
Science and Linguistics (1940) - shawndumas
http://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/whorf.scienceandlinguistics.pdf
======
lgessler
For a summary of modern understanding of the connection between language and
thought, see the SEP's section on Whorfianism:
[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/linguistics/#Who](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/linguistics/#Who)

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amilogradov
This verb-noun split in latin-rooted languages makes me to recall the essay by
Steve Yegge "Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns" [https://steve-
yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdo...](https://steve-
yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns.html)

It's really amazing how our linguistic system influences our process of
thinking and systems we produce. Also, "unknown unknowns" phenomena (part
about blue color in the article) explains why lambda calculus feels so alien
:)

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squiggleblaz
This should have the date 1940 in it!

~~~
panyang
It should also be noted that Whorf did not speak Hopi fluently so any of his
claims regarding this language should be taken with a grain of salt.

~~~
lgessler
This claim is analogous to one like "Bill Nye is not a race car driver, so we
should take his account of how centrifugal force acts on a race car on a bank
with a grain of salt."

It's true that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has been largely discredited. But
practical use of a language and analytic understanding of the principles that
allow it to function are not strictly related.

~~~
xaedes
taken from
[https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/linguistics/#Who](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/linguistics/#Who)

For Whorf, it was an unquestionable fact that language influences thought to
some degree: [...]

He seems to regard it as necessarily true that language affects thought, given

\- the fact that language must be used in order to think, and

\- the facts about language structure that linguistic analysis discovers.

He also seems to presume that the only structure and logic that thought has is
grammatical structure.

These views are not the ones that after Whorf's death came to be known as ‘the
Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’ (a sobriquet due to Hoijer 1954).

Nor are they what was called the ‘Whorf thesis’ by Brown and Lenneberg (1954)
which was concerned with the relation of obligatory lexical distinctions and
thought. Brown and Lenneberg (1954) investigated this question by looking at
the relation of color terminology in a language and the classificatory
abilities of the speakers of that language.

The issue of the relation between obligatory lexical distinctions and thought
is at the heart of what is now called ‘the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis’ or ‘the
Whorf Hypothesis’ or ‘Whorfianism’.

