Radagast revived wrote:Whorf never claims that English has a future tense, he claims that SAE has a future tense - that does not mean that every Indo-European language has a grammatical future tense but that on average they tend to. So WHorf never contradicts Jespersen with whom he was obviously familiar.
True, he's talking about "SAE" in that sentence. What's unclear is why you think this improves Whorf's statement! It means that he's talking about "SAE"
without a single actual example. And if by your hypothesis he would agree with Jespersen's two-tense analysis, it's rather bizarre that he fails to mention that English differs from "SAE" here.
I claimed that Whorf is not talking about grammaticallly marked/morphosyntactic tense, but about conceptualization of time, when he describes SAE as characterized by a past/present/future trichotomy.
Yes, and I showed that this interpretation makes nonsense of Whorf's own statements further on.
It seems entirely unwarranted by the actual text to assume that Whorf thinks that conceptual structures correspond one-to-one with grammatical categories.
I agree; in fact the quote I gave, the one that contradicts your interpretation, shows that Whorf perfectly well understood that grammatical and conceptual categories could differ (and that in such a case he used "tense" to refer to the morphological side).
The examples you give of Whorf "counting" tenses is not an argument against his concept of "tense" being basically conceptual rather than morphological - the point is that the number of distinct concepts vary, not just the grammatical categories.
The thing is, when it comes to exotic language, his methodology is to count the grammatical tenses (or other forms, such as Japanese 'subjects') and deduce the number of conceptual categories. I have doubts about this as a methodology, but no matter-- to be consistent, he should apply the same method to Indo-European languages. But here he applies an entirely different methodology, supplying the concepts apparently by introspection.
(FWIW, though I'm going hard on Whorf for these examples, it doesn't mean that one can't create a 'better Whorfianism'. But that should mean acknowledging where he was unclear or just wrong, not papering over these instances in other to retain his oracular status.)