Book Review: The Language Hoax - John H. McWhorter

This guy's probably right - but there's no need for him to be such a dick about it.

The book is about the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis which, simply put, says that the language people use changes the way they experience the world.

McWhorter thinks this is bullshit - and goes through his reasoning in painstaking detail. It occasionally veers into personal attacks, which I found a little odd.

K. David Harrison has posited that depicting language diversity as marvelously random, as I have, is “stunningly obtuse.” He happens to have done so in a passing critique of an article I wrote in World Affairs. That personal aspect, however, is not my reason for using his position as an example here. For instance, his claim that I think language’s complexities render them unfit for the modern world and that it would be better if all people were monolingual are so contrary to anything I have ever written that the proper response is silence.

Like, dude, is everything OK at home?

Unlike the terrible Atlas of Unusual Languages, this takes the time to go through a variety of languages and explain exactly what makes them different from each other. For example:

In English, time is a distance. In Spanish, it’s an amount or a size. Greek is the same way: you don’t have a long night.

It is also written in a "pop-science" style but, for me, just didn't hit the mark.

If the Pirahã do by chance have counting games that they hid from Everett (“No, no, not in front of him!”) then if all they have to work with is “that there” and “two and a bit” then we can assume that the game barely qualifies as what we think of as counting (“Here’s one banana, Junior, and now, heeeeere’s something like two bananas! Yaaay!!!!!”).

There are plenty of diversionary sentences:

Languages all accomplish the same things despite how massively different human cultures are. It happens, however, that each language happens to develop its random private obsessions, rather like a little fellow who can name all of the presidents’ wives for no real reason (that was me as a lad).

But, at times, he seems to almost revels in teasing us with with what linguistic trivia he knows - but won't tell us:

The Atsugewi language of California is a great example, extinct as of recently but while it was still spoken, goodness gracious! For example: the sentence for “The soot flowed into the creek” was W’oqhputíc’ta cə ni?ə qáph cə c’uméyi. Breaking it down into its pieces in all of its forbidding unfamiliarity need not detain us here; suffice it to know that within that one sentence is a magnificent fussiness.

For all that, it's hard to argue against the book's central thesis - does the Sapir–Whorf hypothesis actually make a difference?

In the grand scheme of things, of all the ways that we might be interested in how American adolescents think, black or not, or how any Americans of any age think, or how English speakers worldwide think, what insight could this wee discovery about too lend us on issues humanistic, political, societal, artistic, educational, medical, or even psychological?

This is all undercut by McWhorter's repeated reliance on anecdotes and conjecture. There's lots of "it's hard to imagine" and "do we really think" and - bizarrely - "queerly".

That said, I can't argue with its conclusions. Sapir–Whorf doesn't really pass the "is this likely" test. When tested, its effects are incredibly weak. And, when push comes to shove, wouldn't make a meaningful difference even if it were true.

A convincing book which I found to be a bit irritating.