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After stumbling on Benjamin Lee Whorf's affiliation with the Theosophical Society, I read two articles that he contributed to the MIT Technology Review in 1940: "Science and Linguistics" in the April issue, and "Linguistics as an Exact Science" in the December issue. Something in the second article surprised me.

Whorf gives a formal account of English syllable structure in terms of what he calls "pattern symbolics", presenting the term and a sketch of the associated formalism as if they were standard linguistic theory, like "Maxwell's equations" in physics. But I've never heard the phrase "pattern symbolics" before, and web search turns up no examples other than this article. And the formalism seems similarly idiosyncratic.

Here's Figure 1, Whorf's "Structural formula of the monosyllabic word in English (standard midwestern American)":

He introduces the formula this way:

To strive at higher mathematical formulas for linguistic meaning while knowing nothing correctly of the shirt-sleeve rudiments of language is to court disaster. Physics does not begin with atomic structures and cosmic rays, but with motions of ordinary gross physical objects and symbolic (mathematical) expressions for these movements. Linguistics likewise does not begin with meaning nor with the structure of logical propositions, but with the obligatory patterns made by the gross audible sounds of a given language and with certain symbolic expressions of its own for these patterns. Out of these relatively simple terms dealing with gross sound patterning are evolved the higher analytical procedures of the science, just as out of the simple experiments and mathematics concerning falling and sliding blocks of wood is evolved all the higher mathematics of physics up into quantum theory. Even the facts of sound patterning are none too simple. But they illustrate the unconscious, obligatory, background phenomena of talking as nothing else can.

For instance, the structural formula for words of one syllable in the English language (Fig. 1) looks rather complicated; yet for a linguistic pattern it is rather simple. In the English-speaking world, every child between the ages of two and five is engaged in learning the pattern expressed by this formula, among many other formula.s By the time the child is six, the formula has become ingrained and automatic; even the little nonsense words the child makes up conform to it, exploring its possibilities but venturing not a jot beyond them. At an early age the formula become for the child what it is for the adult; no sequence of sounds that deviates from it can even be articulated without the greatest difficulty. New words like "blurb," nonsense words like Lewis Carroll's "mome raths," combinations intended to suggest languages of savages or animal cries, like "glub" and "squonk" — all come out of the mold of this formula. When the youth begin to learn a foreign language, he unconsciously tries to construct the syllable according to this formula. Of course it won't work; the foreign words are built to a formula of their own.

He gives a plug for the value of linguistic theory in language instruction:

Usually the student has a terrible time. Not even knowing that a formula is back of all the trouble, he think his difficulty is his own fault. The frustrations and inhibitions thus set up at the start constantly block his attempts to use foreign tongues. Or else he even hears by the formula, so that the English combinations that he makes sound to him like real French, for instance. Then he suffers less inhibition and may bescome what i called a "fluent" speaker of French — bad French!

If, however, he is so fortunate as to have his elementary French taught by a theoretic linguist, he first has the patterns of the English formula explained in such a way that they become semi-conscious, with the result that they lose the binding power over him which custom has given them, though they remain automatic as far as English is concerned. Then he acquires the French patterns without inner opposition, and the time for attaining command of the language is cut to a fraction (see Fig. 2). To be sure, probably no elementary French is ever taught in this way — at least not in public institutions. Years of time and millions of dollars' worth of wasted educational effort could be saved by the adoption of such methods, but men with the grounding in theoretic linguistics are as yet far too few and are chiefly in the higher institutions.

And then we come to his explanation of the formula, which starts this way:

Let us examine the formula for the English monoyllabic word. It look mathematical, but it isn't. It is an exprssion of pattern symbolics, an analytical method that grows out of linguistics and bear to linguistics a relation not unlike that of higher mathematics to physics. With such pattern formulas various operations can be performed, just as mathematical expressions can be added, multiplied, and otherwise operated with; only the operations here are not addition, multiplication, and so on, but are meanings that apply to linguistic contexts. From these operations conclusions can be drawn and experimental attacks directed intelligently at the really crucial point in the welter of data presented by the language under investigation. Usually the linguist does not need to manipulate th formula on paper but simply perform the symbolic operations in his mind and then says: "The paradigm of Class A verb can't have been reported right by the previous investigator"; or "Well, well this language must have alternating stress, though I couldn't hear them at first"; or "Funny, but d and l must be variants of the same sound in this language," and so on. Then he investigates by experimenting on a native informant and finds that the conclusion is justified. Pattern-symbolic expressions are exact, as mathematic is, but are not quantitative. They do not refer ultimately to number and dimension, as mathematics does, but to pattern and structure. Nor are they to be confused with theory of groups or with symbolic logic, though they may be in some ways akin.

Returning to the formula, the simplest part of it is the eighth term (the terms are numbered underneath), consisting of a V between plus signs. This mesan that every English word contains a vowel (not true of all languages). As the V is unqualified by other symbols, any one of the Englissh vowels can occur in the monosyllabic word (not true of all syllables of the polysllabic English word). Next we turn to the first term, which is a zero and which means that the vowel may be preceded by nothing; the word may begin with a vowel — a structure impossible in many languages. The commas between the terms mean "or." The second term is C minus a long-tailed n. This means that a word can begin with any single English consonant except one — the one linguists designate by a long-tailed n, which is the sound we commonly write ng, as in "hang." This ng sound is common at the end of English words but never occurs at the beginnings. In many languages, such as Hopi, Eskimo, or Samoan, it is a common beginning for a word. Our patterns set up a terrific resistance to articulation of these foreign words beginning with ng, but as soon as the mechanism of producing ng has been explained and we learn that our inability has been due to a habitual pattern, we can place the ng wherever we will and can pronounce these words with the greatest of ease. The letterse in th formula thus are not always equivalent to the letters by which we express our words in ordinary spelling but are unequivocal symbols such as a linguist would assign to the sounds in a regular and scientific system of spelling.

You can read the rest for yourself — and maybe translate the Figure 1 formula into a regular expression. My point is not to work through the details of Whorf's system of "pattern symbolics", but to give you the basis for asking the question that I asked myself: Where does Whorf's "pattern symbolics" come from? And where does it go after 1940?

There were certainly formal linguistic systems available in 1940 for expressing things like syllable-structure patterns, for example in the work of Leonard Bloomfield. But as far as I can tell, none of them used the term "pattern symbolics", or used the particular notation exemplified by Whorf's Figure 1. Perhaps a commenter will be able to enlighten us further.

Update — Penny Lee's 1996 book The Whorf theory complex: A critical reconstruction seems to be well worth reading. But nowhere in its 324 pages does the phrase "pattern symbolics" occur, at least according to Google Books search. There's just a brief footnote allusion on p. 39:

Whorf said that just as one is unaware of the intricate laws of phonemic pat­terning with which we comply whenever we speak or even make up nonsense words in our own language (p.254)⁸, so in the selection of words, the "personal mind" is also under sway of "a far more intellectual mind which […] can systematize and mathematize on a scale and scope that no mathematician of the schools ever remotely approached" .

⁸ Whorf was very well aware of these intricate phonetic patterns, having developed a model of the English monosyllable "which was at that time an original synthesis of facts about English sound clusters" (Carroll 1956:32) and (Whorf 1940d[LTR]:220-232). According to Darnell (1995:p.c), Sapir also "played with nonsense words pretty seriously for a stretch during his Ottawa years". She considers it quite possible that his Yale students would have done class exercises of this kind as a means of encouraging them to explore the intricacy of their own unconscious pattern systems.

 

November 26, 2023 @ 6:15 pm · Filed by Mark Liberman under Linguistic history, Linguistics as a discipline

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