Gordon:
> >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.
kelley:
> it's not clear at all. simply having a different language is not a
> signifier of the structure of the mind.
I said that the minds of Inuit(-speakers) and English-speakers _worked_ differently, not that they had different structures. I don't know what "structure" means in this case, but clearly "work" means "produce, perform" and clearly Inuit utterance is a different performance from English utterance, or we would not be able to distinguish between them.
> >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. ...
I should add that to say a language "has 400 words for snow" doesn't mean anything very precise, since different languages order and segment morphemes differently. A term like "life insurance" is two words in English, one in German, and probably four or five in Chinese -- depending on what you call a word. I hope that's noted on the web sites.
> >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.
I don't think the temporal coding of Indo-Europoean languages has anything to do with business. The Chinese were engaged in business when the IE speakers were still mostly howling in the wilderness and painting themselves blue. As far as I can tell from desultory reading, the evolution and variation of syntax are not well understood -- hence, it is premature to dismiss the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, although one might accuse it of being too vague to be very useful.
It may well be that language variation, like genetic variation, is partly a process of random mutation and partly selective, partly random or contingent survival and extinction.
--
Miles Jackson:
> ...
> Consider, for instance, research on counterfactual reasoning
> (If I had wings, I would be able to fly). Native English speakers
> perform better than native Chinese speakers on these counterfactual
> reasoning tasks. Why? Counterfactuals are very awkward to express
> in Chinese, relatively easy to state in English.
This might be a problem with setting up the tests. I worked last year with a very efficient Chinese woman who had some difficulty speaking English, but evidently no problem in dealing with counterfactuals, since most of the project we were working on was highly counterfactual. If we'd had subjunctives we would have worn them out.
> This is the whole idea of Sapir-Whorf: the language we use makes
> it easier or more difficult to think and perceive the world in a
> certain way. There are other empirical examples; the Eskimo hoax
> aside, Sapir-Whorf is in way better shape as a scientific
> hypothesis than ether theory.
The ether sort of came back in contemporary physics, did it not? -- space turns out to be a kind of stuff, rather than a mere metric, and rather active stuff at that from the QM point of view.
Gregory Geboski:
> ...
> 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.)
The only Chomsky "proof" I'm at all familiar with is his assertion that human beings must have some innate language- learning faculty because they begin producing grammatically correct utterances long before they have received enough information to do so in a _tabula_rasa_ manner. Chomsky's own presentation of it, in the material I read, was not particularly rigorous, however; it appealed to common sense. Maybe there's a more rigorous version? In any case, I don't see why it would necessarily reflect negatively on the Sapir- Whorf hypothesis. It might even reinforce it -- we start with some sort of innate and therefore biologically, physically constituted faculty, almost an organ, as it were, and it would be perfectly reasonable to suppose that its exercise and the responses of the world to that exercise might affect it, just as is the case with our musculature.
Of course this is not an argument in favor of Sapir-Whorf, just an observation that it does not seem to have been "debunked".