🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <4luqmb$jbs@nkosi.well.com>, saunders@well.sf.ca.us (Barbara
Saunders) wrote:

> 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? Anyone who speaks more than one 


> Nope, he's right.  The theory used to be that different languages 
> actually shaped the cognitive process in some "physiological" way.  That 
> is no longer considered the case.

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.

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.
--------- oster@netcom.com ----------
"A man hears what he wants to hear and misremembers the rest."
     -- Paul Simon, ("The Boxer")