Wall Street Journal discovers linguistic relativism

[Rick Barr]

The Economist's Johnson blog tackled this very subject (briefly) a few days
ago. Here is the second of two postings about it:
http://www.economist.com/blogs/johnson/2010/07/language_and_thought_0

-- Rick


On Mon, Jul 26, 2010 at 10:06 AM, Jonathan Lighter
<wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: Wall Street Journal discovers linguistic relativism
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> JHC!  Not Sapir-Whorf and linguistic determinism again!  (It's frequently
> presented as "lexical determinism," which is even more bizarre.)
>
> The "strong interpretation" of S-W - that our understanding of reality is
> in
> thrall to and crippled by the syntax and lexicon of our language - is
> almost
> certainly nonsense. ( Of course, it's also very popular in postmodernist
> circles (cf. recent thread on "transgendered").  If it were true, though,
> accurate translation would be impossible. New "paradigms" (relativity, for
> example, in the context of an Indo-European language like German) would be
> virtually impossible as well. Moreover, it is difficult to imagine any
> nonlinguistic behavior that is dictated by syntax. (It may be that the
> strong interpretation does apply to infants, whose world is necesarily very
> limited.)
>
> The "weak interpretation" is more credible and generally held by linguists:
> the idea that syntax, plus the extent of our personal lexicon, *may*
> influence our expectations and can encourage merely conventional patterns
> of
> thought. Some experimental evidence seems to support this hypothesis.
>
> An effective combination-of-ingredients remedy exists, though, for many of
> the limitations language may impose. The ingredients are "logic " and
> "interaction with other human beings because no two minds are identical."
>
> OTOH, my post of July 31, 2009, seems to show that lexicon alone
> can dramatically determine behavior.
>
> JL
>

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