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From: phr@netcom.com (Paul Rubin)
Subject: Re: Fear of a LOJBAN planet
Message-ID: <phrDKBp3E.2t8@netcom.com>
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References: <4b989o$pi4@casaba.srv.cs.cmu.edu>
Date: Fri, 29 Dec 1995 00:52:25 GMT
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In article <4b989o$pi4@casaba.srv.cs.cmu.edu>,
Henry Robertson <robohen@cs.cmu.edu> wrote:
>The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis was important in linguistics in the 1950's, but 
>interest fell off partially because properly testing it was so difficult. 
>Loglan/Lojban is a new approach to such testing.

The way I heard it, the S/W hypothesis was discredited in the 60's and
70's; it was not so difficult to test after all.  One of the more
important tests was noticing that while English has a dozen or so
names of colors (red, white, purple, pink, beige, etc.) many other
languages have far fewer, sometimes as few as two.  And when a
language has exactly two color names, they are *always* 'black' and
'white'; when it has three, they are 'black', 'white', and 'red'; when
it has four, the first three are 'black', 'white' and 'red' while the
fourth (if I remember correctly) can be either 'blue' or 'green', etc.
Bickerton's work showing the similar syntaxes of Creole languages
was another strong piece of evidence that linguistic experience
is pretty much the same among all kinds of peoples.

Reference: Language, its Structure, Method, and Meaning
authors are Finegan and Besnier, I think.
