On the Relativity Front...

[Alexander Gross]

Since it's closely related to our recent discussions about linguistic
relativity and MT, some of you might want to look at my latest published
paper in Translation Journal, a review that in its print & digital formats
has been in existence since 1987.  Simply go to:

http://accurapid.com/journal/30review2.htm

Taking the form of a book review, this paper nonetheless manages to deal
with a number of serious linguistic issues often excluded from current
discussion, among them:

Recurrent and predictable problems created in all languages when extensive
new technical vocabularies are suddenly imported, problems one would not
expect to encounter if human language were truly "innate" or if "we all have
the same minds" and/or there were a "single mental design underlying" all
languages.

New evidence that MT may be doomed and is still floundering around
helplessly in the same polemics that surrounded it twenty years ago.

New testimony by a medical doctor that the arguments favoring the MIT school
of linguistics are deeply defective .

What may well be the final word in the extended debate about Whorf's
theories and the alleged number of "snow words" in Inuit languages.  It may
well be that neither linguists nor anthropologists can have any deep insight
into these questions, since they are most properly the domain of that branch
of translation studies dealing with terminology.

And miracle of miracles, at least in the context of much "mainstream"
linguistics where so many arguments are advanced either by fiat on high or
by exquisitely meandering, metaphysical, metalinguistical meditations, each
one of these points is actually accompanied by evidence.  What on earth
would happen to this field of study if linguists were required from now on
to follow the recent example set by evidence-based medicine, so that
evidence-based linguistics were suddenly to become the norm?

very best to all!

alex