31 August 2010
It is a few days old, but I just came across this New York Times article by Guy Deutscher. It is an excellent summation of how linguistic relativity (the Sapir-Whorf theory, which should really be called just the Whorf theory as Sapir really had nothing to do with it) is and is not valid.
I particularly like the quote from Roman Jakobson that, “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey.”
(Hat tip to Arts and Letters Daily)
