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Summary: Lovers of language will love this book!
Review: This book was required reading when I was in college, and it made such an impression on me that 50 years later I sought it out, and re-read it. Anyone interested in communication, and the impact language has on society ( or how society impacts language!) will find the examples of words used (and not used)in various cultures fascinating.
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Summary: This book is worth it.
Review: This was the first time I had read a book about linguistics. For some time I had heard about Benjamin Lee Whorf and his seminal work on American Indian languages. This is his most famous book, a book of some of his papers during the 30's and 40's. Unfortunately, given my lack of linguistic knowledge I did not understand much of the terminology throughout his more academic papers such as "Some Verbal Categories of Hopi" or "Gestalt Technique of Stem Composition in Shawnee". Nevertheless there is plenty to read which discusses languages without too much academic terminology, although there is always some. His most interesting reads are the more general ones such as "Language, Mind and Reality" or "Language and Logic". Whorf makes the fascinating assertion, new for his time, that the language we speak, to some degree at least, forces us to orient our view of the world in a certain direction, for example the noun based structure of Indo-European languages forces it into considering the world as made up of interacting fixed parts whereas Hopi doesn't even have a tense system and doesn't consider the past or the future and sees events as either manifest or unmanifest. A completely different way of viewing the world and yet possessing its own internal logic and ability to express whatever is necessary. This is something Whorf stresses throughout and the so-called `primitive' languages of for example, the native Americans, is far from this western perspective. In fact Hopi stands out as being a language ideally suited to the new physics. Whorf really lives in two worlds regarding his linguistic studies 1. the fascinating metaphysical world of language constructions throughout the world, i.e. the world view generated by these languages and 2. the strict linguistic approach to languages with its own very formal and structured method to analyse languages, see for example the formulaic approach for one-syllable English words in the paper entitled "Linguistics as an Exact Science". This book is worth it as no doubt the one by Sapir as well.
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Summary: The Structure of the Language We Use
Review: Whorf (1899-1941), trained as a chemical engineer, worked as a fire prevention consultant and did original work in linguistic anthropology. He remains best know for advocating that the structure of language not only reflects but influences our world view and behavior. "We dissect nature along lines laid down by our native languages. The categories and types that we isolate from the world of phenomena we do not find there because they stare every observer in the face; on the contrary, the world is presented in a kaleidoscopic flux of impressions which has to be organized by our minds--and this means largely by the linguistic systems in our minds. We cut nature up, organize it into concepts, and ascribe significances as we do, largely because we are parties to an agreement to organize it this way--an agreement that holds throughout our speech community and is codified in the patterns of our language" (213). This has been called "the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis," (acknowledging Whorf's mentor, linguistic anthropologist Edward Sapir) although it seems sufficiently general for many hypotheses to be derived from it. Alfred Korzybski independently developed similar notions, writing,"...we read unconsciously into the world the structure of the language we use" (Science and Sanity 60). Students of Korzybski's General Semantics have a particular concern for the practical implications and applications of such views. Read This Book!
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