Language, Thought, and Reality by Whorf Benjamin Lee Lee Penny. Levinson Stephen C. Carroll John B

Language, Thought, and Reality by Whorf Benjamin Lee Lee Penny. Levinson Stephen C. Carroll John B

Author:Whorf, Benjamin Lee,Lee, Penny.,Levinson, Stephen C.,Carroll, John B. [Whorf, Benjamin Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780262517751
Publisher: MIT Press
Published: 2014-01-25T16:00:00+00:00


Reprinted from pp. 75–93, Language, culture, and personality: Essays in memory of Edward Sapir, edited by Leslie Spier (Menasha, Wis.: Sapir Memorial Publication Fund, 1941). The article was written in the summer of 1939.

1. We have plenty of evidence that this is not the case. Consider only the Hopi and the Ute, with languages that on the overt morphological and lexical level are as similar as, say, English and German. The idea of “correlation” between language and culture, in the generally accepted sense of correlation, is certainly a mistaken one.

2. As we say, ‘ten at the SAME TIME,’ showing that in our language and thought we restate the fact of group perception in terms of a concept ‘time,’ the large linguistic component of which will appear in the course of this paper.

3. It is no exception to this rule of lacking a plural that a mass noun may sometimes coincide in lexeme with an individual noun that of course has a plural; e.g., ‘stone’ (no pl.) with ‘a stone’ (pl. ‘stones’). The plural form denoting varieties, e.g., ‘wines’ is of course a different sort of thing from the true plural; it is a curious outgrowth from the SAE mass nouns, leading to still another sort of imaginary aggregates, which will have to be omitted from this paper.

4. Hopi has two words for water quantities; and . The difference is something like that between ‘stone’ and ‘rock’ in English, implying greater size and “wildness”; flowing water, whether or not outdoors or in nature, is ; so is ‘moisture.’ But, unlike ‘stone’ and ‘rock,’ the difference is essential, not pertaining to a connotative margin, and the two can hardly ever be interchanged.

5. To be sure, there are a few minor differences from other nouns, in English for instance in the use of the articles.

6. ‘Year’ and certain combinations of ‘year’ with name of season, rarely season names alone, can occur with a locative morpheme ‘at,’ but this is exceptional. It appears like historical detritus of an earlier different patterning, or the effect of English analogy, or both.

7. The expective and reportive assertions contrast according to the “paramount relation.” The expective expresses anticipation existing EARLIER than objective fact, and coinciding with objective fact LATER than the status quo of the speaker, this status quo, including all the subsummation of the past therein, being expressed by the reportive. Our notion “future” seems to represent at once the earlier (anticipation) and the later (afterwards, what will be), as Hopi shows. This paradox may hint of how elusive the mystery of real time is, and how artificially it is expressed by a linear relation of past–present–future.

8. One such trace is that the tensor ‘long in duration,’ while quite different from the adjective ‘long’ of space, seems to contain the same root as the adjective ‘large’ of space. Another is that ‘somewhere’ of space used with certain tensors means ‘at some indefinite time.’ Possibly however this is not the case and it is only the tensor that



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