On Thursday 17 September 2009 15:29:38 Tim Rowe wrote:
> There are good reasons for it falling out of favour, though. At the
> time of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, anthropologists were arguing that
> members of a certain remote tribe did not experience grief on the
> death of a child because their language did not have a word for grief.
> They showed all the *signs* of grief -- weeping and wailing and so on
> -- and sometimes used metaphors ("I feel as if my inside is being
> crushed"). But because of the conviction at the time that "if your
> language does not have a word for something, and you have never seen
> that object, then you "__cannot__" think about it" the anthropologists
> were convinced that this just looked and sounded like grief and wasn't
> actually grief.
This is kind of convincing, when applied to an emotion like that. The whole
thing is obviously a lot more complicated than the position I have taken
here - if it weren't, then there would be no way for a language to change
and grow, if it were literally true that you cannot think of something that
you have no word for.
>
> By the way, at the moment I am thinking of a sort of purple
> blob-shaped monster with tentacles and fangs, that my language doesn't
> have a word for and that I have never seen. On your theory, how come I
> am thinking about it?
I do not really believe you are thinking about a purple people eater. - you
must be mistaken.
:-)
- Hendrik
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