Pettydeep: the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. 🤮

look the sapir-whorf hypothesis the
theory of linguistic relativity it is the philosophy of a highly eccentric individual named Benjamin Whorf and it incorporated data and examples from separate research done by a guy named Sapir so this video is directed towards the philosophy of Worf and it's not what you think it is it's not what people say it is in the universities and it's now people say it is on YouTube either this is a really strange example of a theory that's been completely divorced from the words and intentions of the author who invented it partly just for the entertainment and edification of undergraduate students partly I don't know so professors can feel there's something really profound and important in the science of linguistics itself something more powerful than the study of culture or history perhaps I don't really know what motivates the people who are playing this game but the point of this video is to show you that people are playing games not just here on YouTube but even in PhD programs in linguistics the world needs to know how far we trip sit away from what the actual sapir-whorf hypothesis was so the idea that the language you speak shapes the way that you see the world is really intuitive after all if you know the difference between a guitar and a bass but I don't we're gonna have a pretty different way of talking about our favorite bands so this is the type of seemingly profound and provocative claim that's tacked on to the sapir-whorf hypothesis and it's actually completely utterly irrelevant to the real intellectual legacy and thesis that Benjamin Whorf worked so hard to set down what was it this guy had to say let's jump in here let's go to a smoking gun quotation here you go oh he believes in quote a world of hyperspace a world of higher dimensions you see that this doesn't sound stupid and crazy to you yet stick around this video is gonna get stupider and crazier as it says on the left highlighted yellow Wharf called it the principle of linguistic relativity because he saw the ideas having implications similar to instance principle of physical relativity this is a mystical transcendental over-the-top crazy theory this guy really was a religious eccentric indulging in his own strange spiritual view of life on earth that has nothing to do with linguistics as a legitimate science and has nothing to do even with the kinds of petty but profound questions that professors are kind of trying to inspire their their undergraduate students to ask oh look at this on screen you could read the whole thing if you want to hmm yes yeah yeah yeah hmm the inner affinity of language and the the cosmic order that that sounds legit to you guys what was the original premise behind all of this pseudo spiritual pontificating uh oh yeah right we could actually read his thesis his essay actually does open with a thesis statement as good undergraduate essay should so yeah um the various sciences in proliferating highly specialized languages I suppose to communicate their ideas the various Sciences have become mutually incomprehensible right and this isn't just a problem for communication between the sciences he claims like it's not just difficult for someone in chemistry to communicate with some of the physics the problem is this is actually distorting the perception of reality by scientists themselves and to some extent distorting the perception of reality in all of Western society in the age of the dominance of science and this is a problem a problem that impedes scientific progress and impedes the transformation of our society and he he is gonna solve this problem with his brilliant spiritual insight into the relationship between language and cosmic the cosmic order of reality yeah remember that a world of hyperspace of higher dimensions he's going to talk to us about related this is this is basically part of the founding of a new religion and guess where it was published it was published in the overtly insane Journal of theosophy run by a cult group created by a well-known psychic charlatan helena blavatsky if you don't believe me look it up even Wikipedia will debunk this nonsense you can read what I've put here on on Street for you yeah it wasn't just crazy it was also kind of racist but hey let's go back to let's go back to our respectable youtuber who does a respectable job of summarizing the kind of nonsense that will be on your final exam if you are right now an undergraduate student wading through the petty deep waters of the sapir-whorf hypothesis as it's been I don't know diluted and watered down for your consumption the strongest version of this is usually called linguistic determinism because it says that the way that we think isn't just influenced by our language it's totally 100% determined by it it's also known as the sapir-whorf hypothesis because of a couple of important researchers who pioneered the topic edward sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf now this idea raises some interesting questions like if words shape how you see the world can there be anything resembling accurate translation between languages / if you speak more than one language is your worldview significantly different between them but let's leave those for now and start with some really famous research done in the 1930s by Worf he studied grammatical structures from Native American languages and compared them with English and other European languages one of the languages he looked at was Hopi spoken in northern Arizona and specifically how people talk about time in that language logically the way your eyeballs and brain bits see colors should be basically the same whether you live in Toronto or Taipei or whether you speak Mandarin or Mongolian it's just biology right well to a proponent of linguistic determinism not right the words you have for colors should totally influence what colors you're able to perceive there's actually been a lot of research on this it turns out that not every language has the same number of color terms you can see in this way the academic discipline of linguistics just turn this into a Pandora's box of unlimited petty deep anecdotes about things that happen to be slightly interesting about linguistic asymmetry what was wharfs original crazy idea it was an idea about the relationship between the linguistic order and the cosmic order it's completely clear in his own words if anyone's reading his own words and definitely nobody is alright and what does everyone pretend his idea was they pretend that it's not a two-way street between a linguistic order and a cosmic order they pretend instead the theory of linguistic relativity was a one-way street about the linguistic order imposing itself on culture imposing itself on politics and imposing itself even on cognition now look Wharf didn't make up this not a no highly eccentric religious worldview starting with a blank sheet of paper if you read his writing carefully he tells you what his sources were right so here you go the author's intent matters he's here citing who's Pinsky's book a new model of the universe who was Zeus penske ah it was one of the early proponents of the peculiar new religious movement or cult group of Gurdjieff I don't know how far you want to go down the rabbit hole on this one crazy cult group leads to another leads to another what does he take from Gurdjieff you see here highlighted in yellow part of his philosophy or worldview was undermining people's ingrained patterns of thought right so they have these seven all mystical zen-like moments of breakthrough or insight all right well that doesn't sound too bad or too evil as crazy cult groups go you know whatever I've heard of worse you could imagine for someone like Worf whose whole approach to language was talking about patterns and in green habits of thought and how those shape your percept the world and the possibility of jarring you out of them to have profound insight wharfs view of reality was precisely about the ways in which those patterns of thought were and were not linked to the cosmic order hyperspace as he puts it alternate dimensions perception of reality etc etc and he really was interested in yogic transcendental insights he says it himself it's in his paper he talks about Sanskrit at Hindu traditions of yoga he was interested in zen-like moments of transcendence so whatever you can make fun of it to some extent or you can you can take it for what it's worth what it is not it's a scientific hypothesis it has nothing to do with the science of linguistics no matter how you define it has nothing to do with what it's supposed to be about in academia today quote we saw in part one but in linguistic and mental phenomena significant behavior or what is the same both behavior and significance so far as they're interlinked are ruled by a specific system or organization a quote-unquote geometry characteristic of each language this organization is imposed from outside the narrow circle of the personal consciousness making of that consciousness I'm your puppet whose linguistic maneuverings are held in unsent and unbreakable bonds of pattern so look it is what it is guarded as the start of a new religion or you can regard it as a crazy extension and sequel to some other religions the wirdy around like namely that of Helena Blavatsky and Gurdjieff and whose penske that was the crowd he was rolling with and those the people who was trying to make a positive impression upon um it is certainly very sad to see I mean look here on screen you've got Sanskrit Hindu spirituality rolled in with the rest of it it's certainly very sad to see that his actual hypothesis is being misrepresented as if his theory was that the US government should force everyone to learn English on the contrary what he says here is that Western culture has gone as far as it possibly can and mullah randomizers quoting verbatim quote the commitment to illusion has been sealed in western indo-european language and the road out of illusion for the West lies through a wider understanding of language than Western your indo-european languages alone can give this is the mantra yoga of Western consciousness the next great step which it is now ready to take so you was interested in Native American languages and Asian languages precisely in shaking you out of the slumber of your monolingual ignorance so you could have this profound insight into reality and hey maybe for some of you you know that doesn't sound too bad in closing this video let's come back to the issue of race and racism which has kind of haunted this from several different angles the idea that your language shapes how you think was really influential for a while but unfortunately it had some disastrous consequences and not only in Europe in fact some of the most destructive linguistic policies in America arose from the idea that indigenous language communities should be replaced by civilized European languages and those policies were really ruinous according to the MIT indigenous language initiative of the roughly 300 Native American languages that once existed only 165 remain and of those 80% have under 1000 speakers left I mean there are three times more Hungarian speakers in the US than speakers of the most populous Native American language Navajo and while we're not laying all the blame for this at the feet of ideas linking language to worldview they did make a contribution so this is really unfortunate I don't know to what extent he's being honest or dishonest but this is the exact opposite of who Benjamin Whorf was Worf was a kind of spiritual seeker and he was out there trying to romanticize Native American culture that's really what this research was doing he was claiming oh the Native Americans have a different way of perceiving time and thinking about the future and this is reflected their language he was also trying to romanticize a lot of religions of East Asia he was obviously fascinated by Hindu philosophy and to some and put his philosophy and so on it's hurtful for his work he really was a hippy spiritual seeker of his time who dabbled in linguistics and who romanticized and put on a pedestal the value of indigenous American language so it's it's really sad it's really shameful for his legacy even though I've just come out and told you I regard that says as kind of insane and twisted and a member of a stupid spiritual cult group nevertheless credit where it's due this was not one of the evil imperialists on the wrong side of history this was a guy who saw a lot of value in Native American languages and he was studying he was studying them for precisely these spiritual reasons [Music]