No, no, no, no, no, no...
This may be common sense, but it's wrong.
I mentioned the ether theory in physics as an analogue to Sapir-Whorf, because it was a reasonable theory with some seeming explanatory power, employed by highly intelligent and honest scientists, that was blown out of the water by a subsequent elegant, ground-breaking theory. The difference is that, while no physicist would argue for the ether theory as if Einstein never happened, people still feel free to drag out Sapir-Whorf as if Chomsky never happened.
You just can't theorize this way anymore without refuting Chomsky (and good luck to you). And I write "Chomsky," but I could say "modern linguistics," since his basic arguments are so well-accepted. (Although there are still dissenters, and much friction within the dominant Chomksyan paradigm, wherein Chomsky's latest theories may themselves be a minority view: I'm not close enough to the field to know for sure.)
A well-written (if in my view too breezy and, in places, dangerously speculative) popularization of Chomskyan liguistics is the already-mentioned "The Language Instinct" by Pinker. Available most anywhere. Chomsky himself is tough going, but three of his more expansive and readable pieces are his famous (if scandously non-anthologized) refutation of B. F. Skinner's "Verbal behavior" and the behaviorist paradigm in general (which "progressive" anthropological-based theories of language like Sapir-Whorf inevitably fall into, Chomsky has argued), in the journal "Language," vol. 33, no. 1, 1959; and his then-unfashionable defense of Descartes, "Cartesian Linguistics." Both available at big libraries only, I think. And maybe the best for introductory purposes, a series of lectures he gave in Managua in the 80s (he lectured on linguistics in the day, politics at night, I believe). I forget the title, I think "On Thought and Language." MIT Press, I think still in print.
Chomsky's actually making bookstore appearances for his latest linguistics tome (I forget the name), so maybe he's trying to get the word out more.
----Original Message Follows---- From: Gordon Fitch <gcf at panix.com> Reply-To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com Subject: Re: debunking Sapir Whorf Date: Tue, 5 Dec 2000 10:37:30 -0500
kelley:
> At 02:08 PM 12/4/00 -0500, Gregory Geboski wrote:
>
> --No. The old Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Right up there with the ether theory
> in physics, just more hardy.
>
> for debunking sapir-whorf and the great eskimo language hoax:
> http://cpsr.org/cpsr/lists/rre/Eskimo_words_for_snow
> http://www.urbanlegends.com/language/eskimo_words_for_snow_derby.html
>
>
> (Note for readers of afu, to which this is now being crossposted for the
> first time, for obvious
> reasons. Bill has been defending his position - that Eskimos have a
> megaboss number of words for snow because their minds work differently than
> thse of English speakers - with vigour and enthusiasm scarcely diminished
> by the fact that he apparently has no idea of what he's talking about. ...
It is clear that the minds of Inuit work somewhat differently from those of English-speakers, or they would speak English; language is a mental production. 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.
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, 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_). One can see how this situation might lead to a difference in the way the referents were thought of; those assigned to nouns might be thought of as eternal and unchanging, whereas those assigned to verbs would seem, maybe, fluid and uncertain -- yet the assigment is often pretty arbitrary. "White" is a an adjective in English, but a sort of verb in Japanese. It could be a noun -- we could have _the_white_, if we hung out with Plato _to_leukon_, an eternal thing lending its whiteness-quality to mere worldly objects, something far different from a transitory sensation of the appearance of the snow on Mt. Fujiyama.
I don't know that there's any objective evidence for Whorf's hypothesis, but it's certainly not absurd on its face, and it does not concern how many words the Inuit have for snow.
In any case, I doubt if the language one speaks would affect one's ability to do mathematics very much, since mathematics does not work with way any natural language does, and it often deals with non-linguistic intuitions which are cast into symbolic form only with considerable difficulty.
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