As the previous chapter closed by noting, objections to Saussure’s sealing language inside a system come from two directions. The first is the American anthropologist Edward Sapir. Just five years after Saussure’s Course, his 1921 book Language inherits Humboldt’s legacy while cutting away the hierarchy embedded within it.
Speaking is not like walking
Sapir writes:
Walking is an organic, an instinctive, function …; speech is a non-instinctive, acquired, “cultural” function.
(Japanese and English renderings of quotations throughout are ToL’s own.) Move a child to a different society at birth, and they’ll grow up walking much the same way. But their speech will be “completely at variance” with that of their birth environment (article 013). This starting point points quietly away from Aristotle’s assumption that the concept is universal and only the sign’s surface is arbitrary (Chapter 1). For Sapir, it isn’t just the sign’s form that’s acquired and cultural — the whole activity of speaking is a product of culture, through and through.
Humboldt’s legacy, minus the hierarchy
At Sapir’s root is the intuition Humboldt called “language equals worldview.” But alongside that intuition, Humboldt had also ranked language types by a hierarchy — inflectional languages (Sanskrit, Greek, Latin) sitting, in his scheme, at a more developed stage of mind than isolating, agglutinative, or incorporating ones (article 035). Sapir cuts away exactly this ranking, and nothing else.
Race, in the only sense in which it is a respectable biological concept, is supremely indifferent to the history of language and culture.
Slogans like “Slavism,” “Anglo-Saxonism,” or “the Latin genius” are, in Sapir’s words, “sentimental creeds.” Speaking English determines neither a speaker’s race nor the “potential content” of their thought.
As far as linguistic form is concerned, Plato walks with the Macedonian swineherd, Confucius with the head-hunting savage of Assam.
A different road to the same intuition as Saussure
Here another striking convergence appears. Sapir denies any causal link between culture and language, either.
Culture may be defined as what a society does and thinks. Language is a particular how of thought.
Vocabulary reflects culture, and nothing more — “the linguistic student … should never make the mistake of identifying a language with its dictionary.” That line sits remarkably close to Saussure’s own posture when he says “in language there are only differences” (previous chapter). Sapir himself locates language’s essence not in the meaning of individual words but in the form of its sound patterns (article 018). Saussure and Sapir arrive, independently and without reference to each other, at the same intuition: form is not substance — it is difference, it is pattern.
But the two take that same intuition to opposite places. Saussure uses it to seal language inside a system, pushing parole — individual speech, history, society — outside (previous chapter). Sapir uses the very same intuition to push language back into the middle of culture, history, race, and art. Every variable Saussure excluded, Sapir makes his subject instead.
What was carried forward, and what was reversed
What Sapir kept was Humboldt’s core — that language is not instinct but a plurality of worldviews carried by culture. What he cut away was the hierarchy that intuition had come wrapped in — the idea of superior and inferior languages. And arriving, by an independent road, at the same discovery as Saussure — that form is difference — he relocates it not inside a self-contained system, but in the middle of human history and culture.
By the early twentieth century, then, thinking about language had split into two broad currents. On one side, a linguistics that seals language into a system and describes it (Saussure, and the phonology where Sapir himself excelled). On the other, philosophers asking why the very meaning of words refuses to fit inside a position in a system. Where those two currents collide, and split apart again, is the stage for the next chapter.