Free The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language by Steven Pinker Page B

cannot talk at all except by subscribing to the organization and classification of data which the agreement decrees.
     
    What led Whorf to this radical position? He wrote that the idea first occurred to him in his work as a fire prevention engineer when he was struck by how language led workers to misconstrue dangerous situations. For example, one worker caused a serious explosion by tossing a cigarette into an “empty” drum that in fact was full of gasoline vapor. Another lit a blowtorch near a “pool of water” that was really a basin of decomposing tannery waste, which, far from being “watery,” was releasing inflammable gases. Whorf’s studies of American languages strengthened his conviction. For example, in Apache, It is a dripping spring must be expressed “As water, or springs, whiteness moves downward.” “How utterly unlike our way of thinking!” he wrote.
    But the more you examine Whorf’s arguments, the less sense they make. Take the story about the worker and the “empty” drum. The seeds of disaster supposedly lay in the semantics of empty , which, Whorf claimed, means both “without its usual contents” and “null and void, empty, inert.” The hapless worker, his conception of reality molded by his linguistic categories, did not distinguish between the “drained” and “inert” senses, hence, flick…boom! But wait. Gasoline vapor is invisible. A drum with nothing but vapor in it looks just like a drum with nothing in it at all. Surely this walking catastrophe was fooled by his eyes, not by the English language.
    The example of whiteness moving downward is supposed to show that the Apache mind does not cut up events into distinct objects and actions. Whorf presented many such examples from Native American languages. The Apache equivalent of The boat is grounded on the beach is “It is on the beach pointwise as an event of canoe motion.” He invites people to a feast becomes “He, or somebody, goes for eaters of cooked food.” He cleans a gun with a ramrod is translated as “He directs a hollow moving dry spot by movement of tool.” All this, to be sure, is utterly unlike our way of talking. But do we know that it is utterly unlike our way of thinking?
    As soon as Whorf’s articles appeared, the psycholinguists Eric Lenneberg and Roger Brown pointed out two non sequiturs in his argument. First, Whorf did not actually study any Apaches; it is not clear that he ever met one. His assertions about Apache psychology are based entirely on Apache grammar—making his argument circular. Apaches speak differently, so they must think differently. How do we know that they think differently? Just listen to the way they speak!
    Second, Whorf rendered the sentences as clumsy, word-for-word translations, designed to make the literal meanings seem as odd as possible. But looking at the actual glosses that Whorf provided, I could, with equal grammatical justification, render the first sentence as the mundane “Clear stuff—water—is falling.” Turning the tables, I could take the English sentence “He walks” and render it “As solitary masculinity, leggedness proceeds.” Brown illustrates how strange the German mind must be, according to Whorf’s logic, by reproducing Mark Twain’s own translation of a speech he delivered in flawless German to the Vienna Press Club:
    I am indeed the truest friend of the German language—and not only now, but from long since—yes, before twenty years already…. I would only some changes effect. I would only the language method—the luxurious, elaborate construction compress, the eternal parenthesis suppress, do away with, annihilate; the introduction of more than thirteen subjects in one sentence forbid; the verb so far to the front pull that one it without a telescope discover can. With one word, my gentlemen, I would your beloved language simplify so that, my gentlemen, when you her for prayer need, One her yonder-up understands.
…I might gladly