swsh@ellis.uchicago.edu (Janet M. Swisher) (08/23/90)
In article <2846@aipna.ed.ac.uk> colin@uk.ac.ed.cstr (Colin Matheson) writes: >Perhaps it's true that the act of "compressing" abstractions into concepts >represented by single lexical items or phrases has a qualitative effect on >the kinds of things it is possible to talk about. Thus although it's >probably the case that one can express any particular concept in any >language periphrastically, it might just be that the ability to encapsulate >things in immediately transeferrable units affects the sorts of transfer >that are possible. (Where the transfer is of information between humans.) >Is this version of the Sapir/Whorf stuff part of the original, btw? No, I don't think so. In my understanding, Whorf and Sapir were not interested so much in what "one can express" in a given language, as in the conceptual categories which underlie grammatical ones and which are used by speakers as a guide to experience. Thus, the important thing in their view is not how many words for snow a language has, but what assumptions about things like space, time, form, substance, etc., are implicit in the language's grammatical categories. The controversial part about what they, particularly Whorf, said is the thesis that speakers use these assumptions to guide their habitual beliefs and attitudes, and therefore see them as arising directly from reality, rather than projected on to it. The "Whorfian hypothesis" is often stated as having two forms, a "hard" version (language determines thought) and a "soft" version (language and thought are kinda sorta related). From Whorf's writings, it appears that he himself held views more towards the "soft" end of the spectrum. He shied away from saying there is a "correlation", that being too definite a word, prefering to say that it could be shown that there are cases where linguistic categories are in some way connected to cultural ones, even if it's not universally true. However, it seems to me that it would be mighty odd to find a language whose grammar revealed a categorical system that was otherwise unused by speakers, either in individual cognition, or as part of the attendant culture. -- Janet Swisher Internet: swsh@midway.uchicago.edu University of Chicago Phone: (312) 702-7608 Academic and Public Computing P-mail: 1155 E. 60th St. Chicago IL 60637, USA "It's all just stuff, but some stuff is better than other stuff." R. McClamrock