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),
It's more subtle than that.  Certainly concepts can easily be grasped
regardless of the shape of your language.  Nevertheless, language can
shape your thoughts.  The Chinese didn't come up with democracy on their
own, it was an imported concept.  Of course, there are many factors
leading to this, language probably isn't even a factor in that.
However, I wasn't saying that language is a cage, it does NOT prevent
you from understanding something.  In other words, I'm not espousing an
extreme Sapir-Whorf view, but rather a very weak form, that it helps
shape thoughts, makes some thoughts easier than others, but in no way
does it exclude or require any thought patterns.

> 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.
Well, if Newspeakers did have any notion of freedom, they'd be
immediately arrested for crimethink, so there'd be no compound or
expression for freedom.  :-)

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