Subject: Re: [lojban] Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

From: "Bob LeChevalier (lojbab)" <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 13 Jun 2001 10:56:23 -0400

At 12:50 PM 06/12/2001 -0700, Edward Cherlin wrote:
>At 7:18 AM -0400 6/12/01, Bob LeChevalier (lojbab) wrote:
>>At 06:04 PM 06/11/2001 -0400, [email-masked] wrote:
>>...Not much has happened in the whole area since the late '50's
>> >when linguists got all wrapped up in computation.
>>
>>Actually, this isn't quite true. In the 80s, Kay and Kempton, doing some
>>color-word research, accidentally found some technical confirmation of
>>Sapir-Whorf, which rendered the controversy alive again. The Chomskyans of
>>course have tended to denigrate the hypothesis, while other schools of
>>linguistics seem agnostic about the issue.
>
>The best recent example is non-standard arithmetic, which comes in two 
>forms, one from Robinson's model theory, and the other from Conway's 
>advances in game theory. Both provide consistent but significantly 
>different arithmetics with actual infinitesimals, and both can be extended 
>to analysis. Without the appropriate definitions of terms and proofs of 
>theorems, there is no way anybody outside the field can understand what 
>either form is talking about, since mathematicians had previously "proved" 
>that arithmetic with infinitesimals was impossible, and in particular 
>Peano thought that he had proved the impossibility of any non-standard 
>models of the natural numbers.

But of course the definitions of the terms and the proofs can be provided, 
and presumably the contradiction is therein resolved.

>When free from political or ontological limitations, mathematicians 
>constantly come up with new ideas for which there is no appropriate 
>language, and then invent one, or several, and test which terminology and 
>notation best helps them think about the problems.

And they successfully communicate using this new language to other 
mathematicians. Similarly, English speakers can deduce some information 
about the text of Jabberwocky based on the known rules of the language.

>In any case, some versions of SW are clearly true, and others are clearly 
>false. I don't know which ones the linguistic theorists think they are 
>arguing about.

Usually they are talking about what is called the "strong form" of 
linguistic relativity, which is presumed to be disproved by the fact that 
we can translate or paraphrase anything from one language to another. This 
shows that there is nothing inherent to the target language that renders it 
incapable of expressing anything in the source language.

Kay and Kempton showed that there seemed to be unexpected color perception 
differences between English speakers and those of other languages that 
could not be explained except by a SWH effect. This was a sidenote to 
their primary research, and I don't know where things went. It is really a 
rather small area of SWH research, one that focuses on word meanings rather 
than on grammar (which is the focus of most Loglan Project SWH research).

Myself, I am not sure that we won't eventually have Lojban attitudinals 
that are NOT translatable to other languages.

lojbab
--
lojbab [email-masked]
Bob LeChevalier, President, The Logical Language Group, Inc.
2904 Beau Lane, Fairfax VA 22031-1303 USA 703-385-0273
Artificial language Loglan/Lojban: http://www.lojban.org