Language: An Introduction to the Study of Speech

"Yes. Sapir’s 1921 book Language is still to me the most important pioneering book ever written on linguistics and I’m probably unique in holding that perspective. Everybody knows it’s important but I just think it’s massively important. In it Sapir talks about bi-directional influences between culture and language and thought. A lot of people only give him credit for the idea that the language we speak can affect the way we think, which then became known as the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis. Whorf actually learnt this from Sapir. But Sapir didn’t stop with that, he said that just as language can influence thought, culture can influence language. He argued that language clearly has some computational aspects that cannot be reduced to culture but there are a number of broad characteristics we find in individual languages that reflect the culture that they emerge from. I find that to be extremely pioneering – extremely prescient – and just incredibly innovative. I can’t think of anyone in the history of the study of language that has been more innovative in thought about language than Edward Sapir. He died in 1939 at the age of fifty-four, right at the beginning of World War Two. I think that’s one reason he had less influence. He hadn’t been at Yale that long and was replaced shortly thereafter by his arch rival in the field: Leonard Bloomfield. Bloomfield took his position at Yale, got a number of students, and had much more influence in the next decade or so, especially after the war when people were coming back and Sapir was a distant memory and Bloomfield was the active scholar, the leader of American linguistics. That is one possible interpretation. You can take the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and it has two manifestations: one is linguistic determinism and one is linguistic relativity. Linguistic determinism is the idea that the language we speak determines the way we can think. Linguistic relativity is a much weaker hypothesis and suggests that the language we speak affects in some way some of the ways we think when we need to think quickly. And this is confirmed in experiments. Actually, my son has a new book out on linguistic relativity and he shows in a number of experiments that people have to make decisions and think very quickly online and that their language shows greater effects on the way people think than if you give them more time to think about the problem. This suggests that language is a tool for thought but it isn’t thought. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . So we definitely think without language and I think that has to be true because otherwise we have no explanation of animals. The more we equate thinking with language, the less able we are to cater for the thought that my dog clearly has when she comes to me to go for a walk or understands the dozen or so words that I speak to her that I know she understands. Yes. So you have other species that clearly have thoughts; they have beliefs, they have intentions, and you have pre-linguistic children that clearly have thoughts and intentions. Language is a great facilitator of thought but it also affects it. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been caricatured for so long so that the philosopher Donald Davidson wrote an important article called ‘ On the very idea of a conceptual scheme ‘ in which he argued that it really doesn’t make any sense to say that there are people who think so differently than us that they can’t understand us because, if that were the case, we wouldn’t know if they were thinking or speaking because we’d have no basis of comparison. I don’t think it’s genetic; I think that if we found Martians we could possibly find a way to communicate with them which would clearly mean that it’s not a genetic thing. Yet, at the same time, Sapir really is caricatured and I think that has affected the importance that he should have in the field and has diminished it."