An assessment of the Unicode standard

[Tim Rowe]

2009/9/15 Hendrik van Rooyen <hendrik at microcorp.co.za>:
> On Monday 14 September 2009 14:06:36 Christopher Culver wrote:
>
>> This is the old Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which fell out of favour among
>> linguists half a century ago already. 1) Language does not constrain
>> human thought, and 2) any two human languages are both capable of
>> expressing the same things, though one may already have a convenient
>> lexeme for the topic at hand while the other uses circumlocution.
>
> 1) Is an assumption, not a proven fact.  "falling out of favour" is merely
> fashion amongst people who are dabbling in fuzzy areas where the hard
> discipline of the "scientific method" is inapplicable, because it is kind of
> hard to "prove" or "disprove" that my thinking and yours differ "because" my
> first language is different to yours. - we end up talking about our beliefs,
> after telling war stories.

There are good reasons for it falling out of favour, though. At the
time of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, anthropologists were arguing that
members of a certain remote tribe did not experience grief on the
death of a child because their language did not have a word for grief.
They showed all the *signs* of grief -- weeping and wailing and so on
-- and sometimes used metaphors ("I feel as if my inside is being
crushed"). But because of the conviction at the time that "if your
language does not have a word for something, and you have never seen
that object, then you "__cannot__" think about it" the anthropologists
were convinced that this just looked and sounded like grief and wasn't
actually grief.

By the way, at the moment I am thinking of a sort of purple
blob-shaped monster with tentacles and fangs, that my language doesn't
have a word for and that I have never seen. On your theory, how come I
am thinking about it?

-- 
Tim Rowe