>2. Different languages represent reality in
>different ways.
>
>--No. The old Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Right up there with the ether theory
>in physics, just more hardy.
Sapir-Whorf inspired research is a flourishing, growth industry in linguistic anthropology.
And despite key differences between Whorf and Sapir, and between their approaches and and contemporary ones, all would consider the simple comment, that different languages represent reality differently, a no-brainer.
Also I'd clarify (after reading other posts on this thread -- sorry if it was already been pointed out) that while Sapir and Whorf did stress the systematic incommensurability of languages -- incommensurable in the sense that a major shifting in coordinates of experience is required to pass from one language to another -- both also stressed that such shifting was well within the abilities of all humans. That's a basic tenet of their Boasian anthropology: the psychic unity of humanity. What's relative is the interpretation of sensible experience in conceptual terms, not the process of thinking.
At present, far from going the way of Ether, Whorf's most basic ideas have had something of a renaissance in recent decades. Since Chicago is one of the centers of this growing sub-discipline thre are lots of its practitioners in my midst. One especially influential neo-Whorfian approach was first set out here in the seventies and eighties, by Michael Silverstein, in a reformulation that draws upon Peirce, Jakobson, Volosinov and others.
My impression is that what's new about these contemporary Whorfian projects is a broadening beyond their earlier focus on semantics (propositional functions of language), to a greater emphasis on pragmatics (indexical functions in the enaction of discourse contexts). Though even in this respect the project takes much of its inspiration from Whorf's earlier observations. (btw, this current emphasis on performativity is very different than the "performative speech acts" stuff associated with Austin, Searle, etc.)
The contemporary pragmatic broadening also meets up with another old tenet of the Boasian tradition, the relative inaccessibility of linguistic categories to conscious awareness.
So what you get is a typology of grammatical categories in terms of their accessibility to conscious awareness. The basic idea is that because semantic (more accessible) and pragmatic (in general, less accessible) meanings will be parcelled out among grammatical categories in different ways in different languages, there will be correspondingly different sources and patterns of cognitive appropriation, and different systems of conscious ideologizing about the world, "nature," and the construal of experience.
So part of this project is new, e.g., categorizing linguistic structure/meaning in terms of likelihood or likely directions of cognitive appropriation. But its guiding idea, that lingustic features impact concepts about how the world works, is very Whorfian.
Note that these main emphases -- levels of conscious awareness, stress on pragmatics, on linkages between meaning and indexicality -- coincide nicely with some longstanding Marxist concerns. Many involved in the foregoing projects draw heavily upon Marxian reflection on practical consciousness, its stress on concrete social relations at play all-the-way-down (as opposed, say, to Saussurean-inspired semiology), and similar stuff that Marx for one thought it important to think about.
Maureen