Random Linguistic Question [Palfrey's life]

You're viewing

palfrey's journal
Create a Dreamwidth Account Learn More

Reload page in style: site light

←

→

I have a question for anyone more linguistically minded that's been kicking around my head for a while. This is regards Sapir-Whorf, and got triggered by the conversation with a linguist a couple of weeks ago (hey, she was cute...). Anyways, here's the question: I'm confused about what Sapir-Whorf is meant to be. The version I was arguing about on Boxing Day involved the idea that if you don't have a word for something, then you can't express the concept. Where as the Wikipedia entry and my own random memories seems to think that it's more about your language shaping how you categorise the world, and influencing your thought patterns in that way instead.

So, anyone here know any better? Anyone actually read any of the darn papers on this sort of thing?

Mood::

thoughtful

Music:: Add N To X - Add Insult To Injury - Kingdom of Shades (Exorcist)

←

→

There are 7 comments on this entry. (Reply.)

the one you were arguing about was the strong Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the wikipedia entry concentrates more on the weaker version as thats the version more widely accepted.

[link] [reply]

oh and a belated happy birthday :-)

[link] [parent] [reply]

the idea that if you don't have a word for something, then you can't express the concept

Out of interest, which side of the arguement were you on?

[link] [reply]

Surely the fact that people of completely different languages manage to communicate, and seem to fall in love occasionally (or is that just films?!), suggests communication is not necessarily reliant on language :)

[link] [parent] [reply]

To a certain extent, that's just films, and that's more a matter of finding a way to communicate *enough things*, not everything. These two theoretical people that fall in love have therefore managed to communicate enough bits and pieces in order to do all of that, but strong Sapir-Whorf (if you don't have the words, you can't talk about it) would say that there are certain concepts that may exist in the languages of one of them that doesn't exist at all in the other's language, and therefore they'll never be able to talk about that subject (which may be unimportant, but hey).

OTOH, if you run with the theoretical scenario a bit, they're probably sort of making up a pidgin/signed language of their own in order to be able to communicate, and it may be possible to add concepts to that pidgin language that would have been entirely unknown to one of the two in their original tongue, by going the long route around and explaining the concept, until the unknowing person properly groks (I love that word...) the concept.

[link] [parent] [reply]

The major topic was regarding the differences between spoken and written language, and noting that certain concepts may be expressable in spoken form, but if they take more than a certain amount of time to explain then they never are (amount being dependant on context, quite small in the party situation), and so IMHO this deficiency of spoken language may result in a reduction of the number of concepts that can be expressed at all, resulting in a limited form of strong Sapir-Whorf. That was my side.

I wasn't actually drunk, but I'd still count the whole thing under random drunken conversations, which scarily enough with me often turn out to be about something sensible in the morning.

[link] [parent] [reply]

There are actually two parts to the sapir-whorf hypothesis.

Originally, it was intended as hardass linguistic determinism. For example, if you knew the word nigger, you were a racist whether you wanted to be or not.

That turned out to be politically undesirable and scintifically incorrect, so it was revised to merely linguistic relativity, where your language influences the way you view the world. For example, many eastern cultures talk about time as a circle, while we in the west talk about it as a line.

[link] [reply]

Sun	Mon	Tue	Wed	Thu	Fri	Sat
1	2	3	4	5	6	7
8	9	10	11	12	13	14
15	16	17	18	19	20	21
22 1	23	24	25	26	27	28

Palfrey's life

Random Linguistic Question

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

February