Re: Sapir-WhorFreakiness

From:    Steg Belsky <draqonfayir@...>
> Weird article a friend of mine showed me...
>
> http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/08/19/science.counting.reut/
> index.html
I got that from another friend, and I must say that I was pretty skeptical
based on that article (i.e., before I read the other paper).  There don't
seem to be any controls on the experiments:  they don't first rule out
basic memory and processing properties of human individuals, and they
don't indicate whether they used a statistically significant number of
individuals.

Now that I look at the other article, John's supposition seems highly
likely to me.  Another possibility is not a nice one:  the informants
simply lied to the researchers.  There's a famous case of concerning
Margaret Mead's research on Samoan women who later admitted to having
lied that their lives were full of promiscuity (a fact upon which Mead
based much of her findings).

> > Less freaky, but the language is also one with different phonemic
> > inventories for men and women.
One of the members of our department is documenting Karaja /kara'Za/,
a Macro-Ge language.  In this language, one of the gender-based variations
is that men systematically drop all /k/s from words, while women retain
them.

> > How and why do such systems arise?
>
> Taboos, probably.  I recall an Indonesian lang. where s ~ h also
> alternated between men/women, tho I don't recall which used which.
Or maybe simply the desire to identify as a male.  Georgian men do
this in a weird way: they all sound roughly as if speaking with swobs
of cotton in their mouths*.  (Georgian women talk much like other
women in Caucasia and the CIS do.)

* This is what we call an "unscientific characterization".

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier	       "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637

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