>
>
>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.
okay. can deal with that. sorry for the misinterp of what you'd said.
i can deal with the idea that our language shapes reality or, rather, how we think about our reality, that it limits what we do. but that's the case with *all* social practices and institutions. i have a tone of things going on in my mind right now. but my words can only say so much.
if the claim is that language develops free of influence from social and natural environment, then i have a problem with that.
>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.
no, i'm talking about Weber's study of the rise of capitalism. the conditions were, largely, there for the chinese to have been the place where a proto-capitalist economic organization took off, not all the conditions, but many. nonetheless, various places in the west took off and were more successful and this was about the development of accounting techniques, in part, that aided people in conceptualizing symbolically rational planning of projections based on past, present, future.
i'm guessing that the solidification of and development of complex ways of indicating the passage of time, etc probably coincides with these developments. i have no idea, but i do know that weber argued somewhere that we didn't have an exceptionally good way of accounting for the passage of time until carving time up into more discrete categories become important.
long ago read some good sociological accounts of the sociology of time but for the life of me i couldn't give you more examples of why i think it would be wrong to assume that the structure of our language now indicates that it's always been the case that it's been this way. well, we know that's not true anyway. so i'm not saying much.
but if all the S-W is saying is that language delimits and shapes our ways of thinking, etc, then no-duh -- all human social practices and institutions inevitably and must do so.
kelley