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From: bossed@ERE.UMontreal.CA (Bosse Dominique)
Subject: Re: In defense of Whorf
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References: <3jgqon$gke@usenet.INS.CWRU.Edu> <3jkd1c$d21@unogate.unocal.com> <D5LHwG.KEo@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Date: Sat, 18 Mar 1995 16:13:00 GMT
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Xref: glinda.oz.cs.cmu.edu comp.ai:28251 comp.ai.philosophy:26088 comp.ai.alife:2780

>In article <3jkd1c$d21@unogate.unocal.com> stgprao@sugarland.unocal.COM (Richard Ottolini) writes:
>>In article <3jgqon$gke@usenet.INS.CWRU.Edu>,
>>Robert B. Bushman <fm845@cleveland.Freenet.Edu> wrote:
>>> It seems from this that not only is language a learned
>>>trait, but is also a fundamental part of that which makes us
>>>human, likewise, I have read of several studies comparing and
>>>contrasting the logic structures of people raised with different
>>>native tongues.  The gist of these studies was that people
>>>raised in different societies think differently as a result
>>>of their learned languages.  
>>
>>This is the old Whorf school of linguistic philosophy now
>>generally discounted.  THe favorite piece of folklore from
>>this philosophy was that Eskimos have 30 words for snow.
>>When somone examined this more closely, it was found that people
>>of any language who work with snow, e.g. American skiers,
>>have most of those 30 terms in their vocabulary, e.g. sleet, powder,
>>crunch.

>That's a bit of the "discredited" thinking in itself: that
>where snow is important, there will be lots of words for it.

>>Another folklore is that Chinese are timeless because their verbs
>>don't have tenses.  First, there are some minor tenses.  Second,
>>through other mechanisms it no more ambiguous than English when
>>an action has occured and its state of completion is.

>I haven't heard that one.  It sounds like what's sometimes said
>of Hopi.  The one I heard of Chinese is that the Chinese have trouble
>with counterfactuals.  It's mentioned in Pinker's book somewhere.

>Anyway, the following may be of interest.

>From The Guardian (a UK newspaper) On Line 2 march 1995:

>  With respect to Steven Harnad's Off Line (OnLine, 23 February), poor
>  old Benjamin Whorf has received rather too much slagging off over the
>  years.  Harnad would be well advised, before repeating allegations
>  about Whorf, to read what the man actually said.  Did Whorf really 
>  think the Hopi "lack a sense of the future", on account of the
>  absence of a future tense, as such, in their language?

>  In "The Relation of Habitual Thought and Behaviour to Language", he
>  writes: "Verbs have no `tenses' like ours, but have validity forms
>  (modes), that yield even greater precision of speech.  The validity
>  forms denote that the speaker (not the subject) reports the situation
>  (answering to our past and present) or that he expects it (answering
>  to our future) or that he makes a nomic statement (answering to our
>  nomic present)."

>  The paper "Some Verbal Categories of Hopi" (Language, 1938) also
>  shows a more subtle and deeper understanding than that attributed
>  to him by Harnad.

>  John Boyd
>  Whitehaven, Cumbria.

>-- jd
--
Dominique (fem.) Bosse~

bossed@ere.umontreal.ca
