Whorf's law

Not to be confused with Sapir–Whorf hypothesis.

Whorf's law is a sound law in Uto-Aztecan linguistics proposed by the linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf. It explains the origin in the Nahuan languages of the phoneme /tɬ/ which is not found in any of the other languages of the Uto-Aztecan family. The existence of /tɬ/ in Nahuatl had puzzled previous linguists and caused Edward Sapir to reconstruct a /tɬ/ phoneme for Proto-Uto-Aztecan based only on evidence from Aztecan. In a 1937 paper published in the journal American Anthropologist, Whorf argued that phoneme was a result of some of the Nahuan or Aztecan languages having undergone a sound change changing the original */t/ to [tɬ] in the position before */a/. The sound law has come to be known as "Whorf's law" and is still considered valid although a more detailed understanding of the precise conditions under which it took place has been developed.

The situation had been obscured by the fact that often, the */a/ had then subsequently been lost or changed to another vowel, making it difficult to realize what had conditioned the change. Because some Nahuan languages have /t/ and others have /tɬ/, Whorf thought that the law had been limited to certain dialects and that the dialects that had /t/ were more conservative. In 1978, Lyle Campbell and Ronald Langacker showed that in fact Whorf's law, had affected all of the Nahuan languages and that some dialects had subsequently changed /tɬ/ to /l/ or back to /t/, but it remains evident that the language went through a /tɬ/ stage.

In 1996, Alexis Manaster Ramer showed that the sound change had in fact also happened before the Proto-Uto-Aztecan high central vowel */ɨ/, not just before */a/. Today, the best known Nahuan language is Nahuatl.

References

• Campbell, Lyle; Langacker, Ronald (1978). "Proto-Aztecan vowels: Part I". International Journal of American Linguistics. 44 (2). Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 85–102. doi:10.1086/465526. OCLC 1753556. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Canger, Una (1988). "Nahuatl dialectology: A survey and some suggestions". International Journal of American Linguistics. 54 (1). Chicago: University of Chicago Press: 28–72. doi:10.1086/466074. OCLC 1753556. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Launey, Michel (1996). "Retour au -tl aztèque". Amerindia. 21: 77–91. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Manaster Ramer, Alexis (1996). "On Whorf's Law and Related Questions of Aztecan Phonology and Etymology". International Journal of American Linguistics. 62 (2): 176–187. doi:10.1086/466285. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)
• Whorf, Benjamin Lee (1937). "The origin of Aztec tl". American Anthropologist. 39 (2): 265–274. doi:10.1525/aa.1937.39.2.02a00070. {{cite journal}}: Invalid |ref=harv (help)