it's not clear at all. simply having a different language is not a signifier of the structure of the mind.
>If, living outdoors in an
>artic climate, it would be strange if they did not have a
>great many words for snow, just as young American males have
>a great many words for automobiles; people can be expected to
>create large conceptual and vocabulary systems for things they
>are familiar with and deal with every day. I don't see anything
>odd in the 400-words-for-snow theory, whether it's correct or
>not.
it's not that its odd, its quite plainly wrong AND unremarkable. they don't have 400 words for snow. they have as many as other people who live in snowy climates. seattle folks can probably tell us about the many different words for rain. but i'll bet ya they don't have many more than others: shower, mist, drizzle, freezing rain, downpour, spring rain, etc are all common to people who don't live in seattle.
at any rate, as the author points out, that there are different ways to describe your physical or social reality, this is unremarkable. and more interesting to me, is the exotization of the other --because that phenom is what made that urban legend run for as long as it did. it appealed to our desire to believe that the ethnic other is interesting, exotic, fascinating, different, compared to our blandness. (orientalism)
>However, that doesn't reflect much on the Sapir-Whorf
>hypothesis, at least as Whorf expressed it. Whorf
>explicitly stated that he thought syntax, not "lexations"
>(dictionary entries) might be expected to influence thought,
other entries in the links addressed this as well.
>since syntax is much more restrictive than vocabulary. For
>instance, in most Indo-European languages, the speaker is
>compelled to assign activities or states, as expressed in
>verbs, to a particular time domain (tense). Thus, speaking
>English, one must choose from "I am running, I run, I ran,"
>etc., placing the act in a particular time relationship with
>the present moment. This assignment is _required_ in English,
>but not in some other languages (e.g. Chinese). On the other
>hand, we assign a time dimension to nouns only sparingly and
>with some difficulty (_ex-president_, _bride-to-be_).
and this still has nothing to do with essential differences in our mind, but, rather, in differences in the social organization of our lives, differences which structure time and space for us and, so, structure our experience such that time matters. it becomes increasingly, important, for example, to be able to predict events in the future when you're running a business and want to make a reliable profit. categories of past, present, future become important conceptual categories to be able to make short and long term decisions, as do increasingly sophisticated methods of accounting.
so, i'd hesitate to say that these aspects of the english language are somehow essential english as some mysterious thing that simply evolves on its own logic, but evolved in dialectical relation to the social organization of the economy which shapes people's everyday experiences and which demand language to account for and organize that experience.
kelley