The hypothesis was never formulated in more than casual terms by the "originators." About as clear as it gets (not actually in either of them) is that grammatical categories of a language affect the native ontology of the speakers: if there are nouns, adjectives and verbs, the speakers see the world as composed of isolated things that have properties and do events; if the only major category is verbs, then the speaker sees the world as as a holistic process, with temporary -- but constantly changing -- eddies. And so on (though it is not clear what is associated with other languages). To make matters somewhat worse, Whorf at least thought he knew how the world really was and therefore implicitly gave
added values to those languages (Hopi, Menominee, i.e., the one he had studied) which gave their speakers the right view (the outer edges of Mahayana -- which is, of course originally set forth in a language with verbs, nouns and adjectives, whatever the native grammarians may say).
From: Luke Bergen <lukeabergen@gmail.com>
To: lojban-list@lojban.org
Sent: Wednesday, August 5, 2009 11:35:21 AM
Subject: [lojban] Re: Experiments in Sapir Whorf
I'm not sure I follow you here. Are you saying that the hypothesis is defined to vaguely to make realistic/specific tests?
- Luke Bergen
On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 12:28 PM, John E Clifford
<kali9putra@yahoo.com> wrote:
Yes, it sorta does in this case, since the claimed effects and claimed causes seem to be very familiar and open to examination and tinkering.
From: Luke Bergen <lukeabergen@gmail.com>Sent: Wednesday, August 5, 2009 9:14:25 AM
Subject: [lojban] Re: Experiments in Sapir Whorf
How does failing to come up with a testable hypothesis make something a crock? It just means we've failed to test it so far. There are a lot of things in the universe that we don't know how to test yet, that doesn't make them "a crock" does it?
- Luke Bergen
On Wed, Aug 5, 2009 at 9:59 AM, John E Clifford
<kali9putra@yahoo.com> wrote:
The negative results of sixty years (more or less, probably more) of trying to formulate a testable hypothesis that is even vaguely related to what Ed and Ben said. The best of these (possibly testable) were either trivially true (the vocab cases) or blatantly false (the strong metaphysical determination cases), and only the latter looked much like what the two actually said. Of the rest, the untestable ones (though it didn't stop people from claiming to try) yielded no significant results (of course) and the testable ones had nought to do with the professor and the claims adjuster (and the results were still generally negative).
From: "MorphemeAddict@wmconnect.com" <MorphemeAddict@wmconnect.com>Sent: Tuesday, August 4, 2009 9:30:22 PM
Subject: [lojban] Re: Experiments in Sapir Whorf
In a message dated 8/3/2009 15:39:24 Eastern Daylight Time, kali9putra@yahoo.com writes:
SWH is about deep level grammatical categories and ontology, not about vocabulary tricks. (It is still a crock, of course, but at least it is an interesting crock).
What evidence do you have that it's a crock?
stevo