Zitate:

• „Language is a guide to ‘social reality’. […] Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society. It is quite an illusion to imagine that one adjusts to reality essentially without the use of language and the language is merely an incidental means of solving specific problems of communication or reflection. The fact of the matter is that the ‘real world’ is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group. “

• „No two languages are ever sufficiently similar to be considered as representing the same social reality. The worlds in which different societies live are distinct worlds, not merely the same world with different labels attached. “ (E. Sapir (1968): Selected Writings. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. S. 162)

• „This is the relativity of concepts or, as it might be called, the relativity of the form of thought. It is not so difficult to grasp as the physical relativity of Einstein nor is it as disturbing to our sense of security as the psychological relativity of Jung, which is barely beginning to be understood, but it is perhaps more readily evaded than these.“ (E. Sapir (1968): Selected Writings. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. S. 159)

Benjamin Lee Whorf

Biographie:

*24. April 1897 in Winthrop, Massachusetts. Whorf studierte ab 1914 „Chemical Engineering“ am Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 1918 Bachelor of Science. 1919 Beginn seiner sehr erfolgreichen Tätigkeit bei der Hartford Fire Insurance Company.

1926 begann sich Whorf mit Indianersprachen zu beschäftigen. 1930 Feldforschungen zum Nahuatl in Mexiko.

1931 Studium bei Edward Sapir an der Universität Yale.

1932 Beginn der Befragung eines in New York lebenden Native Speakers von Hopi. 1938 kurze Zeit auf der Hopi-Reservation in Arizona. In seinen letzten Lebensjahren setzte er trotz eines Krebsleidens seine linguistische Tätigkeit fort.

Am 26. Juli 1941 starb Whorf.

Leitmotive:

• Das Weltbild der Hopi-Indianer ist von dem in der „westlichen“ Zivilisation völlig verschieden. Gemeinsame Maßstäbe sind nicht möglich. (zB. Keine Zeit in Hopi)

• Das Verhalten wird unbewußt von der Sprache gesteuert. (vgl. Sapir)

• Whorf vertritt den sprachlichen Pluralismus (alle Sprachen sind vollwertig)

„Western culture has made, through language, a provisional analysis of reality and, without correctives, holds resolutely to that analysis as final. The only correctives lie in all those other tongues which by aeons of independent evolution have arrived at different, but equally logical, provisional analyses.“(Whorf 1956: 244)

• Sprachliches Relativitätsprinzip:

  • „We are thus introduced to a new principle of relativity, which holds that all observers are not led by the same physical evidence to the same picture of the universe, unless their linguistic backgrounds are similar, or can in some way be calibrated.“ (Whorf 1956: 214)

  • „The phenomena of language are background phenomena, of which the talkers are unaware or, at the most, very dimly aware [...]. These automatic, involuntary patterns are not the same for all men but are specific for each language and constitute the formalized side of the language, or its "grammar" […]. From this fact proceeds what I have called the "linguistic relativity principle," which means, in informal terms, that users of markedly different grammars are pointed by their grammars toward different types of observations and different evaluations of externally similar acts of observation, and hence are not equivalent as observers but must arrive at somewhat different views of the world.“ (Whorf 1956: 221)