5 LINGUISTIC RELATIVITY HANDOUT

1. ASIAN DEVELOPMENT FOUNDATION COLLEGE
GRADUATE SCHOOL
Topic: Linguistic Relativity/Whorfian Hypothesis
Reporter: MAED - English
Professor: Dr. Dexter A. Oberes
I. INTRODUCTION
1.1 There were presumptions that language affect thought.
1.2 This was given special attention through the works of Edward Sapir
and more importantly Benjamin Lee Whorf.
1.3 Whorf worked on the languages of American-Indian especially Hopi,
the language of Pueblo Indians of Arizona.
1.4 Whorf concluded that cultures and thought processes of American and
Hopi differ because their languages differ from each other.
II. LANGUAGE RELATIVITY
2.1. Whorf established the following:
…what I have called the “linguistic relativity principle,” which means, in
formal terms, that users of markedly different grammars are pointed by
their grammars towards 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
2.2. Hopi lang. does not make space-time distinctions
e.g. In English, the sentence He will run shows future action.
But in Hopi, there is no equivalent term for the word “will”
2.3. Hopi language cannot be translated to English.
2.4. Language is in some sense a superficial embroidery upon deeper
processes of consciousness
2.5 One could increase possible strategies in thinking by increasing
vocabulary.
III. NEWSPEAK
3.1. George Orwell explored on the idea that language would totally
tyrannize or brainwash people.
3.2 He wrote a novel entitled Nineteen Eighty-Four which features an
imaginary society called Ingsoc whose language is Newspeak.
3.3 The purpose of Newspeak was not only to provide a medium of
expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of
Ingsoc, but to make all other modes of thought IMPOSSIBLE.

2. 3.4 It is designed to diminish the range of thought by cutting the choice of
words down to a minimum.
3.5 It has an almost complete interchangeability between different parts
of speech
3.6 Any word in the language could be used either as verb, noun,
adjective, or adverb.
IV. CHOMSKYAN GRAMMAR Vs. WHORFIAN HYPOTHESIS
4.1
CHOMSKYAN GRAMMAR WORFIAN HYPOTHESIS
1. Human mind constructs meanings . 1. One’s language determines his
world view.
2. 2. Humans can make infinite uses
of language
2. 2. Humans are restricted with the
kind of language they have
Chomsky’s Transformational Grammar
Structure of human language is inborn ("built-in") in the human brain
that to adequately describe the grammar of a human language, you have to give
each sentence at least two different structures,
called "deep structure" and "surface structure"
Chomskyan Grammar denies Whorfian Hypothesis
IV. CONCLUSION
Language tends to give us categories. But that does not mean that we
necessarily suppress or ignore anything that does not fall into place.
Language may be abused, but it can potentially lead us away from our
tendency to categorize by allowing us to make new combinations of meanings
and to qualify every semantic distinction we make.