Franz Boas
Linguistics

Boas also contributed greatly to the foundation of linguistics as a science in the United States. He published many descriptive studies of Native American languages, wrote on theoretical difficulties in classifying languages, and laid out a research program for studying the relations between language and culture which his students such as Edward Sapir, Paul Rivet, and Alfred Kroeber followed.

His 1889 article "On Alternating Sounds", however, made a singular contribution to the methodology of both linguistics and cultural anthropology. It is a response to a paper presented in 1888 by Daniel Garrison Brinton, at the time a professor of American linguistics and archaeology at the University of Pennsylvania. Brinton observed that in the spoken languages of many Native Americans, certain sounds regularly alternated. Brinton argued that this pervasive inconsistency was a sign of linguistic and evolutionary inferiority.

Boas had heard similar phonetic shifts during his research in Baffin Island and in the Pacific Northwest. Nevertheless, he argued that "alternating sounds" is not at all a feature of Native American languages—indeed, he argued, they do not really exist. Rather than take alternating sounds as objective proof of different stages in cultural evolution, Boas considered them in terms of his longstanding interest in the subjective perception of objective physical phenomena. He also considered his earlier critique of evolutionary museum displays. There, he pointed out that two things (artifacts of material culture) that appear to be similar may, in fact, be quite different. In this article, he raises the possibility that two things (sounds) that appear to be different may, in fact, be the same.

In short, he shifted attention to the perception of different sounds. Boas begins by raising an empirical question: when people describe one sound in different ways, is it because they cannot perceive the difference, or might there be another reason? He immediately establishes that he is not concerned with cases involving perceptual deficit—the aural equivalent of color-blindness. He points out that the question of people who describe one sound in different ways is comparable to that of people who describe different sounds in one way. This is crucial for research in descriptive linguistics: when studying a new language, how are we to note the pronunciation of different words? (In this point, Boas anticipates and lays the groundwork for the distinction between phonemics and phonetics.) People may pronounce a word in a variety of ways and still recognize that they are using the same word. The issue, then, is not "that such sensations are not recognized in their individuality" (in other words, people recognize differences in pronunciations); rather, it is that sounds "are classified according to their similarity" (in other words, that people classify a variety of perceived sounds into one category). A comparable visual example would involve words for colors. The English word green can be used to refer to a variety of shades, hues, and tints. But there are some languages that have no word for green. In such cases, people might classify what we would call green as either yellow or blue. This is not an example of color-blindness—people can perceive differences in color, but they categorize similar colors in a different way than English speakers.

Boas applied these principles to his studies of Inuit languages. Researchers have reported a variety of spellings for a given word. In the past, researchers have interpreted this data in a number of ways—it could indicate local variations in the pronunciation of a word, or it could indicate different dialects. Boas argues an alternative explanation: that the difference is not in how Inuit pronounce the word, but rather in how English-speaking scholars perceive the pronunciation of the word. It is not that English speakers are physically incapable of perceiving the sound in question; rather, the phonetic system of English cannot accommodate the perceived sound.

Although Boas was making a very specific contribution to the methods of descriptive linguistics, his ultimate point is far reaching: observer bias need not be personal, it can be cultural. In other words, the perceptual categories of Western researchers may systematically cause a Westerner to misperceive or to fail to perceive entirely a meaningful element in another culture. As in his critique of Otis Mason's museum displays, Boas demonstrated that what appeared to be evidence of cultural evolution was really the consequence of unscientific methods and a reflection of Westerners' beliefs about their own cultural superiority. This point provides the methodological foundation for Boas's cultural relativism: elements of a culture are meaningful in that culture's terms, even if they may be meaningless (or take on a radically different meaning) in another culture.
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