🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <4lp126$91u@usenet1.sjc.in.sel.sony.com>,
Howard Stateman <howards@sec.sel.sony.com> wrote:
>>On 22 Apr 1996, Ross Thompson wrote:
>>> Oh, man, won't this myth ever die?  The notion that people's thoughts
>>> are limited by the language that they speak has been debunked for
>>> decades, and yet you still see it being quoted every month or so.  The
>Debunked? What cave have you been living in?

None of your damn business. :)

But more to the point, the points that you make are attachments to
very superficial elements of language.  I assure you, for example,
that if the my cognate for "red wine" is different than Pierre's
cognate for "vin rouge," it has nothing to do with word order or
morphology, but rather on cultural and experiential differences.  The
appeal of the Whorfian(*) hypothesis, as it is known, is very
intuitive, but I think if you look at the linguistics literature, you
will find very little respect for this hypothesis today.

A colleague of mine reminded me of an interesting experiment in this
area.  I report it not to convince you, but rather to amuse:

Apparently early after Whorf made his conjecture, a lot of people felt
that he meant that there was sub-vocalization going on during thought,
and that this vocalization could be detected as micro-contractions of
the vocal apparatus.  To refute this, an exerimenter whose name I
can't remember administered curare to himself to paralyze the entire
musculature.  During that time, he was shown stimuli, and after the
curare wore off, he was able to report what he had seen accurately.
This experiment was powerful enough that the Whorfian hypothesis had
to be reformulated, and caused a small revolution in the thinking of
linguists.

- Ross

(*) No, I'm not some Trek weanie, that really was his name.  As far as
I know, he was an earthling.	- drt
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