Re: OT: Helen Keller & Whorf-Sapir
| From: | Jörg Rhiemeier <joerg_rhiemeier@...> |
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| Date: | Saturday, August 14, 2004, 19:44 |
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Hallo!
On Sat, 14 Aug 2004 13:45:14 -0400,
John Cowan <cowan@...> wrote:
> J?rg Rhiemeier scripsit:
>
> > I wouldn't call Sapir a dumbass; Whorf is another matter.
> > (But even about Whorf I better stay silent because I am not
> > a professional linguist, only a bloody amateur.)
>
> So was Whorf, if it comes to that.
I am aware of that. And his "contributions" to linguistics,
as far as I know of them, were pathetic. He is best known for the
"hypothesis" attributed to him, for example, he claimed that the
Hopi had no sense of time because their language doesn't inflect
verbs for tense (do Hopi verbs indeed have no tense marking?
Anyway, Whorf's "conclusion" is pathetically wrong). He also
analyzed some Amerindian language (Nahuatl?) as being
"oligosynthetic", i.e. building all words from only a few dozen
morphemes - an analysis that, of course, turned out to be completely
wrong.
It also strikes me that Sapir and Whorf had very different views
on the existence of "primitive" languages. Sapir put an end to the
myth that languages of "primitive" societies were primitive in their
grammatical structure, while Whorf entertained the notion that they
are.
In sum, Whorf belongs into the same box of crackpots as, for example,
Patrick Ryan (the one with the "Proto-Language"), the proprietor
of lexiline.com or the guy who proposed "Edenics". Sapir was a great
linguist; Whorf was a charlatan.
> Anyhow, the SWH was not
> a hypothesis for S or W in the sense that they were trying to
> prove it; rather, it was simply a background assumption current
> at the time.
And especially popular among the extreme right (and among bad science
fiction writers) until today.
> > I also wouldn't say that language has *no* influence on thought;
>
> The Lojban community uses a "negative" form of the SWH that says
> "Grammar constrains thought". This gets away from the "how many
> words for snow" red herring (how many words do printers have for
> fonts?) and into what W thought of as the core of the matter,
> what is and what is not grammaticalized.
Translating something into a language that grammaticalizes different
categories sometimes can be quite revealing. For example, English
tends to treat agents and instruments alike, allowing for such
sentences as the NRA slogan "Guns don't kill people". If one
translates this into Old Albic, a language that clearly keeps
agents and instruments apart, one gets (using the Modern Low Elvish
word _arcebus_ to translate `gun'):
Na amareri arcebysimi cvestim.
not AOR-kill-3PL:P gun-PL-INST person-PL-OBJ
(There is no way to translate it with _arcebysim_ `guns' as agent,
because the latter is inanimate and has no agentive case at all.)
This is a patent falsehood, as it means `People are not killed
by means of guns', which even the most die-hard gun nerd must
admit to be false. Where is the mistake? It's in the NRA slogan
that has gone into this little translation exercise.
> > I think it does indeed influence thought, but only to some degree.
>
> Nobody except a fanatic thinks otherwise.
Yes.
Greetings,
Jörg.
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