Sapir-Whorf

The goal of this study was to test a weak form of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis deal-ing with one of the biggest unsolved questions in linguistics: Does language affectthe way we think? Grammatical systems in the world’s languages differ in manyaspects. Unlike English or German many languages group nouns on the basis of noun classifiers. Recently research has adressed the question if these linguistic cat-egories built up by classifier systems influence non-linguistic thought. In this paperwe studied Mandarin Chinese and Thai—two languages with classifier systems. Al-though both are classifier languages they categorize objects in different ways. Wetested if these system differences lead to different similarity judgements of objects ina non-linguistic rating task (participants had to rate the similarity of picture pairs). Incontrast to previous studies we suprisingly observed no difference in categorization.It seems that the so-called Whorf effect, i.e. that language affects the way we per-ceive and categorize the world, diminishes rapidly over the time speakers are exposedto a different language system such as, in this case, German.

Synonyms
Cognitive universals; Human nature; Human universals
Definition
The “psychic unity” idea denotes the existence of a set of psychological and cognitive capacities universally shared by human beings and grounded in biological equality.

Despite the need for more study on the theory, linguistic relativity may help towards understanding the inter-relatedness of society, culture, and language by looking at the phenomenon of linguistic relativity as it may have affected New Testament writers. The ideas discussed should provide useful information for further research into the application of modern linguistics to New Testament hermeneutics, systematic theology, and biblical exegesis.  The implications of linguistic relativity theory applied to this genre of literature are of extreme importance in light of resurgence in interest and work in biblical languages and modern linguistics in the last quarter of a century. This discussion circumscribes the salient elements of the Sapir/Whorf hypothesis and its application to New Testament autographs by focusing on: transcription of oral tradition, the influence of languages on the autographs, and the implications of linguistic relativity for exegesis.

En este artículo se pone de manifiesto cómo la concepción occidental (no científica) del tiempo determina nuestra cultura; particularmente, cómo la concepción de tiempo absoluto interviene en los métodos de castigo-reinserción de nuestra sociedad. La cadena de razonamiento del autor comienza con Whorf, quien analiza la concepción del tiempo en Occidente en contraposición con otras culturas como la de los indios hopi, para luego profundizar en el análisis de Foucault sobre el castigo aplicado en la penalidad moderna y sobre las llamadas “disciplinas de dominación”; en este aspecto, muestra cómo el ejemplo más extremo y terrorífico de esta absolutización del tiempo se llevó a cabo en el campo de concentración de Auschwitz. Finalmente, se propone una reflexión sobre el peligro de la aceleración en nuestros días.

Edward Sapir was one of those men, rare among scientists and scholars, who are spoken of by their colleagues in terms of genius. His writings on frontier problems in cultural anthropology, psychology, and linguistics are outstanding for their provocative insights and remarkable control of factual data. His long essay on language, his principal field of study, is an illuminating exploration of various aspects of the subject. His stress on the fact that language is a cultural or social product helped to make linguistics an integral part of the study of man. The interplay of culture and personality was a field where Sapir was a pioneer and many of his essays have become classics in the social sciences. The nine contributions brought together in this volume well show the distinction and lasting quality of Sapir's work. They include "Culture, Genuine and Spurious," "The Meaning of Religion," "Language," "Cultural Anthropology and Psychiatry," and "The Statue of Linguistics as a Science."
İçindekiler
LANGUAGE1
THE FUNCTION OF AN INTERNATIONAL45
THE STATUS OF LINGUISTICS AS A SCIENCE65
CULTURE GENUINE AND SPURIOUS78
THE MEANING OF RELIGION120
CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY AND PSYCHIATRY140
PERSONALITY164
THE EMERGENCE OF THE CONCEPT194

Although current discussions of linguistic relativity tend to concen- trate on obligatory grammatical categories, the original architects of this school of thought, including Boas, Sapir, and Whorf, all argued strongly for the role of vocabulary in guiding human perception, especially in the culturally charged situations of everyday life. Taking the Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk languages of northwestern California as a case study, this article demonstrates the im- portance of vocabulary in conveying pervasive cultural ideologies, such as those associated with mythology, religion, folklore, or geographical systems of spatial orientation.Although current discussions of linguistic relativity tend to concen- trate on obligatory grammatical categories, the original architects of this school of thought, including Boas, Sapir, and Whorf, all argued strongly for the role of vocabulary in guiding human perception, especially in the culturally charged situations of everyday life. Taking the Hupa, Yurok, and Karuk languages of northwestern California as a case study, this article demonstrates the im- portance of vocabulary in conveying pervasive cultural ideologies, such as those associated with mythology, religion, folklore, or geographical systems of spatial orientation.

"The primary focus of this study is to assess the impact of a spoken language on its speaker’s thoughts, perception and cognitive abilities. It is postulated that language, to a certain extent, can influence a person’s thought and his concept of the world, and that the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis is less faulty as it seemed to be. This study may be helpful in determining to what degree, does a spoken language shape its speaker’s cognition. It will also attempt to discuss what other pathways prospective researchers can take when conducting further studies on the said topic.
Keywords: Language, Cognitive Abilities, Concept of the World
"

This paper-presentation explores the sci-fi short story “Story of Your Life” from Ted Chiang’s anthology “Stories of Your Life” and its cinematic adaptation, “Arrival” released in 2017. This story and its film adaptation are interesting for their peculiarity as a pseudo-phenomenology of an alternative temporal ontology. Rather than imagining a world that is alternative or queer for its aberrations within the exclusively dominant ontology we are familiar with, he imagines a world where one can experience a new temporal ontology altogether, one that is either coextensive with or subsumes our dominant temporal ontology, rather than being subsumed by it. Chiang’s protagonist does not supplant her physical brain with a new one somehow more capable—it is her own very human, very relatable brain that extends to reach new ontological territory. His piece and its film adaptation are examples of why it is worthwhile to support the kind of well-informed intellectual explorations that science fiction has to offer in order to help humans better understand and potentially expand their brain states, and to better reach for new realms in the world that may be closer to grasp than we even know. We should continue to explore the viability of sci-fi narratives as a legitimate tool for enabling, fostering, or reaching closer to alternative cognitive modes, as opposed to seeking the thrill of temporary states. Such exercises may, perhaps, make us better prepared for actual first contact. [Please contact me to read the full paper].

Аннотация: Статья посвящена анализу современных тенденций в изучении проблемы влияния естественного языка на когнитивные процессы, а также формулировке новой программы междисциплинарных исследований по теме «язык и познание». Сначала вкратце рассматривается история изучения «гипотезы лингвистической относительности» («гипотезы Сепира-Уорфа»), притом де-лается акцент на неорелятивистском направлении исследований и на полученных в 1990-2010-е гг. результатах. Затем выявляются слабые места в неорелятивистском проекте и вводятся базовые положения пострелятивизма - новой теоретической модели, представляющей собой попытку реконтекстуализации главных идей Б. Уорфа с учетом современных тенденций в лингвистике (неоструктурализм) и когнитологии (посткогнитивизм). Вторая половина статьи посвящена формулированию исследовательской программы по теме «язык и познание». Рассматриваются разные уровни когнитивности (доконцептуальный опыт, перцепция, мышление, философское творчество) и их связь со структурой естественного языка. С опорой на последние открытия в этих сферах намечаются наиболее перспективные с точки зрения автора исследовательские проблемы.

Summary: This article analyses contemporary trends in the study of how natural language influences cognitive processes, and formulates a new program of interdisciplinary research in the field of language and cognition. The author first briefly examines the history of "the linguistic relativity hypothesis" ("the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis"), focusing on the neorelativist research program and results achieved in the period from 1990 to 2010. Next, the weak points in the neorelativist project are highlighted and the author introduces the fundamental tenets of postrelativism, a new theoretical model that attempts to recontextual-ize the main ideas of Benjamin Whorf while taking account of contemporary tendencies in linguistics (neo-structuralism) and cognitive science (postcognitivism). The second half of the article formulates a research program for the field of language and cognition. Different levels of cognition are considered (pre-conceptual experience, perception, thought, philosophical activity) and their connection with the structure of natural language examined. Relying on the latest discoveries in these fields, the author outlines what he considers to be the most productive research problems.

В книге рассматривается вопрос о воздействии структуры языка на познавательные способности его носителей, или проблема лингвистической относительности. В первом разделе представлен подробный анализ развития релятивистских идей с конца XVIII в. по 1990-е гг. Во втором разделе рассматриваются компаративные исследования 1990–2010-х гг., посвященные пространственной семантике, концептуализации времени, цветообозначениям и другим эмпирическим и теоретическим проблемам, связанным с тем, что можно охарактеризовать как неорелятивистское направление в психолингвистике и когнитивной антропологии. В третьем разделе представлена новая модель взаимосвязи структуры языка и когнитивных процессов, названная автором пострелятивизмом; также намечена программа будущих пострелятивистских исследований. На обширном материале (около 250 языков и несколько сотен эмпирических исследований) демонстрируется, что язык в режиме реального времени вовлечен в работу многих познавательных механизмов, и это отражается на характере когнитивного стиля его носителей.

The book deals with the problem of influence of natural language structure on cognitive processes of its native speakers - the problem of "linguistic relativity". The first part contains detailed analysis of the development of relativistic ideas from XVIII century to the 1990-s. The second part deals with comparative studies of 1990-2010-s that consider spatial semantics, conceptualization of time, color-terms and other theoretical and empirical problems within "neo-relativist" framework of psycholinguistics and cognitive anthropology. The third part is dedicated to the new model of interaction between the structure of language and cognitive operations; this model was named "post-relativism" by the author. Also there is detailed program for the future post-relativist investigations. The book represents the idea (grounded in the analysis of massive empirical data - 250 languages and more than several hundreds empirical researches) that natural language is integrated in the work of many cognitive processes, and this fact is reflected in the cognitive style of its native speakers.

Монографію присвячено аналізові проблеми співвідношення мислення і мови в аспекті теорії лінгвістичної відносності – міждисциплінарного напряму наукових досліджень, який на початку XXI ст. перетворився на масштабний когнітивно-антропологічний проект, здійснюваний у межах сучасної когнітивної лінгвістики. На матеріалі філософських та релігійно-філософських, а також почасти й наукових текстів, використовуючи дані слов’янських, германських і низки давніх мов, авторка простежує, у який саме спосіб особливості семантики тієї чи іншої мови відбиваються в осмисленні основоположних філософських понять і впливають на розвиток відповідних філософських і наукових концепцій.
Окреме місце посідає висвітлення питання про переклад філософських термінів, розташоване авторкою у когнітивно-релятивістській площині, що виявляє проблематичність їх повного відтворення іншими мовами і виступає ще одним свідченням на користь впливу мови на філософський світогляд. Пропонується герменевтична модель перекладу філософських термінів, побудована за принципами лінгвокогнітивного підходу, що надає можливість відтворення філософської термінології з урахуванням її конкретно-мовної специфіки.
Для філологів-фахівців із загального мовознавства, когнітивної лінгвістики, перекладознавства, дослідників мови філософії й мови науки, філософів, культурологів, усіх, хто цікавиться функціонуванням мови як засобу відображення й формування мислення й інструменту пізнання дійсності.

Ho realizzato questo lavoro come tesi di laurea (relatore il Prof. Massimo Dell'Utri e correlatore il Prof. Antonio Pinna, dell'Università di Sassari) perché ritengo che le lingue plasmino l'individuo portandolo a percepire la realtà che lo circonda in modo unico e intrasferibile.
Si tratta di una breve illustrazione del concetto di "relativismo linguistico" così come inteso dagli studiosi Edward Sapir e Benjamin Whorf.

У статті розглянуто гіпотезу лінгвальної відносності Сепіра – Уорфа стосовно проблеми перекладності. Проаналізовано статус гіпотези як однієї з засад концепції неперекладності, а також виявлено труднощі перекладу, пов’язані з існуванням різних мовних картин світу.

Winning arguments by insisting on definitions (the definist fallacy, persuasive definition) is a powerful and increasingly popular tactic in the 21st century. Yet this tactic is rarely highlighted or explicitly analyzed. If there is no agreement on what a word X means, there is no objectively "right" answer to questions involving X, and the debate can be gamed by insisting on, popularizing, or enforcing a definition that yields one's preferred outcome. Semantic conflicts like this ("quibbles over the definition of words") are often thought to be trivial or pointless, but in fact are a key leverage point for exerting political power. Because these conflicts are inherently impossible to settle with facts and logic, they can only be settled through non-rational tactics (propaganda, peer pressure, outrage, deplatforming, ridicule, legal coercion, and so forth). In recent years, there has been an upsurge in activism aimed at changing definitions due (at least in part) to the hothouse environment of social media and constant engagement. Like other memes, redefinitions can go viral, and rapidly change word meanings/usage among the public. This becomes a formidable, Orwellian lever of power: Given the ability to change word usage, one can square any circle, win any argument. How far can this process go? Like O'Brien in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, I conclude there are no in-principle limits; all truths are ultimately social, and even the "hardest" scientific facts can be rendered false by modifying word usage. The ability to square any circle is very alluring, and will surely be overused. This may fragment society into incommensurable Sapir-Whorf language tribes, undermine the foundations of consensus truth, and bring about an Orwellian condition of chronic reality distortion to achieve political aims.

This paper has three sections. Section 1 describes how the definist fallacy works. Section 2 examines how definitional conflict functions in a specific case: arguments over the human/non-human status of the fetus. Section 3 sketches the full scope of definitional disputes in the 21st century, non-rational activism driven by such disputes, acceleration of the definist fallacy by social media, limitations of the technique, and the effects on society of Orwellian engineering of "reality."

This paper is a meta-commentary on a pioneering paper “bhaSar ottacar” (“Torture of Language”, first published in probaSi, joysTho, 1322 Bangabda [May 1915 A.D.]) by Sukumar Ray. The author of this paper interpreted the discourse of Ray in the light of contemporary or “modern” linguistic theories. Thus, this paper is also a formal elaboration of Ray’s hypotheses on the problems of language.

When I first went through the reprint Ray’s paper, I was flabbergasted as I found that Ray commented on some fundamental linguistic issues, which were almost unknown at that time, i.e., in 1915, in that short paper written in Bangla.

Ray started his discourse with “familiarity principle” that disrupts the understanding of “too familiar phenomenon” (it is to be noted that Chomsky, 1972: 24 initiated his discourse on language and mind with this principle). The issues, inaugurated by Ray, include: (a) arbitrariness of signs (in Ray’s phrases: “relations of artificial illogical sounds”) and different types of signs (symbol, icon and index were exemplified by Ray) ; (b) cultural relativity [as proposed later by Sapir-Whorf in 1929] ; (c) The relationship between thought and language and the domination of language over the thought due to the burden of ideology; (d) the existence of signifier without “real” signified and condensation of thought; (e) ideological problems of interpretive translation and changes in meaning (Ray exemplified it with two almost different Bangla translations of Vedic hymns); (f) Problems of polysemy, metaphor and metonym; (g) neutralization of meaning; (h) problems of metalinguistic functions.

However, the main emphasis of Ray was on the controlling power of linguistic order of things over the thought process or cognition and the hermeneutic gap between perception and understanding. As we are living within the prison-house of language and our thought processes are regulated/telescoped/condensed/appropriated/approximated by the linguistic order of things, Ray justifiably called this as “torture of language”.

Note: Downloadable document is in Bengali.

Number of Pages in PDF File: 6

Keywords: Sapir-Whorf, language-thinking, discourse Analysis

Este capítulo trata de: Etnolingüística en sentido amplio. La forma interior y su interpretación en la Lingüística hispánica. Lengua e interpretación del mundo: la llamada “hipótesis Sapir-Whorf”. Un peculiar concepto de raza. El multilingüismo del mundo hispánico. Las varias herencias culturales hispánicas. Mundo hispánico e interculturalidad. Principales instituciones dedicadas al estudio de las lenguas
indoamericanas. Bibliografía comentada. Bibliografía general.

INTRODUZIONE Quella di Benjamin Lee Whorf (1897-1941) è una figura piuttosto atipica e ormai indissolubilmente legata alla nota ipotesi che porta il suo nome ma alla quale ci si riferisce più propriamente come ipotesi Sapir-Whorf tributando così il giusto onore a Edward Sapir (1884-1939) che per primo ne tracciò la pista. Se oggi per gli etnolinguisti è cosa generalmente accettata che la cultura di un popolo influenzi più o meno pesantemente il suo modo di comunicare e dunque il linguaggio, l'ipotesi Sapir-Whorf si spinge oltre affermando che il linguaggio stesso agisce sul parlante nativo influendo sul modo in cui egli percepisce la realtà circostante e aggiungendo che-essendo la lingua sostanzialmente un filtro attraverso il quale gli uomini hanno esperienza del reale-lingue diverse possono giungere a comportarsi in modi anche radicalmente differenti, evidenziando caratteristiche ed aspetti dell'esistenza potenzialmente intraducibili. Per Whorf ciò che viene pensato è pienamente determinato dal linguaggio e conseguentemente ciò che del linguaggio non fa parte non può essere propriamente pensato ma solo intuito. Nella sua formulazione più rigida l'ipotesi suona così: "Il sistema linguistico di fondo (in altre parole la grammatica) di ciascuna lingua non è soltanto uno strumento di riproduzione per esprimere idee, ma esso stesso dà forma alle idee, è il programma e la guida dell'attività mentale dell'individuo, dell'analisi delle sue impressioni, della sintesi degli oggetti mentali di cui si occupa (...) Noi analizziamo la natura secondo linee tracciate dalle nostre lingue (...) Siamo così indotti a un nuovo principio di relatività, secondo cui differenti osservatori non sono condotti dagli stessi fatti fisici ad una medesima

Analysis of Roberto Saviano masterpiece "Gomorra. Viaggio nell'impero economico e nel sogno di dominio della camorra" and of the challenging German translated version created by Friederike Hausmann and Rita Seuss.
Diving deeply into foreignization & domestication translation methods, into  the well known translation theories of Sapir, Whorf, Benjamin, Berman, Lotman and Zohar, here is the attempt to discover the translators' paths to ensure the cultural transfer of foreign realities as well as the Fortleben of novels and respective authors.

Debates about linguistic relativity commonly focus on one question: Does language affect thought? This yes-or-no question does not do justice to the complexity of Whorf’s ideas and skirts several issues of great importance to Whorf. My first aim in this paper is to recover the arguments that got lost in translation of Whorf’s ideas into the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I will show that, for Whorf, languages were also one of the ways in which we think, scientists were not immune to language effects, and the key to advancement of Western science was multilingual awareness. My second aim is to draw on these insights to articulate a Whorfian agenda for the field of second language acquisition (SLA) that asks new questions about second language learning and cognition and expands the boundaries of the field and the scope, duration, and locations of SLA research.

Course covers an introduction to the problematic of the linguistic relativity. Emphasis was made on the experimental investigations from the end of XXth to the begininng of XXIst centuries. But also there is careful consideration of the linguistic relativity refolmulation according to modern definitions of «language» and «thought». One can find here the history of the problem. Course program includes the most important researches of the linguistic relativity and also a lot of particular researches. Course consists of 6 parts. The first part deals with the history of the problem and reformulation of the main thesis. In the next five parts there is consideration of particular domains of thinking and perception influenced by language: space, time, motion, color, gender, number etc. In the final part there is discussion about research perspectives, connected with nontrivial grammatical categories and the specificity of the Indoeuropean worldview. Every part has a list of references. It seems that course is urgent because of lack the detailed reflection on modern western investigations in Russian studies.

The classic version of the linguistic relativity principle, formulated by Boas and developed especially in the work of Whorf, suggests that the particular lexicogrammatical patterns of a given language can influence the thought of its speakers. A second version of the argument emerged in the 1970s and shifted the focus to the indexical aspect of language: any given language includes a particular set of indexical signs, and these essentially shape the contexts produced in speaking that language.

(Italiano)
Abstract: Uno degli assunti fondamentali della linguistica e psicologia cognitive è che ogni percezione ed espressione è connessa alla nostra biologia, e più di quanto si pensasse in precedenza. Dopo una panoramica della letteratura cognitivista orientata per l’indipendenza tra linguaggio e pensiero, evidenzierò punti problematici di questa posizione avvalendomi di ricerche empiriche da un lato condotte in ambito neuro-cognitivista e dall’altro di tipo psicolinguistico. Proporrò degli spunti a favore della ‘contro-tesi’ per cui il pensiero implica la lingua naturale: linguaggio e pensiero, cioè, si influenzano l’un l’altro.
Questa posizione implica che la mente umana sia in corpore (embodied) in un corpo fenomenologico e strutturata dalle nostre esperienze, e gli stimoli esterni quotidiani offerti dall’ambiente in cui si è situati (embedded) formino dinamicamente il modo di pensare degli esseri umani. La mente intesa come prodotto dell’interazione delle proprie introspezioni con le interazioni quotidiane è influenzata, e in una certa misura persino condizionata, dalla lingua parlata e da come è usata. Conoscere la natura dinamica del rapporto tra linguaggio e pensiero permette una migliore comprensione della natura del linguaggio e di come la lingua motivi il modo in cui si ragiona del proprio mondo.

Parole chiavi: Sapir-Whorf, linguaggio e pensiero, linguaggio e cultura, embodiment, cognizione


(English)
Abstract: One of the fundamental premises of contemporary cognitive linguistics and psychology is that human perception and expression are intimately coupled with human biology, to a much greater degree than linguists and psychologists had previously thought. In this essay I provide an overview of contemporary literature from cognitive linguistics and psychology that posits language-thought independence. I also highlight the theoretical problems and the further neurocognitive and psycholinguistic empirical research specific to these issues which make this position problematic. I then provide evidence for the counter-theory, that thinking in fact involves natural language and that language and thought influence one another.
This position indexes the supposition that our minds are embodied in a phenomenological body built on our everyday experiences, and daily external stimuli offered by the cultural environment in which we are individually embedded dynamically form our way of thinking. The mind is the product of the interaction of introspections and daily interactions; it is influenced, and to a certain extent even conditioned, by language and how it is used. Understanding the dynamic nature of language and thought will guide us in better understanding figurative language in general and metaphor in particular as well as how they motivate our way of reasoning about our world.

Keywords: Sapir-Whorf, language-thought, language and culture, embodiment, cognition

What makes it the case that we draw the boundary between “blue” and “green” where we draw it? Do we draw this boundary where we draw it because our perceptual system is biologically determined
in this way? Or is it culture and language that guide the way we categorize colors? These two possible answers have shaped the historical discussion opposing so-called universalists to relativists. Yet, the most recent theoretical developments on color categorization reveal the limits of such a polarization.

Does language modulate perception and categorisation of everyday objects? Here, we approach this question from the perspective of grammatical gender in bilinguals. We tested Spanish–English bilinguals and control native speakers of English in a semantic categorisation task on triplets of pictures in an all-in-English context while measuring event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Participants were asked to press a button when the third picture of a triplet belonged to the same semantic category as the first two, and another button when it belonged to a different category. Unbeknownst to them, in half of the trials, the gender of the third picture name in Spanish had the same gender as that of the first two, and the opposite gender in the other half. We found no priming in behavioural results of either semantic relatedness or gender consistency. In contrast, ERPs revealed not only the expected semantic priming effect in both groups, but also a negative modulation by gender inconsistency in Spanish–English bilinguals, exclusively. These results provide evidence for spontaneous and unconscious access to grammatical gender in participants functioning in a context requiring no access to such information, thereby providing support for linguistic relativity effects in the grammatical domain.

This paper aims to shed light on the terminological and conceptual area around linguistic relativity (nowadays a mostly empirically conceived problem), namely the relations with relativism as a philosophical position. Throughout history and up to now there has been a degree of confusion in handling the terms 'linguistic relativity', 'linguistic relativism', 'linguistic determinism' and the like, all in a more or less conscious fashion. Here it is clarified that linguistic relativity, at least as construed by the recent Neo-Whorfian literature (but also in some important sense, from Whorf 's own point of view as well) is not, by definition, the same as linguistic determinism, but neither is a form or relativism. On the other hand, relativism, maintains the recent philosophical literature, is a family of theses that share a number of common features even though a single defining core is not easily identifiable. While linguistic relativity does have some connections with some of those features, to make it collapse into an easily dismissible kind of relativism is a crucial misconception of the nature and scopes of such an idea, i.e., that different languages have a different bearing on speakers' cognition and actions.

For fifty years the general semantics movement has endured, where many other educational organizations of seemingly greater popularity and influence have withered and died. This longevity has not depended upon widespread public acceptance, but upon the dedication of individuals who found that once they had taken the considerable time and effort required to understand general semantics, that they valued what they had found far too much to give it up lightly. In August of 1985 I attended the Tenth International Conference on general semantics in San Di-ego, California. Although the quality of the lectures impressed me, most of them simply rehashed (however well) old material without adding anything new. I could not help but notice that most speakers looked well into their retirement years. The average age of conference at-tendees did not seem much younger, and at the time I felt that this boded ill for the future. The continuing dedication of general semanticists argued well for the enduring value of the discipline , but the dearth of younger people argued that unless the demographics changed, the movement could not long survive. Unfortunately, because of time constraints an important scheduled session on "The Future of General Semantics-Next Steps," did not take place. I had hoped that this event would involve several "brainstorming sessions" on different aspects of this topic, concluding with a general session with an emphasis on developing a practical program for making sure that general semantics had a meaningful future in a real sense.

This article is about translating oral literature in indigenous societies, especially in multilingual and multicultural areas such as Northwestern California, where shared, regional material becomes ethnically marked when seemingly small changes are introduced. A case in point is the profound symbolic effects that accompany a shift in languages. Though Dell Hymes was deeply concerned with questions of translation, he rarely applied his analytical framework to translations within indigenous cultural settings; more often, he focused on the subtleties of translating oral literature into English, with emphasis on faithfully representing aspects of the structure and style. One way to build on Hymes’s legacy would be to apply his careful attention to matters of structure and style to a discussion of translation within indigenous traditions, where this approach can tease out minor differences that take on great symbolic significance. Translation is a practical, daily matter in much of the world, and in this sense Hymes’s groundbreaking work on the poetics of translation continues to shed light on the subtleties of creating meaning and ethnic distinction in multilingual areas. A commentary to this essay by Charles L. Briggs appears later in this special issue.

Culture is a crucial part of human life and every society has its own. Culture can be defined as roughly as ‘humans’ perception of the world’. Today we know that culture and language have a sincere relationship. According to Everett, culture reflects human life and language reflects the culture. For example, if a society’s language dies inevitably the culture of that society will perish too. Because of this close relationship linguists created theories about their parts. However, before talking about these theories it is useful to get familiar with some terms.

Palestra apresentada ao Curso de Museologia, da Faculdade de Ciência da Informação, da Universidade de Brasília em 15 de março de 2022, às 14h. (duração 02 horas), via plataforma TEAMS.

Discussões sobre Linguística com base nos textos de Sapir&Whorf
, Boroditsky&Gaby (2010); Majib et al (2004) e no Ted Talk da doutora Lera Boroditsky.

Colour perception and conceptual metaphor are areas where language and cognition interact. Different languages categorize colours differently (cf. Kay et al. 2009). In order to investigate whether there is a relation between the type of colour terminology and the types of conceptual metaphors found in a given language, a qualitative study was done on a small sample of Standard Average European (SAE) and non-SAE languages. The focus here was on conceptual metaphors involving the colour blue. Languages were coded for their type of colour terminology (zero, one, or two separate basic terms for blue); their conceptual metaphors with blue were then collected and discussed from the framework of embodied cognition, as described by Lakoff and Johnson. This revealed that many negative metaphors shared across SAE and non-SAE languages are anchored in correspondences between blue and bodily states. In addition to this overlap between SAE and non-SAE languages, both groups also contain metaphors not found in the other. Furthermore, ‘grue’ (no basic term for blue) languages show a difference between the ‘grue’ term and an ‘indigo’ term, which appears to be equivalent to the difference between ‘sea blue’ and ‘sky blue’ in languages with two basic terms. The implications of this for translation between languages of different types are briefly discussed.

Term paper for Translation Studies Class, taught by Dr. Gijs Mulder.

Two references were missing from the list, I have since added these. If you find any more ERRATA, please let me know!

In the current conflict in Ukraine, one of Russia’s
most effective propaganda weapons is its ability to
fuel the fear in Ukraine’s eastern regions that the
new government in Kyiv will enact laws against use
of the Russian language and repress speakers of
Russian. In 2014, in the aftermath of Euromaidan,
the Ukrainian parliament, the Verkhovna Rada,
actually passed a law to repeal the “language law”
of 2012,1 which had enabled the expansion of
Russian at the regional level. Since then, the 2014
repeal has been in limbo, as it has neither been
signed nor been vetoed by the president of Ukraine,
Petro Poroshenko.

Discovery is crucial to the progress of science. At a minimum, a scientific discovery involves coming to know something that was not known previously. Because discovery is an epistemic phenomenon, it is also factive. One cannot therefore discover that human beings evolved from other great apes, or that we only use 10% of our brains. Further, even if she ends up being proven correct, an investigator who makes an educated guess or conjecture does not, at least on this basis, merit being called the discoverer of a phenomenon. Scientific discovery's epistemic character also enables us to see that it requires conceptual sophistication needed to grasp the phenomenon being discovered. This is why, although an undergraduate new to chemistry might synthesize a novel compound by a fortuitous and largely random addition of ingredients, we would not say that he has (scientifically) discovered that new compound. Likewise even if a (non-savant) toddler happens upon a species of butterfly unknown to biology, she has not made a scientific discovery. The picture of science bequeathed to us by the Enlightenment is that of a lone investigator delving into a topic that has captured her or his curiosity. On occasion the investigator might report their results to a learned body, but for the most part such work is solitary. By contrast, nowadays great swathes of science are only possible with the collaboration of large groups of researchers, often distributed across the globe, and each performing distinctive tasks relative to the rest of the team. Manuscript and grant referees, journal editors, and institutional review boards are integral to the process as well. This picture might suggest that the process of scientific discovery is now, even if it has not always been, an inherently social one.

This thesis looks at theories of the emergence of linguistic difference put forward by three philosophers of the (long) eighteenth century—Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715–1780), and Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803). The conventional, and in most regards accurate, assessment of these figures places them in different traditions (respectively rationalist, empiricist, romantic); however, I argue, on the matter of the growth and diversification of natural languages, they operate to a nontrivial extent on common ground, unified by a view of language as creative, using metaphor, analogy, and similar figurative operations to expand its expressive base; social, rooted in the desire for human communion; and relativistic, meaning both that language shapes or constitutes thought and that the precise nature of this effect varies according to the individual characters of different languages. These common ideas emerge, despite the different preoccupations of their authors, as a result of their common need to grapple with the “linguistic turn” effected by the Essay Concerning Human Understanding of John Locke (1632–1704) and the emergence of proto-linguistics as a field in its own right.
I then consider the implications of this creative–social–relativistic episteme for the current (twentieth- and twenty-first-century) line of research on linguistic relativity inaugurated by BL Whorf (1897–1941). I will try to illustrate that Whorf is connected to the eighteenth century, and Leibniz, Condillac, and Herder to each other, by several specific shared concepts: 1) that linguistic and cultural variation happens due to the use of words to organize the world in ways that vary across communities (what Condillac calls the “connection of ideas”); 2) that alongside or underneath its relativism, meaning is always to some degree universal and innate, a notion to which each writer considered here brings a different admixture of rationalism, empiricism, and theosophy; and 3) that a translinguistic, interpretive Einfühlung (in Herder's term), or ‘empathy’, dependent on the preservation of both universal and relativistic principles, is crucial to the attainment of an intercultural harmony that respects and does not reduce the differences in linguacultural thought-worlds.

Whorf is now mostly either worshipped (by the same sort of people who like to mention Gödel's Theorem to prove something that it does not) or denounced (by those who either understand this theorem or on the other hand do not wish to believe in that something) for his (universally misunderstood) claims under the rubric of the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" (he did not claim the connection between language and thought that is generally attributed to him but rather assumed as given because at that time it was; what was innovative was his claim about the extent to which supposedly different linguistic cultures differed in their mentality, e.g. having different conceptions of time).  However he was also a major scholar of two Uto-Aztecan languages (Hopi and Aztec/Nahuatl) and of comparative Uto-Aztecan.  His discovery that Aztec tl comes from *t before *a can probably be compared for its impact in Native American linguistics to Verner's Law in Indo-European.  In this article we discuss both some issues of the history of this Whorf's Law and some exceptions both positive and negative to the law.  As to the first, we try to correctly attribute credit for the discovery that Aztec dialects that now lack tl one had it (much of the credit goes to Boas, some to Whorf himself).  As to the second, words with tle and tlo are shown to arise as a result of contractions of sequences such as -ahi-, -a?i-, -awi-, etc., in some cases resulting in completely new etymologies, in others merely in cleaning up earlier proposals.  But there remain examples of tli that seem to come from *tu:- or *tuw- (where it seems that *tu- does not undergo this change).  We propose that the vowel in *tu:- and *tuw- sequences became ï at an early enough time to participate in Whorf's Law, which accordingly occurred not just before *a but also before this secondary *ï, that is before the two back unrounded vowels existing at the time.