Re: OT: Helen Keller & Whorf-Sapir

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."

But perhaps we use "left" and "right" differently.

Doug

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