Re: OT: Helen Keller & Whorf-Sapir

Hallo!

On Sun, 15 Aug 2004 11:03:53 EDT,
Doug Dee <AmateurLinguist@...> wrote:

> In a message dated 8/14/2004 3:45:17 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
> joerg_rhiemeier@WEB.DE writes:
>
> >>       Anyhow, the SWH was not
> >> a hypothesis for S or W in the sense that they were trying to
> >> prove it; rather, it was simply a background assumption current
> >> at the time.
>
> >And especially popular among the extreme right (and among bad science
> >fiction writers) until today.
>
> I am surprised by the "extreme right" comment.  I have the opposite
> impression: the SWH/linguistic relativity/whatever-you-call-it seems to be popular on
> the political "left," among people who like to claim that different
> languages/cultures have different (but valid, useful, and interesting) world-views, while
> people on the "right" tend to view all this as relativism and nonsense.
>
> SWH is often advanced as an argument in favor of the preservation of
> endangered languages, which seems to me to be a cause more popular on the "left."
Yes.

> But perhaps we use "left" and "right" differently.
I don't think so (though these terms are indeed pretty ill-defined,
so we might use them slightly differently).  It seems that the
Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is used by both leftists and rightists.
The leftists use it to underpin their position that languages
are to be preserved as you say; the rightists use it to deduce
that non-SAE people have such a different world view that
human rights and similar concepts cannot be meaningfully applied
to them because those were alien to their way of thinking, etc.

On the other hand, there are both leftists and rightists who reject it.
I am a leftist and I reject the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (though I don't
reject it 100%: I think that language indeed influences patterns
of thought, but it doesn't dominante them).

Greetings,

Jörg.

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