Re: Re : Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis

Grandsire, C.A. wrote:

>         I'm not sure about it. Before the Chinese Revolution, China
completely
> lacked concepts like democracy and the like, but they appeared very
> quickly and the Chinese seem to have had no problem to understand them
> (the Chinese for "democracy" is a compound meaning "people's power" if I
> remember correctly), even better than the Chinese government expected I
> think. As for concepts like "freedom", I'm not sure that any language
> could lack it, and if one did, the speakers would certainly have a
> compound or an expression to render this. Newspeak seems to me an
> impossibility.
Oh, I dunno.  I seem to remember an article about the disparate sense
of the Latin "liber" which suggested that the only way they could be
unified is by reference to the root sense of the word, which was
social and negative in nature: someone who is "liber" is not a
"servus".  The other senses were all analyzable as derivative from
that (metaphorically or otherwise).

I remember in "Studies in Words" by C.S. Lewis (which alas, I've only
browsed in the bookstore, not read), one of the essays is about the
history of the word "Free" and its equivalents, back to the Latin and
Greek, and the changes that have occurred in its meaning.

And in her book _Understanding Cultures Through Their Key Words_
(another one I've alas only browsed and not read), Anna Wierzbicka
claims that under careful analysis, the meanings of the words in
several different European languages which are glossed "Freedom" in
English have important differences in detail, as well as a significant
common core which motivates their being translated as equivalent.

That's three completely independent bits of research on words for
"freedom," in three different directions (intralinguistic,
historical-linguistic, and interlinguistic) which suggest that there
is a certain degree of language- and culture-specificity to the word
"freedom" and its equivalents.

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Ed doesn't know everything, but he hasn't figured that out yet.
Please break it to him gently.              edheil@postmark.net
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