The Whorf Hypothesis

[rlarson at unlnotes01.unl.edu]

> 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.

Or how about OP "Xta'widhe"?  ;-)

We had a young Omaha student going into heart surgery
this semester, who gleefully memorized the phrase:

      Xta'widhe, noNde'skidhe-haaa'!
      (I love you, sweetheart!)

delivered with vampirically mortuary tone, just to
freak out her doctors when she woke up!

Rory