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You mean the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is wrong. Which people like me (originally trained as a linguist) have been saying for years.
by tokenadult 10y ago
You mean the strong version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is wrong. Which people like me (originally trained as a linguist) have been saying for years.
- bitL 10y agoMaybe that hypothesis is wrong when your brain is young and as it starts losing its elasticity, it becomes valid?
- WorldMaker 10y agoThe Strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis seems obviously deficient because you can certainly think about things your language has no words (concepts and feelings, etc). It's the Weak Sapir-Whorf hypothesis that is much more interesting and still at debate. Certainly things that are easier to describe in a language would seem easier to reason with. Our brains leverage language as a tool to map concepts and the concepts we can name are easier to grasp and utilize than the ones we cannot. The Weak hypothesis does seem like it would be affected by brain elasticity. Keeping concepts close to hand in your language would presumably keep them easier to conceptualize as your brain plasticizes.
- corecoder 10y agoWho does defend the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis? I've never seen anybody defending it, while I've seen lots of people arguing against it; the first name that comes to mind is Steven Pinker.