Politics & Power Quote by Edward Sapir

Sapir is doing something quietly subversive here: refusing to let “richness” be treated as the trump card that ends the debate. By calling inferiority “supposed” and then brushing the complaint aside with “of course,” he exposes a familiar rhetorical move: critics smuggle in a romantic standard - language as a sediment of history, homeland, and inherited nuance - and then declare engineered tongues bankrupt by comparison. Sapir’s point is not that constructed languages rival French or Chinese in cultural echoes; it’s that this is the wrong metric for judging the project.

The intent is methodological. A national language accrues connotations the way a city accrues graffiti: by long, messy use, by accidents of literature, class conflict, jokes, and trauma. A constructed language begins life sterilized. To fault it for lacking the dirt is to misunderstand its aim. Sapir, a scientist of language and culture, is policing categories: evaluate tools by what they’re built to do. If the goal is precision, neutrality, ease of acquisition, or cross-border communication, then “connotative richness” becomes a feature you can postpone, cultivate, or even constrain.

The subtext also needles nationalism. Calling a language “national” often means granting it moral legitimacy, as if authenticity requires a flag. Sapir pushes back: human design doesn’t automatically cheapen a system. In the interwar era’s churn of internationalism, migration, and mass communication, he’s defending the possibility that planned language could be a pragmatic technology - not a counterfeit culture - and that cultural depth is something communities make, not something bloodlines confer.