¹ Bibliographies of the voluminous literature may be found in the following works: Kurt Goldstein, Language and language disturbances (New York, 1948); Friedrich Kainz, Psychologie der Sprache (Stuttgart, 1941/43); George A. Miller, Language and communication (New York, 1952); Charles Morris, Signs, language and behavior (New York, 1946); David L. Olmsted, Ethnolinguistics so far (SIL, Occasional papers, No. 2; 1950); N. H. Pronko, Language and psycholinguistics: A review, Psych, bull. 43.189-239 (1946).

This paper was stimulated by research carried on under the auspices of the Values Study in the Laboratory of Social Relation, Harvard University, and the Communications Project at the Center for International Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. I wish to express my thanks to both institutions. I am also greatly indebted to Harry Hoijer for inviting me to participate in the Conference on Ethnolinguistics, held in Chicago during March 1953, where the discussion of some of the problems raised in this paper helped to clarify my thoughts. Finally I gratefully acknowledge the many helpful suggestions made to me by Noam Chomsky, who read two earlier versions of this article.

² Whorf is not alone in making this assumption. Cf. Dorothy D. Lee, Linguistic reflection of Wintu thought, IJAL 10.181-7 (1944) ; Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Les fonctions mentales dans les sociétés inférieurs, Ch. 4 (Paris, 1910); Leo Weisgerber, Adjektivistische und verbale Auffassung der Gesichtsempfindungen, Wörter und Sachen 12.197-226 (1929). The last of these is a representative of what H. Basilius has called Neo-Humboldtian ethnolinguistics, Word 8.95-105 (1952) ; the entire movement is based on the assumption discussed here.

³ Whorf, The relation of habitual thought and behavior to language, Language, culture, and personality 75-93 (Menasha, Wis., 1941).

⁴ Whorf, Languages and logic, The technology review, Vol. 43 (1941).

⁵ Ernst Cassirer, Philosophie der symbolischen Formen: Die Sprache 1.168-9 (Berlin, 1923). Cassirer's source is D. Westermann, Sudansprachen.

⁶ This assertion and the following are based on evidence from experimental psychology. See George Humphrey, Thinking: An introduction to experimental psychology, Chs. 4 and 8 (London, 1951) ; Miller, Language and communication passim.

⁷ Most of Whorf's and Dorthy Lee's working hypotheses are of this nature. Harry Hoijer's Cultural implications of some Navaho linguistic categories, Lg. 27.111-20 (1951), and the tentative connections between various linguistic features and nonlinguistic behavior mentioned by Claude Lévy-Strauss, Language and the analysis of social laws, Amer. anthr. 53.155-63 (1951), also fall into this category of working hypotheses.

⁸ Cf. Sapir, The grammarian and his language, Selected writings of Edward Sapir 153-4 (Berkeley, 1949). It is assumed here that any vocabulary can be expanded.

⁹ The use of the term vehicle of communication does not mean that I deny (or even take a position toward) the epistemological contention that language and knowledge are indistinguishable. I am merely referring to the communicative capacities of language.

¹⁰ John B. Carroll, Report and recommendations of the Inter-disciplinary Summer Seminar in Psychology and Linguistics 8 (Ithaca, N. Y., 1951).

¹¹ These conditions, aspects, and relationships are primarily but not exclusively expressed by grammatical categories.

¹² For a modern definition of this term see Robert Leeper, Cognitive processes, Handbook of experimental psychology 730-57 (ed. S. S. Stevens; New York, 1951).

¹³ What I am proposing to do here is not in principle different from what Whorf (for instance) occasionally suggested. The difference between Whorf and me is rather in our respective attempts to substantiate our hypotheses.

¹⁴ Cf. Ralph M. Evans, An introduction to color 230 (New York, 1948).

¹⁵ This is a specific question within a problem that has been posed by many other investigators. Sapir said: ‘Language is a ... self-contained, creative symbolic organization, which not only refers to experience largely acquired without its help, but actually defines experience for us by reason of its formal completeness and because of our unconscious projection of its implicit expectations into the field of experience.‘ (Conceptual categories in primitive languages, quoted by I. J. Lee, The language of wisdom and folly 265 [New York, 1949].) Sapir makes the same point in The status of linguistics as a science, Selected writings 162.

¹⁶ The following is an outline of research in progress carried on by Roger Brown of Harvard University and myself. The details of the project will be published as soon as the data are fully assembled.

¹⁷ If there is no well defined name for a color, it is reasonable to assume that linguistic communication about it is poor.

¹⁸ Again space does not permit me to cite all the evidence in support of this assertion. The interested reader may inspect the colors used ; they are produced by the Munsell Color Co., a scientific research organization. Most of them are published in the two volumes of the Munsell book of colors (Baltimore, 1921 and 1942). Codeable colors have the notation 2.5 PB/7/6, 5 PB/4/10, 10 P/3/10, 5 RP/6/10, 5 YR/3/4, 3 GY/7.5/11.2, 7.5 GY/3/4, 2.5 G/5/8, 5 Y/8/12, 7.5 G/8/4, 2.5 R/7/8. Non-codeable colors have the notation 10 BG/6/6, 8.5 B/3/6.8, 10 PB/5/10, 2.5 R/5/10, 8 RP/3.4/12.1, 7.5 R/8/4, 2.5 Y/7/10, 7.5 Y/6/8, 7.5 YR/5/8, 5 P/8/4, 5 BG/3/6. Colorimetrie and psycho-physical data on these colors are published in Journal of the Optical Society of America 30.573-645.

¹⁹ Codeability of colors does not seem to be linked to cultural importance or preference for these colors. The reader may convince himself of this by trying to name all the colors in his environment. He will notice that colors for which he has a 'good* name occur much less frequently than colors which are difficult to label unambiguously.

²⁰ Such tests are described in K. Koffka, Principles of Gestalt psychology, Chs. 11-3 (New York, 1935).

²¹ The test colors were exposed four at a time, for two seconds. After a waiting period of thirty seconds, subjects had to find the test colors on a color chart of 120 colors. All colors were identified by numbers. The subjects used in this experiment were not required to use any color name whatever.