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I was immediately put off when the author trotted out Sapir-Whorf; and, not even apologetically: in its strong form! Everything in the article became suspect. S

• avmich 11y ago
  He later mentions the argument against the strong version of S-W. As for "S-W is not correct", that's interesting - arguments countering it are not known to me.
  • thechao 11y ago
    I'm not going to refer you to Wikipedia. Instead, I'll take the top hit off of google scholar, given the search term for "Sapir Whorf"[1]. The conclusion is in the abstract: """ These findings suggest that the mastery of the English subjunctive is probably quite tangential to counterfactual reasoning in Chinese. In short, the present research yielded no support for the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. """ Every serious study of S-W, results in the same: no evidence. Now, there is -minute- evidence that languages that have very short number words allows students to master the memorization of number sequences easier---the students literally have less information (in terms of phonemes) to memorize. This sort of thing is actually pretty prevalent; but it is not really what most people are thinking of when they discuss S-W. Also, the Himba "study" about green is pretty much debunked. If you get a high-quality monitor, with good ambient lighting, go ahead and ask some colleagues to find the differently-colored green square. They'll do so, just fine, and quite quickly! [1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/0010027783900380 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/00100277839...