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A language isn't just a collection of vocabulary words and grammar rules. A language, beyond being a cultural artifact in and of itself, forms part of the syste
by striking 4y ago
A language isn't just a collection of vocabulary words and grammar rules. A language, beyond being a cultural artifact in and of itself, forms part of the system by which a community processes, discusses, reacts to each other and the world around them. Some folks might be familiar with Spanish's gendering of inanimate objects, but even things like counting on linear counting scales are in play here! https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2610411/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2610411/
The value isn't just "the culture": language is indelible from the way one sees and understands the world. That's what's worth preserving.
- petesergeant 4y agoI’d thought that Sapir-Whorf was largely discredited, but I was wrong: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity I wonder how this applies to languages that have been revived? Do modern-day Hebrew (also a revived language[0]) speakers relate to it and Jewish culture the way that Judean Jews did? Presumably the corpus of existing literature is a significant factor. 0: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revival_of_the_Hebrew_language https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revival_of_the_Hebrew_langua...
- Tagbert 4y agoSapir-Whorf is, at best, a minor effect among many in how we perceive the world.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- tgv 4y agoSapir-Whorf is discredited AFAIK, although some nearly trivial influence of language probably exists. There's almost no support, and the support I've seen suffers from the usual pitfalls (not excluding other causes, bad inferential statistics, etc.). I'm appalled that Wikipedia cites a text book as the proof.