Sapir Whorf hypothesis in action or thereabouts

Sapir Whorf hypothesis in action or thereabouts

Sapir Whorf hypothesis is a theory developed by Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf that states that the structure of a language determines or greatly influences the modes of thought and behavior characteristic of the culture in which it is spoken. I believe it follows that if the structure is ‘deficient’ in some sense,  the thought and behaviour is also correspondingly ‘deficient’.  Since Language is a great differentiator along cultural as well as linguistic lines, one can also safely extrapolate that the cultures that are deficient, sufficient or rich in language may also be respectively and accordingly so.
I believe it should be explained that, the experiences common to a cultural group are the foundations on which their shared values, beliefs and assumptions (in short, culture) are built, generates appropriate sounds, inflections, phonemes, morphemes, semantics, syntax and all the other units that are used to describe language and that is why language and culture as so inseparable and is a more complete argument. Language does not originate from a vacuum as is implied by the Sapir Whorf hypothesis as stated above.

It follows therefore that by analysing the language and perhaps arriving at the unique expressions of a linguistic group one may reverse trace the original experiences of that group. Since we cannot usually go back in time, it may remain a matter of conjecture and a plausible one, nevertheless is a good intellectual pursuit if one is inclined so.  So did my argument of ‘barabar’ for ‘right?’ or ‘okay?’ of the Gujaratis, while the original in Hindi means ‘equal’. Ok for equal I argued is an expression of the underlying industrial, commercial instinct of the Gujarati of something of equal value given in return and therefore a fair transaction and therefore ok. This is more in line with discourse analysis with some extrapolations.

I witnessed two expressions of Mallus which indicated the thought process in Hindi which happened to be the local language from childhood, but when forced to speak to listeners who were predominantly Mallu it gave away the structure of the original Hindi though in Malayalam it made less sense or grammatically no sense. The expression was ‘varaan koduthilla’ which is no expression in Malayalam but a translation of ‘aane nahi diya’ in which made perfect sense in Hindi and meant ‘did not allow entry’.

Similar was another boy’s expression ‘patti kadichu karega’ in Malayalam and Hindi mix which was a translation of the Hindi ‘kutha kaatta karega’ which means ‘the dog will bite’ or more specifically ‘the dog will do the bite’ in Hindi but no such expression existed in Malayalam or English. Can we extrapolate therefore that in spite of being born to Malayali parents, because of the upbringing  in the North, these children are more likely North Indian culturally?  More later......

Resident's Associations

The article I wrote for the Eastern Villas Residents' Association 10th anniversary souvenir -2014

Residents’ Associations:

A sociological perspective

Human sociological history can be traced  generally from the tribal through the agricultural, the industrial and the post industrial.

Affiliations to the larger group to which one belongs assumes different forms in different stages of growth of a society.  Man is a social animal and being in a community is a fundamental human attribute. At various stages of human social development, the nature of communities have  undergone changes as well.  The group is the unit of social analysis, and  community is the unit of sociological analysis, just as the fundamental unit of psychological analysis is the individual.

In the most primitive of human communities, groups of families aggregated into clan and clans into tribes. Affiliations of kith and kin were centred on the clan. The in-group and the out-group were decided by whether one belonged to this tribe or that.

As groups of tribes moved in search of livelihood, mostly on hunting gathering mode, these became grouped and regrouped into newer clans and newer affiliations. Over a period of time these developed into newer tribes and so on. At the most primitive, these affiliations were decided by birth into a certain clan and tribe. Marital relations were usually across families and sometimes across clans, but were least across tribes.

In earliest societies, the social identity was around the belongingness to the tribe. At  a certain stage as people settled, the geographic also took importance and the village name assumed a certain force in social identity. This may have coincided with greater specialization in society with people taking up more functionally segmented occupations. Thus the family  plus the village became the demarcators of identity. Sometimes, village names are used as part of names even today.

A house name indicated clan or family to which one belonged. Village life and roles were centred on agriculture, the main occupation of the majority. Industrial development brought about large migrations to the urban from the rural. Alongside there was a shift in roles centred on specializations of occupations. Unlike the village and the earlier tribal existence, this mode is characterized by the aggregation of different people of various occupations and specializations in close proximity.

This would mean that though there is physical proximity, there is very little of psychological proximity due to requirements of specialization. The village farmer’s neighbour was the village farmer, who shared the same concerns of his farmer neighbour. The urban occupational specialist’s neighbour is a specialist of another occupation in a different work domain,  which means his day to day mental transitions and concerns are different from his neighbours’. The main concerns also have transited from the physical to the conceptual.

Much of the urban insensitivity to the proximate can be attributed to the above fact. One’s daily occupational concerns are spatially distal and temporally different. Urban society can therefore be an agglomeration only in the physical sense but not in the social sense, at least not in the same social sense of a pre-industrial one. In a post-industrial information technology enabled society, the physical proximity is even replaced by technological possibility. Proximity itself takes a different meaning due to technological possibility. One’s cousin who is physically proximate has less in common than one’s technologically proximate colleague or acquaintance.  Like mindedness is sought and found across portals than across the neighbourly fence.

Residents Associations are a certain attempt to bring in the benefits of an earlier kind of neighbourliness to a post agricultural society. The behaviour requirements of such a society demand a certain subordination of narrow interests in favour of a more actively co-operative contribution of one’s talents and abilities for the common good. The attitudes and values of minimal interference daily, but maximum support in times of need and all for common good, are foundations to the smooth functioning of a residential association. Unproblematizing the problematic, rather than problematizing the unproblematic and resolution through discussion and consensus are reflective of a mature community in our democratic tradition.  Issues that can be resolved internally need be resolved internally through mediation if need be. Such a mature community when replicated in all locales can give rise to a strong larger community that is our Nation and ultimately a peaceful world. In an interconnected world where problems can spill over to the detriment of all, standing for the benefit of the whole community is not an option, but a necessity.