In the Land of Invented Languages - Arika Okrent [69]
He began to formulate his ideas about the relationship of thought to language when, after finally piecing together a grammatical description of Hopi (an Uto-Aztecan language spoken in Arizona), he realized that he knew how to form plurals but not how to use them. It was like knowing that the English plural is formed by es when a word ends in an “s” sound, but not knowing that it's inappropriate to refer to a pile of rice as “rices.” He realized that “the category of plural in Hopi was not the same thing as in English, French or German. Certain things that were plural in these languages were singular in Hopi.” For example, something like “day” could not be pluralized in Hopi, because days were experienced one at a time; they could not be assembled into an objective group that could be observed all at once—a Hopi criterion for pluralness. Whorf connected this observation to other features of the language that suggested the Hopi experience of time was not the same as it was for a speaker of an SAE (Standard Average European) language. Could it be that a different way of categorizing things in language reflected a different way of categorizing things in the world?
He never got a chance to fully explore the question. He died of cancer in 1941, at the age of forty-four. He left behind a number of papers on the topic—some published, some unpublished, some written for experts and some for lay audiences—that served as the basis for what came to be called the Whorfian hypothesis (or Sapir-Whorf hypothesis). The science-minded scholars of the 1950s reinterpreted Whorf's incomplete and complicated exploration of various issues having to do with language, thought, and culture as an empirically testable claim, hence the Whorfian “hypothesis.”
The closest Whorf himself ever got to a hypothesis-style statement was a description of his “linguistic relativity principle,” which held that “users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward different types of observations and different evaluations of externally similar acts of observation, and hence are not equivalent as observers but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world.” As to what exactly he meant by that, well, there are about as many interpretations as there are mentions of Whorf's name in print. In any case, this statement is a long way from saying that abstract nouns or passive verbs or words like “is” are conspiring to gang up on us and steal our good sense. Whorf's ideas were definitely fertilized by the language-fearing times in which he lived, but his formulation of the language/thought question was the most sensitive to the complicated way in which language actually works and the most attractive to the social scientists who decided to take up the question in the 1950s.
It proved very difficult to come up with a scientific test of the Whorfian hypothesis. Suppose you compared two groups of people who spoke different languages, and you found some kind of difference between the groups. How would you know it was the language that caused that difference? Perhaps it was from a difference in culture. Perhaps it was the culture that shaped the language, and not the other way around. Every language was attached to a culture, and there was no way to separate one thing from the other. This was one of the problematic issues that came up when a group of top linguists, psychologists, and philosophers got together for a conference on the Whorfian hypothesis in 1953. The papers from the conference were published in a book called Language in Culture, and soon every field that touched on language and human behavior was buzzing about it.
A sociologist named James Cooke Brown, who had just taken a position at the University of Florida in Gainesville, was paying close attention. In the winter of 1955, when classes let out for the holidays, he “sat down before a bright fire to commence what I hoped would be a short paper on the possibility of testing the social psychological