The SAE languages objectify time and space in the sense that they allow counting and measuring them while in Hopi ‘There is no objectification, as a region, an extent, a quantity, of the subjective duration-feeling. Benjamin Whorf, a student of Sapir, compares the treatment of time and space in the Hopi language with its treatment in what he calls SAE (Standard Average European) languages. The differences can be anything from marginal to fundamental. As each language has a different structure, each language dictates its own classification of the world around. It conceptualizes our world and provides for us the categories we think in. ‘The world of our experiences must be enormously simplified and generalized before it is possible to make a symbolic inventory of all our experiences of things and relations and this inventory is imperative before we can convey ideas’ (Sapir 1921, 12).Īnd this is what language does for us.
The same applies to abstract things like ideas, sensations, and emotions. For example, if we hear the word “house” we might have in mind a certain prototype, e.g., four stone walls, a wooden door, glass windows, and a tiled roof, but we do not think of a certain house we once saw, because “house” is a symbol for a concept, a category, consisting of very few basics: walls and a roof, suitable for people to live in. A concept is the abstracted sum of numerous individual experiences that are perceived as similar or even identical in their basic properties. A speech element can symbolize either a concept or relations within and between concepts. Therefore not only communication systems of animals are excluded from his definition of language but also any human articulation that is not symbolic or voluntary, e.g., instinctive cries. Sapir characterizes language as purely human and non-instinctive, consisting of a conventional system of arbitrary sound symbols that are produced voluntarily.
Beginning with Sapir’s definition and characterization of language I want to carve out the function of language structure in connection with language change, its impact on world view, and finally Sapir’s conclusions concerning an artificial international language. In this paper I want to give an overview on his inquiries into the function and form of languages as arbitrary systems of symbolisms. He treats language as a cultural product and considers linguistics to be a fruitful possibility of a scientific study of society.
As Edward Sapir first approached the field of linguistics in the course of his anthropologist studies, his view on language is one that takes into account not only cultural studies but the whole range of human sciences, among them psychology, sociology, and philosophy.
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