History of Sapir-Whorf | Does Language Have a Tyrannical Hold? || Dr. Dillon Mahoney

Описание: In this clip, Dr. Mahoney discusses what the "Sapir-Whorf" hypothesis is and how anthropologists have been concerned with language and power since the early 20th century.

Transcript:
so to go a little bit further i wanted to show one of the few people you will often hear about and some people when i say what do you know about linguistic anthropology they'll say Sapir-Whorf okay so a couple things main point with sapir okay he was a student of boaz's and i talked about boaz mentioned him briefly before but many of boaz's students were focused on language and many of them went around north america recording native american indigenous languages and that focus on language you can tell in many ways was was sort of pushed by boaz and boaz also allowed his students to do things linguistically and to analyze language during their research in a way that was rather innovative and so the other person you hear a lot about is zora neale hurston who was a student of boaz's um and who was very interested in language she studied the harlem renaissance in the 1920s but was also very interested in the language of the harlem renaissance and doing research in and then writing up your research in that specific language and i think that's a good example of where you can say well it's all english these are actually right these are these are very different types of language even if we might call them dialects all right we're going to be very fluid with our use of of language here um sapir was another of boaz's students and what's interesting is sapir you know wharf if anybody's interested whorf was actually an insurance adjuster who took some classes with sapir at yale they never published together and there is no hypothesis what Sapir-Whorf hypothesis though refers to as a series of debates started in the mid 20th century having to do with the impact of language on thought okay and this goes back to some early Sapir and early Boasian thinking um sapir is famous for having this line that the language we think has a tyrannical hold on the way we see the world all right and there's power there and i want to just say that sapir was talking about language and power before people even realized he was talking about language and power the reason sapir's uh teachings often get taken off into left field is because of whorf and and it's worth just pointing out what wharf did was he took this idea and he drew on the idea of the hopi from the southwest and he said you know the hopi they don't have morphemes on their verbs for future tense and past tense um and maybe that's a reason why the hopi are living in in poverty maybe it's because they don't understand progression they don't understand progress they don't understand time right and so it's their language that's holding their back not the fact that they were you know colonized by the american government no no it must be their language and and that created a bit of an uproar a lot of people disagreed with this and pointed out the obvious problems with Whorf's theories and some of this unfortunately got got stuck on sapir um but those were really interesting debates

and i'll just say there's two ways that people have dealt with this since the mid-20th centuries uh mid-20th century many psychologists and developmental psychologists i'd highlight john lucy from the university of chicago as one of the best they have taken experimental approaches to look at how language and thought interact and you can actually do some really neat experiments john lucy worked with yucatec mayan where you're actually looking at certain languages that don't have certain complexity but do they have complexity elsewhere and then can you do actual controlled experimental studies to show that two people who speak two languages will actually behave somewhat differently will answer questions somewhat differently and they can find a connection but the big takeaway is that these are all very minor minor things very very minor things it's not what we would really call a tyrannical hold and most importantly just because you may not have a word for something in your language doesn't mean that you can't learn that concept you can't have it described to you and you can't get it i do this with kids in Florida all the time i say who hasn't seen snow before half the class has never seen snow before but i can explain to them 15 different types of snow that you find up north they don't have to have actually experienced it they don't have to know what the difference is between powder slush and sleet and snowball so you know you can explain this stuff and that's you know the thing is it doesn't really have a tyrannical hold this is how we learn to communicate