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Article 1188 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: gunther@wmavm7.vnet.ibm.com ("Mike Gunther")
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Sapir-Whorf
Message-ID: <9111041849.AA25746@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 4 Nov 91 18:48:00 GMT
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Reference: <430@trwacs.UUCP>

Harry Erwin:
>The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is essentially that the words of a language and
>their meanings (syntax and semantics) influence strongly the paradigms
>used by the speakers of the language. My experience is just that...
...
>... I speak Russian and
>German, and I have learned that there are concepts in certain fields where
>the way those languages express them are much more natural than in
>English.

>At a deeper level, the grammatical forms (and even the pronunciation) of
>languages organize the way the speakers think. In Russian, aspect is
>regarded as an important category for verbs. Perfective verbs describe an
>action as completed, while imperfective verbs describe an action as
>on-going. There are subcategories here, too--actions that are repeated and
>others that are intermittant. In Proto-Indo-European, there was _no_
>tense, instead voice (active and medio-passive) and aspect were primary. A
>language that has no future tense is difficult to use to describe causal
>relationships.


I had thought that Sapir-Whorf was quite "past tense."  A current
linguistics text (Akmajian, Demers, and Harnish) doesn't even mention
it.  I think at bottom it may not be testable, which may be why
linguists lost interest in it.

A language and its culture grow up together;  so much of any culture
is expressed linguistically that it is very hard to disentangle the
two.  In learning another language we inevitably pick up the culture
which is expressed through the medium of that language.  What seems
to be lacking is the ability to identify and predict the effects of
language and culture separately.


>...                          Studies of cultural evolution seem to
>suggest that Sapir-Whorf is correct.

Reference?


