The Whorf Hypothesis

[Heike Bödeker]

At 15:54 18.12.02 -0600, R. Rankin wrote:
...
>Otherwise we're being self-indulgent to maintain either of the polar views.

Probably. It largely seems about ideological preferences. We just needed to
do the same with culture/thought to be able to substitute the Marxist credo
"Das Sein bestimmt das Bewußtsein." (Being determines consciousness).

>By the way, I once gave a seminar on the work of Edward Sapir and didn't
>find that he really supported linguistic relativity strongly.

My impression, too.

>  So I tend to leave his name out of it and attribute it to Benjamin Lee
> Whorf.

Yeah, there's also more to linguistic relativity hypotheses (e.g. Vïgotskiy
just to mention another classic) or language/"thought" (for which various
Cognitivist approaches would be relevant).


At 22:23 18.12.02 +0000, David Kaufman wrote:
>but I also believe that spoken or written language has to fit into a
>grammatical construct template in order for our thoughts to make sense to
>another speaker of the same language.  How much our grammatical construct
>template limits us in how we think or expresses nuances in different
>languages I'm not sure about.

But what is such a template? I think the notion could very nicely
challenged using various NAN data. E.g. Mithun (Lgs. of Native NA, pp. 152,
163) points to TAM categories not being obligatory (as in fully
grammaticalized) which increased (while an analogous interp to Whorf's Hopi
probably might have suggested otherwise) their pragmatic force.


At 17:21 18.12.02 -0600, R. Rankin wrote:
>I would bet large sums that, if we could go back to Western Europe before
>timepieces became common, that we would find that the speakers of those IE
>languages did everything on "Indian Time" too.

There's still some gradients within Europe, too. Probably this is a very
late thing as in industrialization or something. Machines are most
profitable when running 24/7, so cancel the wage slaves' siesta. And, of
course, now in the Silicon Age (at least of N America) you can drive from a
lovely air-conditioned home in an AC'ed car to an AC'ed bureau to an AC'ed
shopping mall and back again.

All the best,

Heike