a semificticious isolation to parts of experience. English terms, like "sky, hill, swamp," persuade us to regard some elusive aspect of nature's endless variety as a distinct THING, almost like a table or chair. Thus English and similar tongues lead us to think of the universe as a collection of rather distinct objects and events corresponding to word. Indeed this is the implicit picutre of classical physics and astronomy - that the universe is essentially a collection of detached objects of different sizes. The examples used by older logicians in dealing with this point are usually unfortunately chosen. They tend to pick out tables and chairs usually unfortunately chosen. They tend to pick out tables and chairs and apples on tables as test objects to demonstrate the object-like nature of reality and its one-to-one correspondence with logic. Man's artifacts and the agricultural products he severs from living plants have a unique degree of isolation; we may expect that [all] languages will have fairly isolated terms for them. The real question is: What do different languages do, not with these artificially isolated objects but with the flowing face of nature in its motion, color and changing form: with clouds, beaches, and yonder flight of birds? For, as goes our segmentation of the face of nature, so goes our physics of the cosmos. p.240-1

The book stands as a classic. Whorf thought adventurously and modestly, always drawing attention to the things he knew nothing about, and making no dogmas to conceal his, and our, ignorance. He is an example to be followed by linguists, and it's a shame that since Chomsky he's been nothing more than a punching bag.

[Sibyl · Rating 3 out of 5]

One cannot speak of the influence of language on thoughts without mentioning the Sapir - Whorf hypothesis . It is the intriguing idea of linguistic relativity, largely attributed to Sapir & Whorf, which central theme is that culture , affects the thinking of humans through the language. This should be due to the fact that fundamental categories of our thoughts (space, time, object-subject, etc. ) are not the same in all the different languages.
The idea itself was of Franz Boas , an eminent anthropologist , in a period in which he actively researched on linguistic differences in grammatical and cultural terms , of some indigenous American , concluding that the language has the power to shape the world. Sapir was one of the best students of Boas and has pursued this vision. Benjamin Lee Worf , a chemical engineer, was a student of Sapir at Yale when , in the last decade of his life, he became one of the most influential linguists of his time.
Whorf connects the idea of relativity to the term used in mathematical physics that aims to demonstrate how different starting points lead to different conceptions of the cosmos and world views. In this sense he called “principle of linguistic relativity” its finding that different grammars lead the users towards different types of observations and different evaluations of acts, although externally similar, thus coming to different views of the world.
Whorf connects the true freedom of the human mind to a wide knowledge of many linguistic systems and believes that those who see the usefulness of a monolingual world , whether English, French, Russian or any other language , they have a bad ideal because the universal monolingualism would be a disservice to the evolution of the human mind.
What Whorf actually wrote appears to be unknown to most people, especially to those who ascribe to him a hypothesis he had never formulated . What this author actually wrote was , essentially, that the constancy of our language makes us think of a fist or a lightning strike as a " thing "; a slight elevation of the earth is felt as a "thing" different than the surrounding land (a hill ), or the slightly higher water content of the soil leads it to be conceived as a "thing" different than the surrounding terrain ( a quagmire ) . What this author wanted to point out, is the difference between conception and perception.
The findings of Benjamin Lee Whorf have been the core of my studies on multilingualism in a psychological perspective. I only can recommend this book although I think that only a small part of it is really interesting.

[Jennifer B. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Although the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been seriously discredited, it still makes some valid points and raises some interesting questions. This book is heavy going and best for academics and/or serious nerds, though.

[Sara Morelli · Rating 3 out of 5]

Very interesting topics and concepts at its core, but not exactly what I was looking for. I personally wanted to read and learn more about cognitive linguistics, linguistic relativism and thought processes linked to language learning on a theoretical level (and possibly applied to modern languages and cultures); however, the essays focused a lot on some very specific linguistic researches carried by Whorf during his lifetime (he was very much into prehistoric languages, we’re talking Hopi and Maya here). Also, because the essays were selected and put into a collection after he died, they tend to get a little repetitive here and there. Still, pretty brilliant and forward-looking for its time, I would love to see some modern takes on his theories.

[Bruce Langley · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the book, Whorf offers his concepts on the way languages see the world and the effects of those perspectives upon the spoken language. An interesting chapter in the book to me is where he examines the unique approach of Native American Shawnee thinking as expressed through the stem composition of that language. According to Samantha Holland, known student and author of the Shawnee language, one word may be seen rather as a phrase than a single thought and a variety of contextual considerations may be considered by the simple affixes attached to basic roots.

[seanchiswell · Rating 4 out of 5]

English not being my native language, this book was a bit hard to read and took me longer than it usually takes me to read a book with this amount of pages. It's a good, mind opening and we'll written book that contains many linguistic technicalities, other than that, it's a super interesting book that will make you think about language and perspective in a different way. I'll read it again in the future for better understanding.

[Remus Rimbu · Rating 2 out of 5]

Whorf afirms the strong version of linguistic relativity(The language one speaks constrains the kind of thoughts one can have); and this has been thoroughly refuted by other scholars. Nevertheless, there are some formulations of the weak version(The language one speaks influences the kind of thoughts one has) which are manifestly true. The book would be a good introduction to linguistic anthropology if it weren't so terribly dated.

[Hal Lowen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not a linguist, haven't been in my A-level anthropology for a WHILE so most of this was very interesting but ultimately a mystery oops.

[Santiago Iturbide · Rating 1 out of 5]

Der Hopisprache hin und her.

[Sunny · Rating 5 out of 5]

i must admit to have left out large chunks of this book where it goes into the analysis of some the well known aztacan and maya languages and another native indian language called Hopi which he uses a great deal for juxtaposition with english. the book is about linguistics and language and how whorf believes that the words we use and the language that words are threaded with help or promote a certain understanding of the reality around us and how this reality could have been findamentally diffferent if the laguage strucutres were different. on of the big differences with the Hopi language is based aroudn teh concept of time. in Hopi while they are conscious of time it doesnt come to play as much in their day to day language. tenses dont really exist in those languages. they dont see time as linear but histroy is seen as a reconfirmation of original princples and the future is almost an extension of this. (its hard to exaplin to be honest) end result is that the present is given a great deal more value and acts as the main pivot. theres tonnes of other god stuff and examples like the coeur d'alene language spoken by a small indian tribe in idaho instead of using a simple cocept of cause their language splits this three ways into 1) cause which is essentially organiccally caused, 2) cause which occurred due to addition and 3) cause that occured due to a process change. fascinating. whorf argues taht the sciences and arts of this world may have been fundamentally different had the langauges we used been differenrt as tey woudl have determined the way we view the world aroudn us. fascinating book but in parts very coimpleicaed and perhaps too detailed for a nonlinguist.

[Bob · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don't feel qualified to wade into the quagmire of debate about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, Wilhelm von Humboldt's linguistic relativity etc, but I particularly like the specific analyses of the complex and other-worldly grammar of American Indian languages and the notion of "cryptotypes", widely applicable and of which he gives lots of fascinating examples in English so you're not so much taking his word for it, as you have to with the American languages.
I think of "The punctual and segmentative aspects of verbs in Hopi" as one of the star turns, which passes from grammatical analysis to suggesting the language is more suited than many others to comprehend particle physics, but that is probably through its having been featured in George Steiner's "After Babel" which highly impressed me as a youngster, a book which is appealing in that you get a variety of linguistic theory with a lot of literary flair.

[Kathy · Rating 5 out of 5]

A ground-breaking book that became important in the understanding of language and cultural differences in world view.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the book that got me started on everything that I've ever been doing

[Frances · Rating 3 out of 5]

Numerous interesting ideas, but probably a touch too complicated for the average reader to fully digest.

[Tam Kozman · Rating 5 out of 5]

my absolute all-time favorite linguistics book!

[Andrea · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another classic of sociolinguistic literature. Although the strong version of Whorf's hypothesis has been debunked (otherwise how would translation even be possible?), his argument has its merits.

[Jon Gauthier]

I don't side with the Whorfians, but this still could be a fun read.