🚀 go-pugleaf

David Phillip Oster (oster@netcom.com) writes:
|   And yet, I have heard the Whorfian hypothesis to be the case with my own
|   ears. I once was visiting with a group of young people who were devote
|   Baptists. The conversation turned to sex, and they began telling each other
|   dirty jokes. Only one problem: their moral code forbid them from naming the
|   sex act. They used a euphemism: "Getting Married" Unless you knew the code,
|   this lead to some pretty strange dirty jokes.
|   
|   The problem: this caused them to conflate the concepts of sexual intercourse
|   and getting married. Oh, sure, they knew the difference intellectually, but
|   in the heat of the moment, when a quick response was necessary, they'd combine
|   the two. If you asked one of them to have sex with you, that was treated as
|   both an invitation to intercourse, and an invitation to marriage.

But if the Whorfian hypothesis were true, they would not be able to
differentiate between the two concepts - it would go much deeper than
simply confusing them "when a quick response was necessary". 

|   
|   Similarly, one of the experiments given as proof of the Whorfian hypothesis
|   is: different cultures divide the spectrum at different places. If you ask
|   someone of a culture that doesn't have a name for an in-between-shade as
|   opposed to its near neighbors, for a name of the in-between-shade, it takes
|   them a meausurably longer time to construct a phrase like "sort of
|   yellowish-purple" than it does for them to begin to say "magenta" Oh, they
|   can construct the phrase, but when hit with a novel situation that they
|   don't have a word for, they go slower.

Yup, that's one of the few experiments which has shown any evidence
for the Whorf hypothesis.  Problem is, it's incredibly weak.  A strong
form of the hypothesis would predict that people couldn't tell two
shades apart at all if they didn't have separate words for them.

Again, i recommend Pinker's _The Language Instinct_ - he's a much
better writer than i, and took more time to explain it than i care to
take.

- Cindy Kandolf, certified language mechanic, mamma flodnak
 cindy@nvg.unit.no                      Trondheim, Norway
 My home page, with link to the Bilingual Families Web page:
        http://www.nvg.unit.no/~cindy/