Whorf-Sapir

Comments (12)

1. Language is a tool? (If the words weren’t there, there wouldn’t be a right one that wasn’t being recollected.)

2. Excellent. However, I wouldn’t use it to draw (or even illustrate) conclusions about Sapir-Whorf.

   1. It was that or Fodor, just to get a good title.

3. Check out this recent blog post from the same site

   http://www.calamitiesofnature.com/blog/?b=321

   Awesome!

4. @enigMan, that language is a tool for manipulating interest systems, others’ and one’s own, is the idea that got me my PhD, back when

5. Long before I had even heard of a Worf (the Klingon one without the ‘h’) I remember reading that there was no direct English equivalent for the French word epanouissement and being struck by the possibility that it might be possible to talk and think about things in one language but not in another and wonder how that might affect a culture. Would it be true, as Chancellor Gorkon comments in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, that “You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.” Is there any support for at least the weak version of the hypothesis?

   1. What is the English for Schadenfreude?

      1. My point exactly!

   2. Personally, I think that any alien language which resembles the gutteral utterances of odd-toed ungulates will tend to make a culture a bit beastly. I call it the Worf-Tapir Hypothesis

      1. FTW!

6. No one mentioning George Orwell?
   Doubleplusungood!

7. I seen this comic on calamitiesofnature before, nice one

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