[lit-ideas] Re: Russian?
- From: John McCreery <john.mccreery@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: Lit-Ideas <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 5 Jan 2014 15:05:46 +0900
Thoroughly debunked? My sense of the current state of play is that there is
general agreement that anything sayable can be said in any human language.
All native speakers of any language are able to to speak and understand an
infinite number of sentences, and speakers of different languages can
usually find ways to explain local concepts to each other. On the other
hand, as a working translator, I can assure you that there are many things
easily said in one language than can only be explained through elaborate
circumlocution in another. Thus, for example, at a recent dinner party, my
wife and I were discussing the difficulty of translating the Japanese
terms *hade
*and *jimi *into English. *Hade *can be glossed "colourful and boldly
decorated" and *jimi *as "plain and dignified," but what counts falls
within the range of colour and pattern that *hade *evokes and *jimi *denies
and how the boundaries shift with the age of the individual wearing the
clothes in question is not captured by "colourful" and "plain" alone.
Computer programmers will also understand what I am talking about. At the
end of the day, all programming languages are Turing machines, but
particular routines are much easier to write in one language instead of
another. A few lines in one may require many more in another. These
examples suggest that a weak form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis may still
be viable, i.e., that particular languages channel thought in particular
directions. Speakers of any language may challenge convention and think in
more difficult ways; but an English speaker may find it easier to say one
thing while a speaker of Chinese, Japanese or Russian finds it easier to
say another.
That's my two yen.
John
On Sun, Jan 5, 2014 at 11:57 AM, Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I wrote
>
>
> The so-called Sapir-Whorf (Whorf was Sapir's student; they did not
> collaborate) has been around for a long time, under the name 'linguistic
> relativity.' Most people think it's been thoroughly debunked, although a
> 'weaker version of it' is still around.
>
> The first part of this should read ...'they did not collaborate) *theory*has
> been around for a long time.'
>
> RP
>
--
John McCreery
The Word Works, Ltd., Yokohama, JAPAN
Tel. +81-45-314-9324
jlm@xxxxxxxxxxxx
http://www.wordworks.jp/
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