Whorfing

Rating: 8/10 (5 December 2016)

The key science fiction idea here is quite innovative and, as far as I can tell, unique. It does, however, have a curious linguistic parallel in a theory posed by the linguist Whorf. "Whorf argued that Hopi has "no words, grammatical forms, construction or expressions that refer directly to what we call 'time'", and concluded that the Hopi had "no general notion or intuition of time as a smooth flowing continuum in which everything in the universe proceeds at equal rate, out of a future, through the present, into a past". Whorf used the Hopi concept of time as a primary example of his concept of linguistic relativity, which posits that the way in which individual languages encode information about the world, influences and correlates with the cultural world view of the speakers." (Wikipedia) Too bad the writers did not reference this, but the unique concept that genuine acquisition of a new language changes the way the brain functions is hard to refute.