Re: Wofir aka The Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis

Doug Ball wrote:

> > Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
>
> > On Thu, 7 Sep 2000, Thomas R. Wier wrote:
> >
> >> Yoon Ha Lee wrote:
> >>
> >> > On Wed, 6 Sep 2000, Mike Adams wrote:
> >> >
> >> > > Sort of like the Wofir hypotesis? I know English still has some gender
> >> > > usage, but we seem to have been loosing it over time. It maybe part of
> >> > > our international flavor and popularity?
> >> >
> >> > By Wofir do you mean Whorf-Sapir, or is it something else I haven't heard
> >> > of
> >>
> >> No, that seems to be what he means.
> >
> > For the sake of this ignorant conlanger wannabe <G> could someone briefly
> > summarize Wofir...?  I did a search and found random spam sites,
> > including one in German about some sort of history, but my German's not
> > good enough to attempt to read it.
> >
> Wofir or the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis
Wofir isn't really a word.  In my experience, it's always been called the Sapir-Whorf
hypothesis or the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis, depending on whether you want to emphasize
who was first to argue something like it (Sapir) or whose version was stronger (Whorf).

> (probably better put as the Whorf
> hypothesis, since Sapir wasn't really involved) basically is "the worldview
> of a culture is subtly conditioned by the structure of its language." (This
> according to Language Files, 7th edition, pages 428-30, put out by Ohio
> State's Dept. of Linguistics).  Language Files goes onto say that Benjamin
> Lee Whorf was not a professional linguist, but rather had studied chemical
> engineering at MIT, and had become a fire prevention expert for the Hartford
> Fire Insurance Company.
... although he had been Sapir's student before this.

>  His interest in linguistics apparently came from
> "problems from interpreting the Bible."  Whorf's data came from comparing
> Hopi (and perhaps other Pueblo Indian languages) and the "Standard Average
> European worldview."
Sapir was actually the one who did the work on Hopi, specifically with respect
to its lack of morphological tense.  He was also the one who came up with the
phrase "Standard Average European" and applied it specifically to problems
of our understanding of the world.

> The validity of this Hypothesis is still in question,
> and IMO I would guess that Whorf-Sapir would be difficult to either prove or
> disprove.
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.

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Tom Wier   |     "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero."
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