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From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Subject: In defense of Whorf
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Date: Fri, 17 Mar 1995 17:29:03 GMT
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In article <3jkd1c$d21@unogate.unocal.com> stgprao@sugarland.unocal.COM (Richard Ottolini) writes:
>In article <3jgqon$gke@usenet.INS.CWRU.Edu>,
>Robert B. Bushman <fm845@cleveland.Freenet.Edu> wrote:
>> It seems from this that not only is language a learned
>>trait, but is also a fundamental part of that which makes us
>>human, likewise, I have read of several studies comparing and
>>contrasting the logic structures of people raised with different
>>native tongues.  The gist of these studies was that people
>>raised in different societies think differently as a result
>>of their learned languages.  
>
>This is the old Whorf school of linguistic philosophy now
>generally discounted.  THe favorite piece of folklore from
>this philosophy was that Eskimos have 30 words for snow.
>When somone examined this more closely, it was found that people
>of any language who work with snow, e.g. American skiers,
>have most of those 30 terms in their vocabulary, e.g. sleet, powder,
>crunch.

That's a bit of the "discredited" thinking in itself: that
where snow is important, there will be lots of words for it.

>Another folklore is that Chinese are timeless because their verbs
>don't have tenses.  First, there are some minor tenses.  Second,
>through other mechanisms it no more ambiguous than English when
>an action has occured and its state of completion is.

I haven't heard that one.  It sounds like what's sometimes said
of Hopi.  The one I heard of Chinese is that the Chinese have trouble
with counterfactuals.  It's mentioned in Pinker's book somewhere.

Anyway, the following may be of interest.

From The Guardian (a UK newspaper) On Line 2 march 1995:

  With respect to Steven Harnad's Off Line (OnLine, 23 February), poor
  old Benjamin Whorf has received rather too much slagging off over the
  years.  Harnad would be well advised, before repeating allegations
  about Whorf, to read what the man actually said.  Did Whorf really 
  think the Hopi "lack a sense of the future", on account of the
  absence of a future tense, as such, in their language?

  In "The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behaviour to Language", he
  writes: "Verbs have no `tenses' like ours, but have validity forms
  (modes), that yield even greater precision of speech.  The validity
  forms denote that the speaker (not the subject) reports the situation
  (answering to our past and present) or that he expects it (answering
  to our future) or that he makes a nomic statement (answering to our
  nomic present)."

  The paper "Some Verbal Categories of Hopi" (Language, 1938) also
  shows a more subtle and deeper understanding than that attributed
  to him by Harnad.

  John Boyd
  Whitehaven, Cumbria.

-- jd
