Collaborate. Compose. Innovate. Revise. Rewind.
“Boas and Sapir” (20)
**Franz Boas (The Mind of Primitive Man, 1938; Handbook of American Indian Languages, 1969)
“Sapir was a follower of Boas…Sapir was faithful to the principles and methodology of Boas, though he seems to have been bolder than his master” (20).
“The ‘doctrine of untranslatability'” (17)
“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?
“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).
