On leaving Sapir out, it’s always been my understanding that Sapir left himself out. From my reading of his work, I got the impression that he was committed to a much less sophisticated and subtle version of linguistic relativity than Whorf’s, and when the evidence failed to support that “strong” version, Sapir more or less bailed on the project. The best work, in my opinion, was done by Whorf, anyway, and when Whorf died, linguistic relativity went into a kind of stasis, with no one around to defend or advance it until it’s “rediscovery” in the last decade or so.

One of us is misremembering Whorf’s argument – I’m pretty sure his argument involved the point that there _are_ no mass nouns in Hopi… yes…:

(what, I can’t use HTML tags even after signing in?)

[begin quote - Whorf]
Hopi is again different. It has a formally distinguished class of nouns. But this class contains no formal subclass of mass nouns. All nouns have an individual sense and both singular and plural forms. Nouns translating most nearly our mass nouns still refer to vague bodies or vaguely bounded extents. They imply indefiniteness, but not lack, of outline and size. In specific statements, “water” means one certain mass or quantity of water, not what we call “the substance water.” Generality of statement is conveyed through the verb or predicator, not the noun. Since nouns are individual already, they are not individualized by either type-bodies or names of containers, if there is no special need to emphasize shape or container. The noun itself implies a suitable type-body or container. One says, not “a glass of water” but ka yi “a water,” not “a pool of water” but pa ha,4 not “a dish of cornflower” but namni “a (quantity of) cornflower,” not “a piece of meat” but sikwi “a meat.” The language has neither need for nor analogies on which to build the concept of existence as a duality of formless item and form. It deals with formlessness through other symbols than nouns.
[end quote]

Not that I disagree with the general tone of your post. I’m not sure that Whorf was right about any particular subject, but the popular reduction of his position to “language determines thought” is lamentable – he was certainly a good deal more subtle than that.

Sorry, I have HTML disabled right now, but everything will be changing when I switch to WordPress tonight. It is tough dealing with SPAM in the comments, but I don’t want to disable them altogether. WordPress should make things easier (since I won’t have to rebuild after I make changes).