Edward Sapir

Languages are incommensurable: they are systems in their own right and cannot be compared.

Language contact appeared to be a more important factor than genetic affiliation

While I am not inclined to state categorically that the areas of distribution of phonetic phenomena, of morphological characteristics, and of groups based on similarities of vocabularies are absolutely distinct, I believe this question must be answered emperically before we can undertake to solve the general problem of the history of modern American languages. If it should prove true, as I believe it will, that all these different areas do not coincide, then the conclusion seems inevitable that the different languages must have exerted a far-reaching influence on one another. If this point of view is correct, then we have to ask ourselves in how far the phenomena of acculturation extend also over the domain of languages.

In a very real sense the normal human being is predestined to walk, not because his elders will assist him to learn the art, but because his organism is prepared from birth, or even from the moment of conception, to take on all those expenditures of nervous energy and all those muscular adaptations that result in walking. To put it concisely, walking is an inherent, biological function of man.

Not so language. It is of course true that in a certain sense the individual is predestined to talk, but that is due entirely to the circumstance that he is born not merely in nature, but in the lap of a society that is certain, reasonably certain, to lead him to its traditions. Eliminate society and there is every reason to believe that he will learn to walk, if, indeed, he survives at all. But it is just as certain that he will neve rlearn to talk, that is, to communicate ideas according to the traditional system of a particular society. Or, again, remove the newborn individual from the social environment into which he has come and transplant him to an utterly alien one. He will develop the art of walking in his new environment very much as he would have developed it in the old. But his speech will be completely at variance with the speech of his native environment. Walking, then, is a general human activity that varies only within circumscribed limits as we pass from individual to individual. Its variability is involuntary and purposeless. Speech is a human activity that varies without assignable limit as we pass from social group to social group, because it is a purely historical heritage of the group, the product of long-continued social usage. It varies as all creative effort varies—not as consciously, perhaps, but none the less as truly as do thereligions, the beliefs, the customs, and the arts of different peoples. Walking is anorganic, an instinctive, function (not, of course, itself an instinct); speech is a noninstinctive,acquired, “cultural” function

As our scientific experience grows we must learn to fight the implications of language. 'The grass waves in the wind' is shown by its linguistic form to be a member of the same relational class of experiences as 'The man works in the house'. [...] The point is that no matter how sophisticated our modes of interpretation become, we never really get beyond the projection and continuous transfer of relations suggested by the forms of our speech.

Someone who says 'I had a good breakfast this morning' is probably not 'in the throes of laborious thought'; he or she is doing no more than transmiting ' a pleasureable memory, symbolically rendered in the grooves of habitual expression'. In such a case it is 'somewhat as though a dynamo capable of generating enough power to run an elevator were operated... to feed an electric doorbell.'

Language not only refers to experiences largely acquired without its help but actually defines experience for us by reason of its formal completeness and because of our unconscious projection of its implicit expectations into the field of experience ... Such categories as number, gender, case, tense... are not so much discovered in experience as imposed upon it because of the tyrannical hold that linguistic form has upon our orientation in the world.

Problem: How is individuality possible?

This means that there is something like an ideal linguistic entity dominating the speech habits of the members of each group, that the sense of almost unlimited freedom which each individual feels in the use of his language is held in leash by a tacitly directing norm. One individual plays on the norm in a way peculiar to himself, the next individual is nearer the dead average in that particular respect in which the first the first speaker most characteristically departs from it but in turn diverges from the average in a way peculiar to himself and so on.

In spite of the fact that language acts as a socializing and uniformizing force, it is at the same time the most potent single known factor in the growth of the individuality. The fundamental quality of one's voice, the phonetic patterns of speech, the speed and relative smoothness of articulation, the length and build of the sentences, the character and range of the vocabulary, the scholastic consistency of the words used, the readiness with which words respond to the requirements of the social environment, in particular the suitability of one's language to the language habits of the person addressed - all these are so many complex indicators of the personality. All in all, it is not too much to say that one of the really important functions of language is to be constantly declaring to society the psychological place held by all of its members.

The Hopi conceive time and motion in the objective realm in a purely operational sense - a matter of the complexity and magnitude of operations connecting events - so that the element of time is not separated from whatever element of space enters into the operation

Around a storage of what are called 'gasoline drums', behavior will tend to a certain type, that is, great care will be exercised; while around a storage of what are called 'empty gasoline drums', it will tend to be different - careless, with little repression of smoking or of tossing cigarette stubs about.

Benjamin Whorf (1897-1941)

Which was first: the language patterns of the cultural norms? They have grown up together, constantly influencing each other. But in this partnership the nature of the language is the factor that limits free plasticity and rigidified channels of development in the more autocratic way. This is so because language is a system ...

After WW1, Germany lost its dominating role in sciences and humanities, (so) also in linguistics

Signs of this were the Cours of Saussure and the book Language by Sapir.

marc van oostendorp

Language as individual expression

Anti-Neogrammarian

history of linguistics

These books have certain things in common:

* each language is a system on its own (scepticism of universal 'laws')

* each language should be considered holistically

Language and thought

'Language' and thought

thought is an outgrowth of language

A language and thought

Anthropological linguistics

Edward Sapir (1884-1939)

American scholars like Franz Boas had become familiar with native American languages.

* difficult to describe in grammatical terms developed for Indo-European

* difficult to reconstruct with the same credibility as Indo-European

No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality.

Every language is different

But that does not make languages unequal

all attempts to connect particular types of linguistic

morphology with certain correlated stages of cultural development are vain. Rightly understood, such correlations are rubbish. The merest coup d’oeil verifies our theoretical argument on this point. Both simple and complex types of language of an indefinite number of varieties may be found spoken at any desired level of cultural advance. When it comes to linguistic form, Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam.

Language is 'cultural'