The Whorf Hypothesis

[David Kaufman]

>>I didn't want to get involved in this discussion, much of which struck me
>>as puerile<<

I apologize for having raised such a “puerile” topic for discussion.  I am
still in the “adolescence” of my career in linguistics and enjoy talking
with more mature-minded experts in the field who will tolerate my
“immaturity” in order to increase my learning curve!  I do find such topics
fascinating, even though they may be considered “worn out” and stale by most
linguists.  I enjoy exploring a whole territory before focusing on any
particular region.  I have learned a lot from this discussion and hope to
learn more about many other things as time goes on.

Dave




Check out my personal web site:
http://dvklinguist.homestead.com/Homepage1.html





>From: Wallace Chafe <chafe at linguistics.ucsb.edu>
>Reply-To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu
>To: siouan at lists.colorado.edu
>Subject: Re: The Whorf Hypothesis
>Date: Wed, 18 Dec 2002 17:54:13 -0800
>
>I didn't want to get involved in this discussion, much of which struck me
>as puerile, but Bob's recent message touched a raw nerve. In my opinion,
>associating recent quite responsible research on this important question
>with post-modernism does it a serious disservice. A couple basic sources
>are Gumperz and Levinson, "Rethinking Linguistic Relativity", and Putz (u
>umlaut) and Verspoor, "Explorations in Linguistic Relativity". In the first
>book, the papers by Slobin and by Bowerman are especially cogent. In the
>second there's even a paper by me. I should also mention the survey by
>Penny Lee, "The Whorf Theory Complex".
>
>I see it like this. Nobody would dispute the observation that languages
>organize sounds differently. Why, then, shouldn't they organize thoughts
>differently as well? The way languages organize thoughts produces semantic
>structures, which I should think anyone who's worked with more than one
>language would agree are different. So as long as one is "thinking for
>speaking" (Slobin's term), one necessarily thinks differently in different
>languages. But not all thought is linguistic, and the remaining question
>ought to be, how much are one's thoughts as a whole influenced by the way
>one organizes them for speaking? Whorf didn't exactly put it that way, and
>surely he at times exaggerated the influence. But sixty years after his
>death we really ought to go beyond arguing about what Whorf really meant
>(he wasn't always consistent), and examining carefully the relation between
>linguistically determined semantic structures and thought in general. The
>MIT bunch doesn't care about such things, they're so hung up on universals,
>but the rest of us certainly should care.
>Wally


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