From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!mcsun!uknet!edcastle!aiai!jeff Tue Nov 26 12:31:35 EST 1991
Article 1508 of comp.ai.philosophy:
Path: newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!mcsun!uknet!edcastle!aiai!jeff
>From: jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Sapir-Whorf
Message-ID: <5684@skye.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 22 Nov 91 21:18:47 GMT
References: <9111041849.AA25746@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Reply-To: jeff@aiai.UUCP (Jeff Dalton)
Organization: AIAI, University of Edinburgh, Scotland
Lines: 14

In article <9111041849.AA25746@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> gunther@wmavm7.vnet.ibm.com ("Mike Gunther") writes:
>
>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.

Readers of this group might be surprised at the vehemence with
which it was employed and defended in eunet.politics a few years
back.  The idea that language and culture might be separated
(eg, that one wouldn't necessarily learn the culture by learning
the language) was not well received, to say the least.  The basic
idea seemed to be that only English speakers who have never
learned a foreign language could possibly hold such a view.


