Re: OT: Helen Keller & Whorf-Sapir

On Wed, Aug 11, 2004 at 11:46:00PM -0000, Caleb wrote:

> The other day, on the way to work, I was listening to NPR, and caught
> the tail end of an article about Helen Keller. This got me thinking
> about the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis. Now I don't claim to be a linguist,
> so I could be wrong, but my understanding is that this basically says
> that one's language defines the way we see the world. If this is the
> case, then I wonder what Helen Keller's perception of the world would
> have been before learning to communicate.
>
> 1) One possibility, I suppose, could be that she came up with her own
> sort of internal 'language', completely different and independent of
> English and unrelated to spoken words.
I'm sure I recall learning that she had already begun to speak when she
lost her vision and sight, although she probably completely forgot it
at a conscious level.

Amanda