[lojban] Re: Kempton/Kay and SWH

[Robin Turner <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

tk1@despammed.com wrote:
> [Bob LeChevalier-Logical Language Group:]
>
>
> > For Jordan and others who want to read more about the Kempton and Kay 
> > experiments, the second message in the digest below has an informal 
> > description by Kempton.
> > http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9110D&L=linguist&P=R1957
>
>
> Thanks for the link! The results seem to confirm what I suspected some time
> ago: that the thought patterns produced by a language depends not only on
> its syntactic grammar, but also the way it classifies concepts -- in
> epistemological jargonology, the manner in which it divides up `semantic
> space', which in the context of Lojban will be the way in which gismu and
> cmavo semantics are distributed.

Whorf was more interested in the effects of grammar (despite his 
infamous "words for snow" observation) but grammar would be much harder 
to test for Whorfian effects.  The closest I could think of to a 
gramatical equivelent of the Kempton and Kay colour tests would be 
something to do with perceptions of the time, duration and location of 
an event.

robin.tr

--
"A Perl script is "correct" if it gets the job done before your boss 
fires you."
 - Larry Wall

Robin Turner
IDMYO
Bilkent Univeritesi
Ankara 06533
Turkey

www.bilkent.edu.tr/~robin