The Sapir Whorf hypothesis and Armenian women's rights

[ara87]

The Sapir Whorf hypothesis basically states that a peoples language shape the way they think.

An example would be that the Hopi tribe of the native Americans did not dwell on the future much b/c their language did not make much use of a future tense.

So I was thinking Armenian unlike other languages, has unisex pronouns, i.e. he/she is one word, as is his/hers. Our nouns and phrases are also genderless as well.

Now I'm not saying that men and women are 100% equal or had been, but unlike other cultures around us we generally had better treatment of women than our neighbors.

* Unlike many of other cultures we were not polygamous.
* One of our main prechristian deities was Anahit, a woman,
* Armenian woman of the upperclasses were generally educated,
* Before the Arab and Ottoman Empires all Armenian women had rights to property and education.
* The first written book of Armenian law written in the 5th century stated that men and women had equal rights

So do you think that the Armenian language shapped the way Armenians viewed women's rights? Or do you think that the way Armenians thought about women's rights shapped the language?

[Merv]

Re: The Sapir Whorf hypothesis and Armenian women's rights

The Sapir Whorf hypothesis basically states that a peoples language shape the way they think.

An example would be that the Hopi tribe of the native Americans did not dwell on the future much b/c their language did not make much use of a future tense.

So I was thinking Armenian unlike other languages, has unisex pronouns, i.e. he/she is one word, as is his/hers. Our nouns and phrases are also genderless as well.

Now I'm not saying that men and women are 100% equal or had been, but unlike other cultures around us we generally had better treatment of women than our neighbors.

* Unlike many of other cultures we were not polygamous.
* One of our main prechristian deities was Anahit, a woman,
* Armenian woman of the upperclasses were generally educated,
* Before the Arab and Ottoman Empires all Armenian women had rights to property and education.
* The first written book of Armenian law written in the 5th century stated that men and women had equal rights

So do you think that the Armenian language shapped the way Armenians viewed women's rights? Or do you think that the way Armenians thought about women's rights shapped the language?

Interesting hypothesis. However, it's not necessarily true. I know that some of the Indic languages do not make a distinction in gender for the male/female, and many of these societies are highly patriarchal, also.

Also, I think all the Indo-European languages are structurally pretty similar and may be contrasted, in Europe, to say Finno-Ugric, which are radically different. However, we do not observe that Hungarians are a bizzarre aberration in their environment. They are really quite similar culturally and civilizationally (not to mention appearance-wise) to their Indo-European speaking neighbors. Same goes with Finns and Basques.

On the other hand, we have ethnic groups whose languages are relatively closely related, such as Chinese and Burmese, yet culturally they may be more similar to groups that speak unrelated languages. For instance, many would argue that Koreans and Japanese are culturally closer to Chinese than Burmese, and that Burmese are culturally closer to Thais and Cambodians. However, Korean and Japanese are completely unrelated to Chinese (and maybe also unrelated to each other), and Thai and Cambodian are similarly unrelated to each other and to Burmese.

So, culture, religion, race, etc. may play a bigger role here than language structure.

[jgk3]

Re: The Sapir Whorf hypothesis and Armenian women's rights

The Sapir Whorf hypothesis basically states that a peoples language shape the way they think.

An example would be that the Hopi tribe of the native Americans did not dwell on the future much b/c their language did not make much use of a future tense.

So I was thinking Armenian unlike other languages, has unisex pronouns, i.e. he/she is one word, as is his/hers. Our nouns and phrases are also genderless as well.

Now I'm not saying that men and women are 100% equal or had been, but unlike other cultures around us we generally had better treatment of women than our neighbors.

* Unlike many of other cultures we were not polygamous.
* One of our main prechristian deities was Anahit, a woman,
* Armenian woman of the upperclasses were generally educated,
* Before the Arab and Ottoman Empires all Armenian women had rights to property and education.
* The first written book of Armenian law written in the 5th century stated that men and women had equal rights

So do you think that the Armenian language shapped the way Armenians viewed women's rights? Or do you think that the way Armenians thought about women's rights shapped the language?

This is total bs. The languages that lack future tense simply use other strategies to indicate future time without conjugation, for example: "He shoots the ball, 3 moons from now. You hunger for food sometime later? You come with me to eat food later?"

These structures are perfectly grammatical in their languages and they do not fail to indicate some time that is yet to come (the future) in conjunction with their ideas or moods expressed linguistically. As you can see, so long as there is a noun phrase that is semantically associated with the future, you don't really need conjugation to specify the time. The conjugation in languages that have future tense simply impliment the semantic notion of future-ness as some kind of agreement marker with another specified noun phrase of future connotation, such as "later", "three moons from now", or will stand in place of such a future noun phrase so that you don't need to say "blah blah blah later" or "blah blah blah three moons from now" each time you wanted to specify futurehood.

And if you think about it, in English we heavily depend on the verbs: to will, to go, etc... in order to conjugate in the so called future tense. In reality, these verbs are just strategies that are used in the English language to indicate the future. You can make a fairly plausible sounding theory about how these verbs were selected, as opposed to ones like "to love" or "to fly" for the marker of future tense specification for their semantic qualities. For example, to will, in its rudimentary context, indicates volition, and this semantic quality seems compatible with the concept of goal setting, which concerns acts and achievements taken and realized in a time that will come later. So, "I will paint the floor"'s future tense originates from this semantic quality of volition, a goal setting act.

And then, for the verb to go, like in "I'm going to paint the floor", it can likewise be analyzed as something not inherently of future connotation, but of traveling from one point to another. In the context of a verb, it can be semantically understood as shifting from a states of not painting the floor to painting the floor. So this "going to" is also understood as either changing states which would be inherently associated with time dilation from the present moment in which the sentence has been uttered by the speaker, or can simply be understood as yet another statement of volition, not made explicit.

So now.... for Armenian, we have a rich vocabulary for nouns that indicate male or female-ness, we just don't use markers of gender in articles or pronouns, even though the human language faculty allows for this parameter in a spoken language. Now, though this may explain why an Armenian speaker learning a language that uses the equivalent in English for words like "he" or she" to distinguish genders, as opposed to the neuter available in Armenian "ink@", then perhaps can anticipate difficulty in an Armenian being able to use "he" or "she" correctly, unless they're accustomed to a second language that does distinguish genders like this. This is why an Armenian coming from Armenia, knowing Russian, would have no trouble in their competency of using "he" or "she" in English, because these features are familiar to them already through their knowledge of Russian.

Now, why does Armenian not allow the use of "he" or "she" markers? You could say that's an accident of history, maybe there were dialects that did but they died out? We don't know, but how would that make them socially any different from another group of Armenians?

[jgk3]

Re: The Sapir Whorf hypothesis and Armenian women's rights

Oh my... I think I just sounded like Noam Chomsky to a layman.