Re: OT: Helen Keller & Whorf-Sapir
| From: | Dirk Elzinga <dirk_elzinga@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, August 18, 2004, 18:24 |
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On Aug 14, 2004, at 7:27 AM, Jörg Rhiemeier wrote:
> Hallo!
>
> On Thu, 12 Aug 2004 20:33:00 -0700,
> Samuel Rivier <samuelriv@...> wrote:
>
>> Or my own hypothesis, which I held throughout my
>> Cultural Linguistics class, much to my professor's
>> dismay, which is that Sapir and Whorf are dumbasses
>> and language has little to no influence on thought.
>
> 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.)
I would still not call Whorf a "dumbass". He provided two grammatical
sketches for the _Linguistic Structures of Native America_, edited by
Harry Hoijer; one for Toreva Hopi and one for Milpa Alta Nahuatl. Both
sketches are still useful to this day (they were written in the
1930s-40s). You don't do that level of scholarly work if you're a
"dumbass."
Dirk
--
Dirk Elzinga
Dirk_Elzinga@byu.edu
"Speech is human, silence is divine, yet also brutish and dead;
therefore we must learn both arts." - Thomas Carlyle