Come back Whorf and Sapir: all is forgiven ?

"Language is not a cloak covering the contours of thought,
Languages are molds into which infant minds are poured..."

The above is about the most prosaic statement of the "strong" form of the Whorf-Sapir hypothesis (WSH), also known as linguistic relativism (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity) . This quote is from Brown 1954 (I think - I know there was snow in it anyway). This is all I remember of the reference except it had to do with Eskimo's (non PC back then) and how they "saw" snow differently because they had 12 words for snow. I only have one or two words for snow and I use them preceded by a word that begins with 'f' generally.

The Wall Street Journal rediscovered WSH this yesterday with an interesting article about Spanish, Japanese and English cultures and how the eye witness reports varies of an event which the authors attribute to language effects (http://ht.ly/2hJy7) . They seem to be stating what is called the strong version of the Whorf Sapir hypothesis - again. The problem is that a lot of work has been done on the WSH and the general conclusion has been that language is "necessary but not sufficient" for complex cognition. The Wikipedia article covers the area quite well, the conclusion is that the weak version of the WSH is probably true, but we have to accept that many aspects of cognition are universal and independent of the language used. One area that had a lot of research was color naming, different cultures have different ways of naming colors, from two (for instance "dark" and "light") to the vast range we have. Yet you will find that core colors, so called focal colors, are the same across cultures. For instance focal red (the "reddest red" ) is the same across many cultures. The invention of aniline dyes had a significant effect on color names, they became abstract rather than object referenced. It's an old debate, and I thought the authors in the WSJ should at least *mention* the WSH. But probably not - too inconvenient for their hypothesis.

It just shows that everything comes around again, and while it makes good copy for the WSJ a little bit of research may have provided a more accurate article. The WSH debate is interesting though.

I always thought that David Bohm's book "Wholeness and the Implicate Order" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wholeness_and_the_Implicate_Order) had a very beautiful account of the Hopi indian language relates to his ideas about Quantum mechanics and how we see the world, and the merging of time. Now that is another way of looking at reality....