Show Posts
1
English & Linguistics / A linguistic question finally answered
« on: May 18, 2005, 05:23:51 PM »
hm.
Sapir-Whorf is not bunk, and it has been horribly horribly distorted by anti-nurturers. The claim that should is supported by Sapir-Whorf is not that your experience modifies your physical perception. What experience does is modify how you process information received via your perceptual organs (and there are some interesting psycholinguistic studies that demonstrate that). The original Sapir-Whorf thing is made all the more anomolous, because as it turns out, a lot of the cultures which have color fusions turn out to be a result of the older portions of the populations having eye diseases which contribute to their in ability to distinguish two colors such as blue and green, so nobody talks about them as being seperate since a large portion of the population can't tell the difference.
Case systems may develop out of a process called cliticization, which is notible in forms of spanish currently. Essentially what would hypothetically happen is that you have a particular type of word (or group of words) that keep getting contracted with a set of function words, like "to", "for", "with" etc. Eventually, these themselves become lexicalized, and boom case system.
Sapir-Whorf is not bunk, and it has been horribly horribly distorted by anti-nurturers. The claim that should is supported by Sapir-Whorf is not that your experience modifies your physical perception. What experience does is modify how you process information received via your perceptual organs (and there are some interesting psycholinguistic studies that demonstrate that). The original Sapir-Whorf thing is made all the more anomolous, because as it turns out, a lot of the cultures which have color fusions turn out to be a result of the older portions of the populations having eye diseases which contribute to their in ability to distinguish two colors such as blue and green, so nobody talks about them as being seperate since a large portion of the population can't tell the difference.
Case systems may develop out of a process called cliticization, which is notible in forms of spanish currently. Essentially what would hypothetically happen is that you have a particular type of word (or group of words) that keep getting contracted with a set of function words, like "to", "for", "with" etc. Eventually, these themselves become lexicalized, and boom case system.