Re: Wofir aka The Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis

At 1:52 pm -0500 7/9/00, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
[....]
>Wofir isn't really a word.
No, it's not - it's not even a well-formed portmanteau word either.  Why,
e.g. drop the {h} in spelling?  Wouldn't a portmanteauization (there's a
lovely word!!) of 'Whorf-Sapir' give 'Whorpir' or 'Whopir'?

>In my experience, it's always been called the Sapir-Whorf
>hypothesis or the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis,
I've known it either as the "Whorfian hypothesis" or "Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis" if one thinks that Sapir was as equally important as Whorf in
formulating the hypothesis.

[snip]
>The short answer is:  yes, it's difficult to prove one way or the other.
>The linguistic
>establishment's reasons for rejecting it seem due to the fact that it's really
>easy to use it for racist propaganda, which is not at all what it was
>intended for.
Which would certainly put me off defending it.  But altho I can see I could
be used that way (but then racists will twist anuthing to their perverted
view point IME), I think there are other valid reasons for rejecting it, at
least in the "strong" form expounded by Whorf.  My sig. suggests one reason
for rejecting it   :)

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At 1:25 pm -0600 7/9/00, dirk elzinga wrote:
[....]
>
>No, the work on Hopi was Whorf's. Besides the grammatical sketch in
>_Linguistic Structures of Native America_ (H. Hoijer, ed), there are a
>handful of articles collected in _Language, Thought, and Reality_
>(J.B. Carroll, ed). Sapir did help Whorf find a Hopi consultant and
>secured funding for him, but the analytical work was Whorf's.
...and I thought it was more specifically Whorf who developed the
(Sapir)-Whorf(ian) hypothesis.

>I'm not sure who exactly coined the term "Standard Average European",
Is there such a thing?  I guess we're talking about a modal average here
(not mean or median  :)
But as Europe streches from the Atlantic to the Urals, from the Arctic to
the Med, does the term have much meaning?

Just curious?
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My understanding is that Loglan was originally developed from 1955 onwards
by James Cooke Brown (no relation!) to test the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and
that its offspring lojban was developed for the same purpose (tho I know
lojban, and presumably Loglan, can be - and are - used for other purposes).


As Loglan has been around for more than 30 years and lojban been around for
some years (10 or more AFAIK), are there any results from their testing of
the hypothesis?

Again - I'm just curious.

Ray.



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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
                   [J.G. Hamann 1760]
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