“The ‘doctrine of untranslatability'” (17)
Berthoff’s “Sapir and the Two Tasks of Language” (part 4)
“Multiple Names”
“They [the Whorfians] sometimes make the environment identical with the ‘thought world’ of a people and thus claim a direct, one-to-one correspondence between word and whatever segment of the flowing face of nature has been perceptually isolated” (16). **allusion to the aforementioned Apache ‘waterfall’ word analysis? Isn’t this a rehash of The Phaedrus?
Berthoff’s “Sapir and the Two Tasks of Language” (part 3)
“From strong to weak versions”
Berthoff argues that Whorf’s thinking has enjoyed a legacy “precisely because of” the “vagueness” of his terms, and that his admirers have dealt with the “unsupportability” of Whorf’s claims by making them more vague (12).
Berthoff’s “Sapir and the Two Tasks of Language” (part 2)
“Whorf’s logical weakness”
“Avoiding abstract terms was one way, Whorf thought, to avoid verbal problems; stressing activities over states was another” (8).