🚀 go-pugleaf

Howard Stateman (howards@sec.sel.sony.com) writes:
|   >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 
|   language, especially languages from different language groups, will tell you 
|   that language shapes the way you think.

I'm bilingual and i'm also a linguist, and i will not tell you that
"language shapes the way you think".  I will instead tell you that
this is an old myth, which sounds logical until you actually think
about it.  Ask yourself this: If language shapes the way we think, how
does anyone ever learn a second language?  How did people ever create
those languages?

One of the most readable debunkings i've read of this myth is to be
found in _The Language Instinct_, by Stephen Pinker - which i warmly
recommend to anyone who is interested in language.  I'm not as good a
writer as Pinker, but i can try to explain it: culture shapes
language.  If a culture needs to make subtle distinctions in a certain
area, the people belonging to that culture will invent the words and
grammatical structures needed to convey those distinctions.  Whorf had
it almost exactly backward - the thoughts come first, the language
changes to match.

Before accusing someone of living in a cave, it is wise to make sure
they really do have their facts wrong.  Ross Thompson was exactly
right: the so-called Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (which Sapir never had
anything to do with) has essentially been discredited among linguists.  

- 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/