(1) There's not much scholarship to recommend about Whorf's own theories, which have generally been badly misconstrued by later linguists who did not do the careful reading needed to grasp exactly what Whorf himself was claiming. In particular, later linguists have mostly argued for or against what they call the Whorf (or the Sapir-Whorf) hypothesis, which was first formulated by Henry Hoijer. Hoijer wanted to construct a formulation that could be subjected to empirical proof or disproof. He accomplished gthat goal, but only by glossing over the complexity and subtlety of Whiorf's own thought.
Not too many decades ago an Australian scholar named Penny Lee undertook the enormous task of going through almost all of Whorf's writings, unpublished as well as published, to find out the full complexity and subtlety of his thought. Her book is titled The Whorf Theory Complex: A Critical Reconstruction (1996). I havenb;t had time to read through it carefully, but it looks far more worth reading than anything else written about the subject. Be warned: it's not an easy read.
(2) The text of "Language, Mind, and Reality" that I posted on archive.org consists of scans of all the pages of the original article as it was published in two successive issues The Theosophist in 1942, shortly after Whorf's unexpected death on July 26, 1941. I was glad to find copies of those two issues of the magazine for sale some years ago, before the whole magazine had been scanned and put online by IAPSOP [The International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals]. Since Whorf's article was published in an occultist journal, hardly any professional linguist ever read it. So I scanned my copies and put them online.
Eventually, in 1956 John B. Carroll published a volume of Whorf's Selected Writings on linguistics (with the MIT Press). He included "Language, Mind, and Reality" as the last item in this volume, but he was exceptionally careless with the text of that article, changing a few words here and there, and even leaving out a sentence or two (possibly by accident). Carroll's flawed text, however, was the only one that professional linguists had easy access to. (Most professional academics in the 1950s wouldn't have been caught dead reading any occult magazine.) And Carroll never mentioned that he had changed Whorf's own text here and there in his edited selection.
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branchandroot
Re: Q
Date: 2024-03-19 01:17 am (UTC)Not too many decades ago an Australian scholar named Penny Lee undertook the enormous task of going through almost all of Whorf's writings, unpublished as well as published, to find out the full complexity and subtlety of his thought. Her book is titled The Whorf Theory Complex: A Critical Reconstruction (1996). I havenb;t had time to read through it carefully, but it looks far more worth reading than anything else written about the subject. Be warned: it's not an easy read.
(2) The text of "Language, Mind, and Reality" that I posted on archive.org consists of scans of all the pages of the original article as it was published in two successive issues The Theosophist in 1942, shortly after Whorf's unexpected death on July 26, 1941. I was glad to find copies of those two issues of the magazine for sale some years ago, before the whole magazine had been scanned and put online by IAPSOP [The International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals]. Since Whorf's article was published in an occultist journal, hardly any professional linguist ever read it. So I scanned my copies and put them online.
Eventually, in 1956 John B. Carroll published a volume of Whorf's Selected Writings on linguistics (with the MIT Press). He included "Language, Mind, and Reality" as the last item in this volume, but he was exceptionally careless with the text of that article, changing a few words here and there, and even leaving out a sentence or two (possibly by accident). Carroll's flawed text, however, was the only one that professional linguists had easy access to. (Most professional academics in the 1950s wouldn't have been caught dead reading any occult magazine.) And Carroll never mentioned that he had changed Whorf's own text here and there in his edited selection.