Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 A passage to modernity
- 2 One reason, one world, many monads
- 3 The world at war with reason: Britain and France in the eighteenth century
- 4 Multiplicity and the Romantic explosion
- 5 Essences and universals through the nineteenth century
- 6 Boas and the linguistic multiverse
- 7 Linguistic relativity: Sapir, Lee, and Whorf
- 8 The other side of the mirror: a twentieth-century essentialism
- 9 The rise of cognition and the repression of languages
- 10 The return of the repressed
- Conclusion
- Notes
- References
- Index
7 - Linguistic relativity: Sapir, Lee, and Whorf
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 April 2011
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface
- Introduction
- 1 A passage to modernity
- 2 One reason, one world, many monads
- 3 The world at war with reason: Britain and France in the eighteenth century
- 4 Multiplicity and the Romantic explosion
- 5 Essences and universals through the nineteenth century
- 6 Boas and the linguistic multiverse
- 7 Linguistic relativity: Sapir, Lee, and Whorf
- 8 The other side of the mirror: a twentieth-century essentialism
- 9 The rise of cognition and the repression of languages
- 10 The return of the repressed
- Conclusion
- Notes
- References
- Index
Summary
We thus free ourselves from the distasteful conception that the natural universe ought to possess something of the nature of a centre.
Albert Einstein (1916)The Boas program was carried on and extended by his students through the 1920s and 30s. It collapsed with the deaths of some of its main figures and came to be miscognized, I will argue, after the War. Here I want to present three of its practitioners: Boas's students Edward Sapir and Dorothy Demetracopoulou Lee, and Sapir's student Benjamin Lee Whorf.
Edward Sapir
Edward Sapir (1884–1939) was born in Germany and came to the United States as a child. He was initially trained in literature and did his Master's thesis on Herder's Treatise on the Origin of Language (Sapir 1907). This early text already reveals some important aspects of Sapir's approach to language and culture. Sapir contests Herder's assertion that the languages of peoples of nature “lack true grammatical sense” and concludes that
[t]oday … owing to the vast stock of comparative and historic linguistic material at our disposal, we … can admit, with a clear conscience, that many typically “original” languages, to adopt Herder's now unserviceable terminology, possess truly grammatical features of incredible complexity, as in the case of the Eskimo verb or Bantu noun. (1907: 129–30)
This is the standard Boasian view. What Sapir himself adds to it is a central interest in the role of poetic figures in language structure, an interest he shared with Herder and Humboldt, and that we have seen anticipated in the Renaissance and in some figures of the French Enlightenment.
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- Linguistic RelativitiesLanguage Diversity and Modern Thought, pp. 133 - 153Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010
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