Talk:Linguistic relativity/Archive 1

message: I found the following text to be confusing (italics are mine):
: The Neuro-linguistic programming (NLP) analysis of the problem is direct: Most people do some of their thinking by talking to themselves. Most people do some of their thinking by imagining images and other sensory phantasms. To the extent that people think by talking to themselves they are limited by their vocabulary and the structure of their language and their linguistic habits. (However it should also be noted that individuals have idiolects.)
The two sentences starting with "Most" are throwing me.  Are they to imply that most individuals exhibit both behaviors, or that there are two groups of people, some who talk to themselves, and some who imagine images and other sensory phantasms?  (Ultimately, it just reads like the original writer accidentally left in two versions of the same sentence.)
If it's the former (which is more likely), I suggest combining the two sentences thus: "Most people do some of their thinking by talking to themselves, and some of their thinking by imagining images and other sensory phantasms."
If it's the latter, I would suggest: "Some people do some of their thinking by talking to themselves, while others do some of their thinking by imagining images and other sensory phantasms."
Histrion 16:07, 8 Jun 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Confusing text? 

message: I'd work in the idea of "Affordance"- What kinds of statements does a language afford?
http://communitywiki.org/WhatIsAffordance
ie Blogs afford general status updates, spoken to the blue, whereas if you do that on a mailing list, that's generally considered wrong. People DO give status reports in mailing lists, and people DO give messages to specific individuals by way of blog. But the affordance doesn't point that way- blogs afford journals and general messages to the open, and mailing lists afford communications tied to subjects and targeted for the mailing list recipients list.
This is extremely similar to the way different programming languages afford particular uses, and the way that spoken languages afford particular expressions and paths of expression.
:That's a great insight.  Thanks.  I hope someone finds the time to write that into an article somewhere (and doesn't disqualify it as "original research"!). Saucepan 17:36, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Affordance 

message: Some while ago I had read information on differences, not between languages but between language groups; Basque - Spanish, Swedish - Finnish, Where completely different areas of the brain were shown to 'light up' or be used when engaging in language; speaking/reading, as the sole stimuli, when scanning brain activity. I think some mention of this would be pertinent to the article. Nagelfar 06:44, 20 Aug 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Brain Imaging Evidence of language groups inhabiting separate 'mind-space' 

message: The name of this page, with a capital H, was at variance with perhaps several thousand Wikipedia pages titled Smith's law, Smith's theorem, Smith's axiom, etc., etc., with a lower-case letter. Michael Hardy 13:51, 1 Sep 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Why I moved this page

message: There's no doubt that the Inuit have several words for snow. Margaret Visser, in The Way We Are lists 35 snow-related terms. The question is how many Whorf listed (hand-me-down authors have been accused of inflating his original number) and what the implications for Inuit perception and thought.--Chris 04:41, 28 December 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: English and Dutch are Germanic, not Romance. Nelson Ricardo 04:39, 29 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Inuit words for "snow" 

message: Why are there two sections, Fictional presence and Fictional examples? --WhiteDragon 19:16, 1 February 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  2 Fiction Sections 

message: I don't see why Pinker's quotation is included.  First, he is not a major player in the debate, except in terms of popularizing it.  Nobody (that I know of) is citing Pinker's work on this topic (because he hasn't done any).  There are plenty of others on both sides that could be quoted (Paul Kay, Lila Gleitman, for example on the con side).  Second, the Eskimo-words-for-snow question is really not relevant to the discussion.  What people are interested in is systematic properties of the languages, things like how time and space are represented, how the grammar divides up objects in a coarse way.  To the extent that we should care about numbers of words for a given concept, what should matter most is how many words individual people have, not how many a language has.  How relevant would it be that English has thousands of words for species of insects, for example? -- MikeGasser (talk) 23:48, 10 March 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree and have removed it. — mark ✎ 19:44, 12 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Quotations 

message: I removed the section (under "linguistic determinism") that used wine lovers as evidence against the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.  I did so because a) is is unattributed to anyone, let alone a known scholar in the field and thus constitutes (or is at least uncomfortably close to) original research; and b) it is an extremely poor argument against SW hypothesis.  That is, the author claims that the fact that wine lovers have a sophisticated vocabulary to describe wine does not indicate that their minds work any different; however, without further substantiating the claim, it could be counterclaimed that that is precisely what their richer vocabulary indicates: a different and richer experience of wine structured by their richer language in that area.  Of course, I've not added this counterclaim to the primary article (nor would I advise it) as it doesn't really do anything either; it simply engages in the he-said/she-said argumentation of the original statement without really adding anything of substance to the article or the broader academic/philosophical debate.  If the original argument were at least attached to a prominent, scholarly critic, it might be relevent to the subsection in which it was placed, but as it was it had no place in an encyclopedia argument (thus, my removal of it).
Also, while I haven't touched it, I think that the counterclaim to the Peter Gordon argument in the same section should either be removed or rewritten as it likewise flirts with (if it isn't wholly) original research, and like the wine tasters critique is a poor and poorly written argument only making the article more clumsy and amateurish without really addressing the serious criticisms of SWH that have been made by scholars.
:Very good edits and very good points. I couldn't agree more. — mark ✎ 07:23, 15 April 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Wine tasters' reality 

message: I'm wondering why an en-dash is considered "standard" for a hyphenated term?  Themadchopper 16:28, 17 April 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: But is it the most commonly used form? Ardric47 04:07, 16 May 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Wikipedia is inconsistent. The first topics I thought of that had two people's names hyphenated were Henderson-Hasselbalch equation, Taniyama–Shimura theorem, Brønsted-Lowry acid theory, and the Hardy-Weinberg principle. Of these, Taniyama-Shimura uses an en-dash, and the other three use hyphens. Is there a Wikipedia policy on this? --Leapfrog314 02:48, 21 May 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Article name and redirects

message: From what I heard from my anthro professor this theory was widely accepted until the 1960s+ but then it began to decline since it was found that their view that Hopis use passive verbs instead of active wasn't even true, let alone the implications that it made them more communal and less individualistic.  This article is very light on criticism which... seems odd since I was led to believe this hypothesis and its linear causation has been mostly discounted.  Honestly, I don't know and I'm repeating the words of a professor but I figure it is worth bringing up.  (Although, such a monocausal relationship doesn't seem to make too much sense although this article distances the hypothesis from sounding monocausal). gren グレン 22:27, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It is not considered discredited. It is considered to be a non-issue, because one part (the strong formulation) is obviously not true and the other (the weak formulation) obviously is true. Modern linguists work on actually procuring knowledge about the extent to which language inflæuences thought. I reccommend reading Gumperz and Levinsons "Rethingking Linguistic Relativity".
And it is definitely not mono-causal. Whorf thought in terms of interrelations, not monocausal determination. See Penny Lee´s book in the literature list, and read the Dan Alford link that I have added.--Grape1 14:52, 2 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Status 

message: I have removed the following claim from this page:
:However, this criticism may be countered by the argument that in a social context, the inability to express a concept is just as much a constraint as an inability to formulate it. An idea which cannot be expressed cannot be promulgated; cannot be used to build a group consensus; and therefore cannot drive political action - consequently, it has as much practical social impact as if it had never been conceived at all. Therefore, while the strong hypothesis may not hold true for an individual, it remains valid for an entire society.
That may be true, but:
# The "may be countered". "Has been countered by [respectable scholar] [citation here]" would make it Wikipedia material. But, the fact is that it will never be used to counter the Sapir-Whorf axioms by anyone capable of sticking to the subject at hand, and neither indeed can it be used, because...  
# This claim does not counter the claim at hand. The issue is whether individual thought-forms are constrained by language, not whether ideas can be transmitted when the language is insufficient to describe them (which is so obvious nobody would need to point it out).
And so smelleth it like unto OR/opinion to me, and irrelevant OR/opinion at that. -- Collard 17:42, 31 July 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Claim removed 

message: I added some details about experiments investigating non-linguistic thought processes.  These are things I am remembering from some psychology classes I took in college.  Obviously we'll need to add some references; probably any introductory college psychology textbook would be able to confirm that there is a consensus on these topics, and it would hopefully have references to the actual experiments.  It seems to me that this material should really be present in full detail in other articles (for example on the human visual system) and perhaps the amount here could be reduced once that happens.  It would also be nice to find some scholarly references that support my claim that these facts are related to this particular debate. -- Beland 18:24, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Psychological experiments 

message: :However, Pinker does not offer any evidence to substantiate his argument against the Whorfian viewpoint, whereas empirical studies in the fields of linguistics, psychology and anthropological linguistics indicate support.
I've read most or all of Pinker's books, as well as taken his introductory psychology class at MIT.  He spends entire books (for example, Words and Rules) which pick apart the different stages of linguistic input and output processing, based on experiments done by his research group and others.  Part of the point of doing that is that he is essentially saying, "No, it doesn't work like the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis supposes, and actually I can tell you in great detail how it does work."  I'm not close by my bookshelf at the moment, but I think it would be worthwhile to take a second look at his work, and also to take into account his more recent books. -- Beland 18:24, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: It hasn't attracted much attention because the criticisms he puts forward in that book are not new, and most of them are wrong. Anyway, this has nothing to do with SWH. Cadr 19:02, 6 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Pinker

message: I added npov tags to this section as I don't know the code for claiming an article is factually inaccurate. I suspect the majority of these claims are actually untrue and if noone can provide a citation in a reasonable timeframe I suggest someone delete them. Also, the "empirical evidence" section is largely irrelevant, and the only relevant sections have no reference to the results of their trials whatsoever (which would indicate to me once again that there is no reasonable evidence for this hypothesis, but make your own conclusion). Hegemonic discourse
:I am sorry but I think you are wrong. There is a large literature of experiments designed to test the hypothesiss and most have the same results, even the experiments conducted by anti-relativists It has sbeen shown that language does have some influence on performance on copgnitive non-linguistic tasksfor example colour recognition. (read what is the sapir whorf hypothesis by Kay and Kempton f.x.) The thing is that the strong versison of the hpyothesis is obviously wrong (language does not determine thought) but the weak version is obviously true (language does influence thought). In fact the only linguist I know of to publicly speak against the hypothesis in strong terms is Steven Pinker, who in turn is widely criticized (Read fx Geoffrey Sampsons "the language instinct debate"). Modern cognitive linguists are working on getting knowledge on how language influences thought. Below is some of the recent literature dealing with the Sapir Whorf Hypothesis in this light experimentally and that doesn't considered to be unreasonable:
*Language Diversity and Thought: A Reformulation of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. By *John A. Lucy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. .
*Grammatical Categories and Cognition: A Case Study of the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis. By *John A. Lucy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 
*Rethinking Linguistic Relativity. Edited by John Gumperz. Cambridge University Press. 1996
*Lakoff, George. Women fire and dangerous things.
*Cultural Constraints on Grammar and Cognition in Piraha: Another Look at the Design Features of Human Language, in Current Anthropology, August-October, 2005 (the piraha math experiments)
I think the article is well balanced and I have not contributed to it before to day. I will try to put in better references in the experimental part though.
Maunus 07:45, 10 August 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: For next time, a better tag would have been Template:Unreferenced or Template:Not verified (also see Wikipedia:Template messages/Maintenance to find other template messages).  I've just removed the NPOV tag.  Also, do folks prefer the parenthetical citations, or can we switch to the WP:Footnotes style? schi talk 20:09, 30 November 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Entire section of "experimental facts" without a single citation.

message: In the article is said that the Pirahã language has only three number words: "one", "two", and "many", however, in the Pirahã article there's another claim, saying that the language has only three words that roughly describe quantity, somewhat akin to "a few", "some", and "many.". I'll leave for the experts to solve this.
:I'm not an expert but from what I've heard/seen the first is probably more correct. They will refer to a single item with "one", two items as "two", and any larger quantity as "three" or "many" or however you want to translate it. -Alan Trick 22:23, 16 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Here's a source. A New Scientist Article describes it as a 1, 2, and "many" distinction. -Alan Trick 22:33, 19 November 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Also discussed at Language Log, with several informative links from there.  I'll try to incorporate into this article later. schi talk 20:03, 30 November 2006 (UTC)

text: Just a side note: There is a book by Terry Pratchett ("Man at arms") in which a troll can only count to three (So one,two,three, many). As Pratchett points out: You can just extend that by using one,two,three,many, many-one, many-two, many-three, many-many, many-many-one, ... :-) 84.154.45.9 15:53, 17 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Pirahã language 

message: "Pinker argues from a contravening school of thought..."  Someone really ought to look up the word 'contravening' in the dictionary. PiCo 03:24, 20 December 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  Words, words, words 

message: Very interesting article, perhaps someone with knowledge of the topic would care to add/extend some kind of overview? Found it demanding to get a basic understanding of what the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is about, without resorting to read through the rather extensive history section. E.g. things like 'What's it about?', 'What's it used for if anything?', 'What's the basic concepts?' 82.182.102.206 16:21, 9 January 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, that's good. Especially the original focus on habitual thought (see Lucy 1992a) needs to be emphasized more in this article, and your summary is a good start. — mark ✎ 10:57, 10 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Requesting Overview 

message: I just removed a lengthy paragraph on the 'language personality theory' by one Sergey Golubkov. That theory was presented in a very recent article in Social Behavior and Personality (Golubkov 2002) and has, as far as I can see, failed to generate any discussion related to the linguistic relativity hypothesis (and in fact any discussion in scholarly journals at all so far). 
I believe the link to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis derives from the author's claim that "Additional perennial philosophical ground and linguistic conception of semantic primitives allow the theory to have the structure, dimensional taxonomy, & quality of universality.". This is a textbook example of WP:NPOV#Undue weight. Too much on the fringe to be included here. — mark ✎ 18:24, 16 January 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Language personality theory 

message: Hey, I am autistic, and I do not think in language. When I use language, I have to translate my thoughts into it.
I have learned language by recognizing patterns. However I can think way beyond the boundries of both the English and German language, however communicating this then becomes a problem (a problem I face daily).
Considering not everyone needs language to think about complex concepts, I would argue that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis definitely does not apply to me.
The limitations of language limit my communication with other people, but they never limited my thoughts.
The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or rather, the ideas stemming from these linguists, did not say that all thinking goes on in language. Whorf explicitly rejected that as behaviorist (naming Watson). You don´t have to be autistic to observe, through introspection, that much of our cognitive activity is not linguistic. But we do think when we speak, autistic or not. That is where thought and language come together.
:What exactly is "not think in language"?  Bear in mind language is more than words - some people can think with imagery but are still using syntax and grammar, whether it's the same grammar as a spoken language or not. Peter Grey 16:51, 2 July 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Not everyone thinks in language 

message: Whoever wrote this article rampantly misuses quotation marks, using them to deliminate irony or uncertainty.  14:14, 1 February 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Overuse of Quotation Marks 

message: ... just a thought. Those quotes take up space... Ling.Nut 03:02, 19 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  move the longish quotes to Wikiquotes? 

message: This can't be added to the article, as it is original research, but I thought long and hard about qualia before I ever heard the term or knew any way to define it. After finding that article, it took me a while to figure out that that was what it was referring to, but I managed. — Daniel 04:46, 8 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  My own example 

message: Two novels are listed that hypothesize societies where "I" is obscene. Such societies and languages are common in Southeast Asia. "I" am not only obscene, but also too lazy to look up the reference write now. Pawyilee 12:59, 21 October 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: "I" as obscenity

message: The first two paragraphs of this article are written with far too much jargon for a layperson to actually understand what the SWH is about.  The article itself can go into specific and jargon-heavy details, but the introduction should be in simple enough language that a mechanical engineer (or even a sanitary engineer) can understand it.
This isn't a grant proposal, it's an encyclopedia article.
Translating the opening two paragraphs, I'd propose:
"The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (SWH) proposes that the way a person understands the world is based in part on the language they use to describe it.  It is named after anthropologist Edward Sapir and his student Benjamin Whorf and was an assumption that they used in research.
According to the SWH, a language changes how its speakers think, and the same concept expressed in a different language may be interpreted differently.  The idea challenges the possibility that reality can be described with language, because the words used will distort the description to match the prejudices of the language."
If nothing else, WP:Explain jargon applies.
Somedumbyankee (talk) 19:25, 20 December 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Plain Language

message: "Among the most frequently cited examples of linguistic determinism is Whorf's study of the language of the Inuit people..." As far as I can tell, Whorf never studied Inuit, Yupik, or other Eskimo languages. This section either needs attribution, or it should be removed. Cnilep (talk) 21:26, 12 March 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Done. Whorf does make the following aside: "To an Eskimo, this all-inclusive word would be almost unthinkable; he would say that falling snow, slushy snow, and so on are sensuously and operationally different, different things to contend with; he uses different words for them and for other kinds of snow" ("Science and Linguistics," 1940). As far as I have found, though, he never studied Inuit. Cnilep (talk) 15:11, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

text: Looking at my edit again, I see I introduced another change. I changed "The notion that Arctic people have an unusually large number of words for snow has been shown to be false by linguist Geoffrey Pullum;" to read "Linguists generally agree that Arctic people do not have unusually large numbers of words for snow." Pullum (1991) was essentially a review of Martin (1986), and the argument has been made elsewhere. Thus, Pullum's is probably the most famous, but not the first, debunking of the idea. Cnilep (talk) 15:20, 6 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Wrongly Attributed" 

message: I think the article isn't really presenting a balanced explanation of the empirical evidence for and against the hypothesis, and may easily confuse a layman into believing there is much more evidence for the hypothesis than there actually is. I can't find a single place where the implications of the opposite point of view are explained: that many experts consider that, in this case, causality is reversed, in the sense that it is thought that influences language, not the other way around (which is what Pinker is implicitly referring to in The Language Instinct in the pages right after he discusses Whorf's particular examples of the Apache and Hopi languages, when he discusses the 'Eskimo hoax').
I also think there should be at least one citation to support this paragraph:
"In the late 1980s and early 1990s advances in cognitive psychology and anthropological linguistics renewed interest in the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Today researchers disagree — often intensely — about how strongly language influences thought. However, this disagreement has sparked increasing interest in the issue and a great deal of innovative and important research."
Any names? Where is the intense controversy?
As if that weren't enough, the section on Empirical Support fails to provide any. The second paragraph, in particular, is appalling:
"Investigation into the recall of linguistic entities confirms that the brain stores associations between semantic concepts (like the idea of a house) and phonetic representation (the sounds that make up the word "house"). ... For example, the recall of the idea of a house can be sped up by exposure to the word "Home" because they share the same initial sound."
IMO, this has absolutely no bearing on the hypothesis. Such associations in the brain are obviously required in order to be able to use language at all, and neither prove nor disprove the linguistic relativity hypothesis. And how can anyone possibly give "house" and "home" as examples of "unrelated concepts"?
If anything, all that one could say is that there is no empirical evidence to disprove the weak version of the hypothesis, but this should be clearly stated.
Finally, I think care should be applied in separating the SWH from the conclusion that can be derived from it ("This idea challenges the possibility of representing the world perfectly with language"), because that conclusion can be arrived at without the need for the hypothesis.
Dbenito (talk) 21:28, 9 January 2008 (UTC)
thread_title: Slight lack of NPOV?

message: I quote: "Whorf might interpret that this usage affects the way English speakers conceive the noumenon "time."
Surely time cannot be "a noumenon", by any give definition, especially not by Kant, where time is a cateegory of mind.
128.214.177.185 (talk) 18:00, 19 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  What is meant with "noumenon"? 

message: There are some reasonably important philosophy of language issues with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. For instance its implication of rendering true translation improbable, or the notion of what constitutes a language (given that a 'language' in this hypothesis seems to be capable of capturing exclusive meanings or phychological processes.) 
The only philisophical mentions of the hypothesis, for instance by A.P. Marinich, basically tear it to shreds logically, and for some fairly strong reasons. One of these is that accounts of how linguistic concepts (from Inuit languages etc) cannot be understood by other language speakers tend to contradict themselves. When it is said that inuits or whoever have words for 20 kinds of snow, and english has only has one, it nonetheless seems explicable that this is possible, when we should assume that the 'english speaker's mind' could not concieve of more than one kind of snow. We can easily make english descriptions of soft snow, hard snow and whatever to compensate for the lack of snow vocabulary.
Anyway, I'd like to hear what people have to say on this, and whether there is a philosophy of language expert around, willing to make an entry.
125.238.242.233 (talk) 01:55, 25 October 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Include section on philosophical relevance? 

message: I don't have much knowledge on the subject, but the following two sentences in the article seemed at odds with each other: 
"...In doing so he opposed what he called a "natural logic" position which held, according to him, that "talking, or the use of language, is supposed only to 'express' what is essentially already formulated nonlinguistically".[4] On this account, he argued, "thought does not depend on grammar but on laws of logic or reason which are supposed to be the same for all observers of the universe". ..."
Perhaps I'm reading them wrong, but it seems that the quote in the second sentence expresses the view Whorf is said to oppose in the first sentence.
Edmundssteven (talk) 18:04, 20 January 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Whorf Quotations Seem to Contradict Each Other 

message: This article gives the impression that Sapir-Whorf is completely unchallenged.  In fact, most of Whorf's grander extrapolations have been largely discredited.  Whorf believed that grammar channeled thought.  Because of that, the way someone thinks is altered significantly by their language.  This is simply not true.  It's been demonstrated that there is some merit to it in very tiny ways (for instance, people with grammatical gender tend to think of inanimate objects as speaking in the voice of their "gender").
Whorf's analysis into Hopi and Inuit was quite incorrect.  Whorf believed that Hopi, for instance, did not distinguish time, and possession the way that we do.  In fact, they do.  Its just that the grammar is so different, that they don't mark it in such a way that would look familiar to a Westerner.
Chomsky and McWhorter are two well known linguists who have been highly critical of this notion.
supersoulty (talk) 17:26, 14 March 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: Definitely. I recently read a reference about how the hypothesis is largely discredited now, and I came here to see details. The article needs the significant criticism. -Phoenixrod (talk) 06:22, 24 April 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: "Largely discredited now" is an overstatement. It might be better to say "a bête noir among twentieth century theoretical linguists" (to paraphrase George Lakoff), but still appealed to by anthropologists and some contemporary linguists. Nonetheless, the large body of criticism out there should be summarized here. The Language Instinct has a very negative chapter. The Great Eskimo Vocabulary Hoax is less dismissive by still quite critical. Women, Fire and Dangerous Things has perhaps the most balanced critique I know of, but I'm sure there are others. All three books are accessible to general audiences.  Cnilep (talk) 16:18, 24 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Where are the critics? 

message: A bot, User:Synthebot, has removed links to cs:Sapir-Whorfova hypotéza, cs:Jazykový relativismus, ja:サピア＝ウォーフの仮説, and ja:言語的相対論. This seems to be an error. The Japanese pages are "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" and "Linguistic relativity" and they seem to cover some of the ground covered here, though each is smaller than this article, and this one now has more history than philosophy. I don't read Czech, but based on the cognate names, I assume those pages are similar. Would someone else like to double-check my impression before I roll back the edits? Cnilep (talk) 15:02, 18 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Inter-wiki links to other languages 

message: I'm a historian of science, not a linguist, but as I read Malotki's Hopi Time I see it as a strong critique of Whorf's assertion that "the Hopi language ... contain[s] no words, grammatical forms, constructions or expressions that refer directly to what we call 'time'" but not as advocating the universalist position.  Although Malotki maintained that time is a universal -- "a fundamental experience conceptualized by every human mind" (p. 630) he also noted that "their sense of time, or the role that time plays in their lives and culture, does not correspond to ours"  (p. 632).  He concluded by leaving the big question of whether "the handling of time should vary greatly for speakers of different languages" to others to consider.  A hint of where Malotki stands is his favorable comment on Ronald Langacker's presentation of a "continuous gradation of theoretical positions in regard to the Linguistic Relativity Hypothesis" (p. 1). 
Given the abundance of specifically Hopi temporal conceptions Malotki documents in his book, he seems to be more a soft  relativist than a universalist.  The article's dualistic structure doesn't allow place for such middle positions, and so wrongly (IMHO) places Malotki among the universalists.
At a minimum, the discussion of Malotki's important contributions should be moved from the section on the universalist period where it presently resides.  Preferably, the article's dualistic structure should be reconsidered.
I'd appreciate some comments on these suggestions from people who are more widely read in linguistics.
--SteveMcCluskey (talk) 22:30, 22 June 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: the section about the universalist period includes malotki for several reasons - He worked in the period where this was the dominant paradigm. He actively tried to disprove notions (strong) of linguistic  just like the universalists did. And his results have been widely publicized by universalists as being strong proof for their viewpoints and against whorf's.·Maunus·ƛ· 22:00, 21 July 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: There is another early extensive Malotki study, on Hopi space. Both books simply pulverize Whorf's ideas about Hopi, but are very measured in tone. In some more recent essays Malotki highlights Whorf's incompetence and he is angry that people simply ignore his findings and continue to treat Whorf's views on Hopi as sacred text. Malotki has a point there, but on the other hand Whorf's knowledge or ignorance of any single language need not mean anything for his basic philosophical ideas about language and thinking.--Radh (talk) 01:47, 26 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Malotki and the universalist-relativist duality 

message: 1.) An early statement of Helmut Gipper's on Sapir-Whorf in his:
* Bausteine zur Sprachinhaltsforschung, Pädagogischer Verlag Schwann, Düsseldorf, 1963, esp. chapter 5 on pages 297-366. 
Gipper later published (and I guess revised his ideas on Whorf somewhat):
* Gibt es ein sprachliches Relativitätsprinzip?, Fischer, Frankfurt am Main, 1972. 
Gipper (1919-2005) was a pupil of Leo Weisgerber, the leading German linguist of his time and not only the Nazi WP tells you about, and the teacher of Malotki. I think, he was pretty much unique among German linguists of the time in his knowledge of (and tolerance for) anglo-american philosophy. He also is not dogmatic at all, which makes it a bit difficult to notice his own judgements. 
2.: Rüdiger Vaas' essay (chapter 6, pp. 187-275, on Native American languages) in a pretty basic book on "Indianer";
* Günther Stoll and Rüdiger Vaas: Spurensuche im Indianerland, Hirzel, Stuttgart, Leipzig, 2001. 
But this essay is not simple-minded, excellent bibliography (p.271-275).--Radh (talk) 11:47, 28 December 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  2 German contributions 

message: Does anybody know of any work relating Sapir-Whorf to information entropy?  What I'm looking at is the problem of translation and the fact that just like with rumor and urban legend, the farther you get from the original work the more the information decays.  A translation is inaccurate because no two languages share the same concepts 100%, and you lose efficiency when you translate because no matter how many notes you put in, readers will miss some of them.  Thanks.
4.249.3.221 (talk) 12:58, 28 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  information entropy 

message: Just came across this: http://www.newsweek.com/id/205985
I had always been taught that this topic was considered bogus but who knows.  Feel free to use the reference if it's good for anything. 69.228.171.150 (talk) 07:28, 1 November 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  newsweek article 

message: Lucy, John A. (1997). "Linguistic Relativity". Annual Review of Anthropology 26: 291–312. http://www.russian.pomona.edu/harves/LucyREVIEWONLinguisticRela.pdf.
I have removed the URL from that item. Unfortunately, the Annual Review of Anthropology is available on-line only with a paid subscription, so the bibliographic item will have to stand without a URL. Cnilep (talk) 14:28, 25 November 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  dead link 

message: The article currently reads (under the sub-heading "Eric Lenneberg"), "Since neither Sapir nor Whorf had ever stated the hypothesis in formal terms, he [Lenneberg] formulated one based on a condensation of the different expressions of the notion of linguistic relativity in their works."
This implies that Sapir and Whorf considered the "Sapir-Whorf hypothesis" as an hypothesis. In fact, though (as the article states) each assumed linguistic relativity as axiomatic and not as a hypothesis. (See, for example, Michael Silverstein or J.B. Carroll, or indeed the rest of the article for references.) I think this is an important point that needs to be archived here on the talk page: During the lifetimes of Sapir and Whorf, there was nothing called "the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis". I am therefore restoring something closer to the previous wording. Cnilep (talk) 16:06, 15 May 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: See Stigler%27s law of eponymy. Pawyilee (talk) 12:19, 16 May 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  "Hypothesis" actually constructed by Lenneberg et alia 

message: There are now two external links to papers by Lera Boroditsky, and if memory serves there were more in the past. Perhaps a link to Professor Boroditsky's faculty page at Stanford (here) would be better. What do others think? Cnilep (talk) 21:46, 5 January 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Actually, this may be a better link. Cnilep (talk) 21:48, 5 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  External links to Boroditsky 

message: Taking from the featured article on the Philosophy of mind, I think the lead needs more of a broad, holistic denotation in approaching the subject.
One line in particular - "The idea originated in the German national romantic thought of the early 19th century where language was seen as the expression of the spirit of a nation, as put particularly by Wilhelm von Humboldt" - literally attributes the idea to von Humboldt. This is a very strong assertion to be made when in all likelihood the idea in and of itself could have first been realized outside of 19th century Germany. 
If someone more familiar with the subject could address this, please and thank you. --Jay(Talk) 00:28, 28 February 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: It could have and perhaps did so (Renaissance Humanism?; Vico?), but it is nevertheless usually attributed to Humboldt and Herder. But see: User: Mark Kupper's detailed entry above--Radh (talk) 09:01, 25 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Origins in the lead 

message: I have removed a photograph of Benjamin Lee Whorf from this article pending discussion here. I have two objections to the photograph's use.
#The file is a non-free image, copyrighted by Benjamin Lee Whorf Papers, Manuscripts & Archives, Yale University Library. It is currently used on the page Benjamin Lee Whorf under fair use. Although use here might be allowable under fair use, the same argument may not apply. Specifically, fair use on the page Benjamin Lee Whorf is asserted "To illustrate the subject in question". Whorf is not specifically the subject of this page.
#In a related vein, although Whorf is probably the scholar most associated with linguistic relativity, others (e.g. Lucy, Humbolt, Sapir, even Lenneberg) have made important contributions to understanding the concept. Therefore including a photo of Whorf and no other scholars might be seen as undue emphasis.
Instead, it may be desirable to include the  template on the page.
Cnilep (talk) 21:51, 15 March 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: +1 --LCE(LCE talk contribs) 10:38, 21 March 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Photo of Benjamin Lee Whorf 

message: In "History/Presenst status" there is this fragment "Current studies of linguistic relativity are neither marked by the naivistic approach to exotic linguistic structures"  Should this be "naive" or "nativistic"?
Hpvpp (talk) 02:05, 19 May 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: naive.·Maunus·ƛ· 04:38, 19 May 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: done (but why didn't you?) Hpvpp (talk) 01:54, 28 May 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I must have had something else to do.·Maunus·ƛ· 05:56, 28 May 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  naive or nativistic? 

message: My question is a thought provoking one. How can we have so many languages in the world?  I noticed that many languages are derived from Latin which has its roots from Greek.  Its interesting to know that these languages share commonality in some ways such as Spanish, French, Italian, German and Portuguese.  If these languages have a commonality, then it is not impossible to assume that many years ago before literature - there was 1 tongue or one language.  —Preceding unsigned comment added by 1meBERMUDA (talk • contribs) 17:34, 13 June 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Note that this page is for for discussing improvements to the Linguistic relativity article, not for discussion of general linguistic questions. Cnilep (talk) 19:08, 13 June 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Was Hebrew (Aramaic ) or English the 1 tongue or one language from ....? 

message: The article should say something about recent research into grammatical gender, showing that depending on the gender used in their mother tongue speakers will associate nouns with masculine or feminine characteristics; e.g. a bridge as 'strong' vs 'elegant'. Ben Finn (talk) 16:03, 17 September 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Gender 

message: The following rebuttal to Alfred Bloom's hypothesis could be mentioned after it:
: Science and civilisation in China by Joseph Needham, Christoph Harbsmeier, chapter Language and Logic, page 116, however, gives examples of counterfactuals in Chinese from the text Lun Heng by Wang Chhung circa C.E. 83 and the text Chuang Tzu and cites Harbsmeier 1981 for over 50 more examples.
See also Reasoning countetfactually in Chinese: Are there any obstacles? by LISA GARBERN LIU, which discusses experimental evidence that modern Chinese speakers have no difficulty with counterfactuals.
Bayle Shanks (talk) 08:10, 9 October 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Citation against Alfred Bloom 

message: Sure, the term "Sapir-Whorf" hypothesis is a misnomer, but all the same known to a great many people and should therefore have its own page with reasons why it's a misnomer as well as a history of the use of the term.  And of course a brief section explaining what it is all about and referring the reader to this article.  I have been wanting to create such a page for a long time, but I haven't had the time to do it.  Still, I intend to do so eventually (if no one else does it before then).  Hpvpp (talk) 08:44, 24 December 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: We haven't lost any redirects in the article namespace. I just moved the article page to the MediaWiki talk namespace in order to import an old edit from the Nostalgia Wikipedia, an old copy of the Wikipedia database. When I moved it back to the original title, I did it without the redirect because there is no need for random redirects from the MediaWiki talk namespace. Graham87 08:54, 24 December 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: Oh. Not that I understand what happened, but okay then. (One of these days I will learn more about how this all works.) Hpvpp (talk) 09:17, 24 December 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Disagree with losing the Sapir-Whorf redirect