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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Wednesday, April 07, 2004
I've long been interested in aspects of the Sapir-Lee Whorf hypothesis, which states that the structure of language has the capability to determine habits of thought. This piece seems to give the idea some validity:"All the major color terms but one were exactly like those in English, and in the one area of difference, they differed in exactly the same way." (They grouped green and blue to form what Kay and Berlin called "grue.") That two such profoundly unrelated languages should name colors alike seemed to point to some universal linguistic pattern... Hunter-gatherers need fewer color words because color data rarely provide much crucially distinguishing information about a natural object or scene. Industrial societies get a bigger informational payoff from color words... Several languages lack subjective terms analogous to "left" and "right," using instead absolute directions, akin to "north" and "south."
The implication seems to be that language can exercise a determining influence in such cases as differing ways in which languages describe space. Conversely, the similar conceptual structures underpinning most languages would point to a limitation of this effect, presumably due to similar cognitive processing of the environment or to an innate transformative grammar of the kind postulated by Chomsky. That said, I am rather struck by the absence of any reference to linguistic change in the face of social change; I would have thought that should describe the 'grue' word formation rather well.
posted by Richard 11:45 am
