Jimmy Akin

No, it has nothing to do with technobabble on Star Trek.

Sapir and Whorf were a pair of linguists, and their hypothesis is that language plays a strong role not just in expressing thought but in shaping and controlling thought.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis undoubtedly has an element of truth in it. We do a lot of our thinking in words, and the words that we have at our disposal will make it easier for us to think certain thoughts and harder to think and express others.

Unfortunatley, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis seems to be too strong as it is commonly interpreted. Thinking is not as strongly determined by language as many suppose. This is clear from a variety of facts, including that we also do a lot of our thinking visually (using images rather than words) and we can make up new words and expressions for things and distinctions we can recognize even though they are not expressible using current language. We’ve also all had the experience of having an insight and then been unable (at least momentarily) to find the words to express it.

The strong versions of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and its knockoffs (including some that originated before Sapir and Whorf) have also had bad consequences. For example, if you’ve ever read the novel 1984, you know about Newspeak–a revision of the English language designed to eliminate the words and thus the concepts needed to express ideas at variance with the totalitarian system IngSoc (English Socialism). Its purpose was to make politically undesirable concepts literally unthinkable.

Here’s a copy of George Orwell’s essay on The Principles of Newspeak. It’s fascinating reading, particular when–after enunciating the principles of Newspeak–Orwell gives a Newspeak translation of the beginning of the Declaration of Independence. Check it out.

The thing is, though, Newspeak wasn’t simply something Orwell came up with out of whole cloth. 1984 is a cautionary tale warning about the dehumanizing effects of Communism, and Newspeak is based on Soviet language revision as a form of propaganda.

The same impulse is behind the politically correct and gender-revisionist movements in American English: By re-engineering how people are allowed to express themselves, it is thought that the thoughts they think will be re-engineered as well.

Some new research is testing the limits of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. This research involves going to cultures whose languages have severely restricted vocabularies in some areas and see if they can conceptualize things that don’t fit their language.

For example, there is the Dani people of Indonesia (ever meet any of them, Beng?) who have only two color terms: black and white. Turns out, though, that they can distinguish other colors, even though they don’t have words for them. I don’t know, but I suspect that they may have circumlocuations for other colors (e.g., “The American dollar is the same color as grass”) even though they don’t have unique words for them.

Another group is the Piraha people of Brazil, who have only three number terms: one, two, and many (which might be more accurately translated “one,” “a few,” and “many”). Turns out the Piraha display the ability to conceptualize more numbers than their counting system has terms for, though with certain numerical tasks they show marked limitations.

There’s an article from The Economist which reports on the Piraha number research. It’s not quite as well done as I’d like (e.g., it concedes more reality to the hypothesis than I think is justifiable), but it’s still fascinating stuff.

There’s also this excellent Wikipedia article which gives some of the other side of the story.

Whorf himself thought that Hopi Indians didn’t have a way to express temporal relationships the way we do and that they perceived things in a kind of non-linear, timeless way (that would radically change their understanding of physics, for example).

Needless to say, this got relativists all excited for a while.

Also needless to say, it’s complete hog slop.

The Hopi do have the concept of linear time and they can express temporal relationships in their language. Whorf simply didn’t gather enough data and pay enough attention to the data he had to realize this. In fact, it’s really embarrassing to look at later studies of this question and note that Whorf’s own data contains counterexamples to his claims about the Hopi conceptualization of time.

Sapir-Whorf has even reared its head in biblical studies. A number of years ago there were a lot of people all worked up about the way the biblical languages allegedly affected the thought of the sacred authors. Hebrew was held to result in “concrete” thought, while Greek was held to result in “abstract” thought, making the former suited to the parochial Old Testament and the latter suited to the cosmopolitan New Testament.

The kindest thing that can be said about these kinds of claims is that they are highly problematic.

Today most biblical scholars (or at least the good ones) will roll their eyes when such claims are introduced. Except for technical vocabulary, all human languages have approximately equal expressive power, and technical vocabulary is the easiest thing to add to a language when you need it. It is extremely difficult to make a whole lot out of the character of Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek and attribute specific theological thought to the genius of these languages. That doesn’t stop one from hearing a lot of such claims from certain quarters, though.

While we’re on the subject of technical vocabulary, let me mention one particular idea you hear sometime: that Eskimos have a huge number of words for snow that express subtle distinctions lost on us English-speakers.

It’s not true.

Total myth.

Long discredited.

Every professional linguist knows this.

Contradict the claim when you hear other people make it.

It is true, however, that the Ferengi language has 178 words for rain.

Wonder what Lt. Cmdr. Worf would make of that?

This Saturday at Mass they had seven (Count them! Seven!) babies baptized. As part of this process, the usual baptismal questions got asked (e.g., “Do you want this child baptized in the faith of the Church?”) and the seventh dad said something unusual in response . . .

SEVENTH DAD: Yes.

What was unusual about this is that the dad didn’t say what all the other parents said . . .

OTHER PARENTS: I[/We] Do.

Faced with the jarring “yes,” something occurred to me that hadn’t occurred before. I suddenly realized why we never hear this response in liturgical ceremonies. The reason is actually very simple.

Latin doesn’t have a word for “yes.”

Yes, I know. Amazing as it might seem, many languages don’t have a word for “yes.” Latin is one of them. So is Chinese. So is Irish. Other languages, like Spanish (“si”), German (“ja”), Hebrew (“ken”), Arabic (“na’am”), Aramaic (“aeh”), or Japanese (“hai”) do have a word for “yes.” Even the language of the reprobate French has such a word (“oui”).

“Yes” is a word that has a function but not a meaning. Its function (or at least its principal function) is to affirm whatever we just have been asked. The meaning of “yes” depends on what question has just been put to us. For example, if we want to give an affirmative answer to “Do you want to go to the party tonight?” we could say “yes” or “I do.” If we want to give an affirmative answer to “Are you taking calculus this semester?” we could say “yes” or “I am.” The word “yes,” not having its own meaning, thus picks up its meaning from the context in which it is used.

As a result, it’s entirely possible to live without the word. What happens in the languages that don’t have a “yes” is when speakers want to give an affirmative answer, they grab the main verb of the question and use it in a first person form. Thus “Do you?” questions get the answer “I do,” “Are you?” questions get the answer “I am,” and so forth.

That’s the way it is in Latin, so when people are asked in the liturgy whether they want to do certain things or have certain things done (“Do you take this woman?”, “Do you want which child baptized?”) the Latin original of the liturgy has the answer “I do,” and when this gets translated into English, that’s what comes across. Not even ICEL has has the khutspah to translate these with a colloquial “yes.”

This isn’t the only time when this kind of thing happens. A while ago I was reading a quotation from a British author (either Chesterton or Waugh, I forget which) in which he noted that Irishmen tend to say “I do,” “I am,” etc., where Englishmen would say “yes.” The reason, he noted, was that Irish lacks a word for “yes,” and the verb-grabbing affirmative method native to Irish has passed over into the English-language speech of Irishmen. Thinking about Irishmen I’ve known or heard, I realized he was right. They do have a greater tendency to do this in preference to using “yes.”

What I want to know is: What happens at the end of the Beatles movie Yellow Submarine in these languages? In the English version the Blue Meanies are converted from saying “No” to “Yes,” with “Yes” spelled REALLY BIG on the screen.

What do they do with that in Chinese, Irish . . . or Latin?

This Saturday at Mass they had seven (Count them! Seven!) babies baptized. As part of this process, the usual baptismal questions got asked (e.g., “Do you want this child baptized in the faith of the Church?”) and the seventh dad said something unusual in response . . .

SEVENTH DAD: Yes.

What was unusual about this is that the dad didn’t say what all the other parents said . . .

OTHER PARENTS: I[/We] Do.

Faced with the jarring “yes,” something occurred to me that hadn’t occurred before. I suddenly realized why we never hear this response in liturgical ceremonies. The reason is actually very simple.

Latin doesn’t have a word for “yes.”

Yes, I know. Amazing as it might seem, many languages don’t have a word for “yes.” Latin is one of them. So is Chinese. So is Irish. Other languages, like Spanish (“si”), German (“ja”), Hebrew (“ken”), Arabic (“na’am”), Aramaic (“aeh”), or Japanese (“hai”) do have a word for “yes.” Even the language of the reprobate French has such a word (“oui”).

“Yes” is a word that has a function but not a meaning. Its function (or at least its principal function) is to affirm whatever we just have been asked. The meaning of “yes” depends on what question has just been put to us. For example, if we want to give an affirmative answer to “Do you want to go to the party tonight?” we could say “yes” or “I do.” If we want to give an affirmative answer to “Are you taking calculus this semester?” we could say “yes” or “I am.” The word “yes,” not having its own meaning, thus picks up its meaning from the context in which it is used.

As a result, it’s entirely possible to live without the word. What happens in the languages that don’t have a “yes” is when speakers want to give an affirmative answer, they grab the main verb of the question and use it in a first person form. Thus “Do you?” questions get the answer “I do,” “Are you?” questions get the answer “I am,” and so forth.

That’s the way it is in Latin, so when people are asked in the liturgy whether they want to do certain things or have certain things done (“Do you take this woman?”, “Do you want which child baptized?”) the Latin original of the liturgy has the answer “I do,” and when this gets translated into English, that’s what comes across. Not even ICEL has has the khutspah to translate these with a colloquial “yes.”

This isn’t the only time when this kind of thing happens. A while ago I was reading a quotation from a British author (either Chesterton or Waugh, I forget which) in which he noted that Irishmen tend to say “I do,” “I am,” etc., where Englishmen would say “yes.” The reason, he noted, was that Irish lacks a word for “yes,” and the verb-grabbing affirmative method native to Irish has passed over into the English-language speech of Irishmen. Thinking about Irishmen I’ve known or heard, I realized he was right. They do have a greater tendency to do this in preference to using “yes.”

What I want to know is: What happens at the end of the Beatles movie Yellow Submarine in these languages? In the English version the Blue Meanies are converted from saying “No” to “Yes,” with “Yes” spelled REALLY BIG on the screen.

What do they do with that in Chinese, Irish . . . or Latin?