The Whorf Hypothesis

[Heike Bödeker]

At 21:35 19.12.02 +0000, David Kaufman wrote:
>I do find such topics fascinating, even though they may be considered
>"worn out" and stale by most linguists.

Not necessarily. As also had been pointed out there's touchy subjects and
one learns to avoid them. On the other hand, it indeed is interesting that
many beginners and actually also laypersons find topics such as LRHs
fascinating and seemingly also something like "instinctively plausible".
Despite the fact e.g. also Whorf's analysis of some Nootka example is not
particularly helpful in understanding what the language really is like.
Which is a pity as it makes it difficult to actually correlate such "gut"
assessments to linguistic structures. Perhaps Schulze wasn't completely off
the mark when he once said linguistic relativity is like, imagine a
romantic scene, an English couple will softly whisper something like "I
love you", a French couple "Je t'aime"... now the Chechen example I can't
remember, but the sound of pharyngealized vowels made the whole class laugh.

All the best,

Heike