ABSTRACT
In her recent account of the history of the concept of ‘linguistic relativity’ in American anthropological linguistics Regna Darnell noted the following about the so-called ‘Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’:
Oral tradition identifies Sapir as the crucial catalyst in what would eventually become the Whorf hypothesis of linguistic relativity. Moreover, the sometime addition of Sapir’s name implies that Whorf merely elaborated, perhaps exaggerated to the point of caricature, the ideas of his prestigious mentor. (Darnell 2001:176)
While I do not quite know by Darnell meant by ‘oral tradition’—perhaps she has had in mind the kind of stories that first-year students in anthropology or linguistics are being told by their instructors, it could be said that much of what we read in textbooks is pretty close to her depiction, too.
