Politics & Power Quote by Edward Sapir

Sapir is poking a neat hole in a popular vanity: the idea that some languages are naturally cleaner, more logical, more "simple" than others. English and French carry a reputation for elegance and straightforwardness in certain educated circles, "all appearances to the contrary" being his sly reminder that the surface impression is doing most of the work. Look closely, he says, and the so-called simple languages teem with irregularities, idioms, historical debris, and hidden rules that only feel natural because native speakers have been trained by immersion.

The intent is corrective, almost surgical. Sapir is writing as a scientist of language at a moment when linguistics was fighting two bad habits: romantic nationalism (my language expresses my people, therefore it is superior) and the colonial-era assumption that non-European languages are primitive or crude. By claiming the examples could be multiplied "almost without limit" and "apply to all national languages", he’s making a methodological point: complexity isn’t an exception to be hunted down in "advanced" tongues; it’s the baseline condition of human language.

The subtext is democratic in the sharpest sense. If English and French aren’t truly simple, then "simplicity" is exposed as a cultural story, not a linguistic fact. Sapir’s line quietly shifts the conversation from ranking languages to studying them: not which one is best, but how each one organizes meaning, and what kind of historical accidents its speakers have agreed to live with.