BEHIND THE SAPIR-WHORF HYPOTHESIS

[Having mentioned in this entry the world-famous German national anthem known as Das Lied der Deutschen, best recognizable by its deliciously ambiguous line Deutschland, Deutschland Über Alles, I am compelled to state, for the record, the far less familiar fact that it was written to the music of the great Austrian composer Franz Joseph Haydn by the notable German poet and linguist August Heinrich Hoffmann von Fallersleben (1798-1874).]

During my mathematical linguistics years at Moscow University, I became acquainted with a considerable number of interesting linguistic theories, some of which were not particularly politically-correct, putting it mildly. Among such theories was one which flatly contradicted the anthropological egalitarianism of Franz Boas, asserting that, in fact, different races, nations, cultures, peoples could not possibly be equal, because they spoke different languages, and their intelligence, capacity for abstract thinking, even the basic modes of perceiving the world, were largely dependent on the levels of development of the languages they spoke, and those who spoke primitive languages had levels of development far inferior to those who spoke better developed languages.

This ostensibly racist, albeit perfectly reasonable theory (mind you, I am not judging its scientific credibility here, which, for all I know, may very well be solid!) did not belong to some Third Reich champion of German superiority (one can say that the great propensity of the German language to produce a multitude of exceptionally nuanced abstract terms, which have empowered German philosophy beyond all others, speaks for a certain German superiority in the realm of abstract thinking and therefore seems to substantiate the otherwise questionable claim to national superiority, Deutschland, Deutschland Über Alles), but it had been espoused by a pair of humble Jewish-American linguists-anthropologists, Messrs. Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf, sometime before Hitler came to power (Sapir’s book Language, an Introduction to the Study of Speech came out in 1921), receiving the name of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis.

The question can be asked already, what do Messrs. Sapir and Whorf have to do with my Nietzsche section, and the answer is predictably simple. Read this passage from Nietzsche’s Jenseits, 20. Please observe that the great Nietzsche stresses the difference among world cultures, rather than superiority of some over others:

“The strange family resemblance of all Indian, Greek, and our German philosophizing is explained easily enough. Where there is affinity of languages, it cannot fail, owing to the common philosophy of grammar that everything is prepared for a similar development and sequence of philosophical systems; just as the way seems barred against certain other possibilities of world-interpretation. It is highly probable that the philosophers within the domain of the Ural-Altaic languages (where the concept of the subject is the least developed) look otherwise “into the world,” and will be found on paths of thought different from those of the Indo-Germanic peoples and the Muslims: the spell of certain grammatical functions is ultimately also the spell of physiological valuations and racial conditions.” (From Nietzsche’s Jenseits, 20).

Here is a brilliant work of contemplative comparative linguistics, giving away the hint that not only Freud, in his field, but even such illustrious investigators of anthropological linguistics as Messrs. Sapir and Whorf may have had a thing or two to learn (and maybe even to steal?) from that bottomless chest of treasures, the legacy of Nietzsche. Well, this linguistic brilliance on Nietzsche’s part, and my particular partiality for it, do make up an unbeatable combination, explaining my somewhat inordinate enthusiasm here, as well as my eagerness to revisit this entry again and again for further contemplation. (To be fair to Sapir and Whorf, they did not rely entirely on Nietzsche’s reference to the Ural-Altaic languages, but chose to strike their gold closer to home, among the native American Indian tribes.)