Peter Farb: Language

Peter Farb was American academic and writer. Explore interesting quotes on language.
Peter Farb: 184   quotes 0   likes

“The weakness of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis… the impossibility of generalizing about entire cultures and then attributing these generalizations to the language spoken …is to leave numerous facts about culture unexplained.”

Peter Farb

Word Play (1974)
Context: The weakness of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis... the impossibility of generalizing about entire cultures and then attributing these generalizations to the language spoken... is to leave numerous facts about culture unexplained. The great religions of the world... have flourished among diverse peoples who speak languages with sharply different grammars.... Cultures as diverse as the Aztec Empire of Mexico and the Ute hunting bands of the Great Basin spoke very closely related tongues.

“This inseparableness of everything in the world from language has intrigued modern thinkers, most notably Ludwig Wittgenstein”

Peter Farb

Word Play (1974)
Context: This inseparableness of everything in the world from language has intrigued modern thinkers, most notably Ludwig Wittgenstein... If its limits—that is, the precise point at which sense becomes nonsense—could somehow be defined, then speakers would not attempt to express the inexpressible. Therefore, said Wittgenstein, do not put too great a burden upon language. Learn its limitations and try to accommodate yourself to them, for language offers all the reality you can ever hope to know.

World

“The colors that a speaker "sees" often depend very much on the language he speaks”

Peter Farb

Word Play (1974)
Context: The colors that a speaker "sees" often depend very much on the language he speaks, because each language offers its own high-codability color terms.

Color , Dependency

“Until language has made sense of an experience, that experience is meaningless.”

Peter Farb

Word Play (1974)
Context: Thinking is language spoken to oneself. Until language has made sense of an experience, that experience is meaningless.

Sense

“Whorf's brilliant analysis… seemed to support the view that man is a prisoner of his language.”

Peter Farb

Word Play (1974)
Context: About 1932 one of Sapir's students at Yale, Benjamin Lee Whorf drew on Sapir's ideas and began an intensive study of the language of the Hopi Indians of Arizona. Whorf's brilliant analysis... seemed to support the view that man is a prisoner of his language. Whorf emphasized grammar—rather than vocabulary, which had previously intrigued scholars—as an indicator of the way a language can direct a speaker into certain habits of thought.

Support

“Wilhelm von Humboldt… stated that the structure of language expresses the inner life of its speakers: "Man lives with the world about him, principally, indeed exclusively, as language presents it."”

Peter Farb

Word Play (1974)

Life , World

“The victory… was complete except for one final indignity. That was to Americanize the Indian… to exterminate the cultures along with the Indians. …Orders went out from Washington that all male Indians must cut their hair short, even though many Indians believed that long hair had supernatural significance. …Army reinforcements were sent to the reservations to carry out the order, and in some cases Indians had to be shackled before they submitted. …attention of the Americanizers was concentrated on the Indian children, who were snatched from their families and shipped to boarding schools far from their homes… usually … for eight years, during which time they were not permitted to see their parents, relatives, or friends. Anything Indian—dress, language, religious practices, even outlook on life… was uncompromisingly prohibited. …They had suffered psychological death at an early age.”

Peter Farb

Man's Rise to Civilization (1968)

Life , Death , Children , Age

“Experiments… have shown that at least one aspect of human thought—memory—is strongly influenced by language.”

Peter Farb

Word Play (1974)

Memory

“For tens, and perhaps hundreds, of thousands of years, people regarded language as a holy instrument that let them look out upon the world… Only in the last few decades have people suspected that their window on the world has a glass that gives a distorted view.”

Peter Farb

Word Play (1974)

People , World