Gilbert Zaragoza

Psych 131
12/11/03

Whorf’s doctrine of linguistic determinism is predicated on the belief that

language directly influences the mental process. Typically, when a person thinks about an

abstract idea words are created in his mind. The limitations on what abstract ideas can be

comprehended then depend on the words that are accessible to a given language. For

example compare the observed Hopi language with English. It has been observed that the

Hopi language does not possess any concept of mass versus count nouns, also the Hopi

language does not distinguish between past and present tense.i Instead, temporal

information is divided between events that have really happened to a person and mythical

events, either future or imagined. These disparities in temporal language, in turn affect

the way each speaker mentally represents time. The Hopi view time as something that

travels in a vertical manner, while an English speaker views time as occurring in a linear

fashion. These disparities, in a concept as universal as the movement of time, offer a

strong case in support of linguistic determinism.

There are two levels of what “determinism” actually entails. The strong meaning

suggests that language is thought and vice-versa. This belief requires strong limitations

on the versatility of language and a person’s ability to learn new concepts outside of the

language. This strong determinism is refuted by the observable adaptation of languages to

incorporate new words and ideas. With the rise of the internet, for example, English has

formed new words for things like email and blog. Prior to the internet, English did not

assign any meaning to these words or the concepts they represent, but the versatility of

language allowed these ideas to be incorporated thus arguing against strong determinism.
 The other type of determinism, weak determinism, simply states that language

influences thought, but not that it constrains it entirely. This form is validated by the

observation that if a person does not possess the linguistic vocabulary related to some

idea or topic, that person cannot think coherently about that idea. Even within a single

language this point is clear, after all a person may speak English his entire life and still

may not be able to think clearly about the complexity of a computer program, until he is

introduced to the vocabulary of the computer world. Differences in the vocabulary of

languages and the affect these differences have, is also observed in an attempts at

machine translation. If each language possessed the same ability to express mental

concepts, a translation from one language into another would be always be possible,

however this is not the case. Often during translation concepts are lost or changed

completely, supporting the theory that mental processes are affected by language.
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Handout 17: Language Variation