Re: Wofir aka The Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis

At 1:25 PM -0600 9/7/00, dirk elzinga wrote:
>On Thu, 7 Sep 2000, Thomas R. Wier 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.
He also wrote some articles for the Handbook of American Indian
Languages, if I remember.

One of the things that was cool about linguistics early in this
century was the varied backgrounds of linguists -- it was in some
ways a wide-open field. I'm sorry to see how the demise of
structuralist linguistic dogma (sometimes, but not always, replaced
by chomskian dogma) has also led to the historical mistreatment of
pioneers of the field.

Whorf was also interested in the occult, and I have also seen that
interest used to discredit him on occasion.

I've always been sympathetic to Sapir-Whorf, though I tend to believe
in the weaker forms of it, as the strong forms seem to make changes
in the semantics of languages rather more difficult than they appear
to be.

I disagree with the tendency of some linguists to dismiss certain
arguments about language out of hand.For instance, Jacques Guy has
argued convincingly and absolutely without any success against the
assertion that all languages are equally complex. However, we live in
a world where people still believe that some languages are so
impoverished that they "don't have a grammar," and then use those
assertions to justify the destruction of cultures and peoples. It's
hard to assert even moderate positions that will be taken up and
abused by extremists.

I don't think any of us would argue that all conlangs are equally
complex, and perhaps its a  mercy that we don't have to worry about
such issues, or (non-fictional) language politics [apologies due to
auxlangers here, as they do have such worries].

   -- David
--
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David Durand
david@dynamicDiagrams.com
Chief Technical Officer
Dynamic Diagrams
http://www.dynamicDiagrams.com/