Posted by Terry on July 13, 1999 at 08:07:34:
In Reply to: Re: The Languages of Pao posted by Nick on July 12, 1999 at 16:12:56:
: That must really cheer him up. The sapir-whorf hypothesis is a sad joke in modern scientific communities.
Nick,
I will admit that I don't know about current scientific thought on 1930's Sapir-Whorf theory and I'm not convinced you do either. But let me say that Vance proposes a grand experiment in _TLoP_: creating 3 languages from scratch each designed for a particular segment of society. This experiment, as we know, has never been carried out in real life and I'm puzzled at what experiments could be done under existing conditions. Social engineering beyond the scale currently allowable would be required and I'm sure that visions of Nazi's and their attempts at manipulating humans may have reared its ugly head during discussions of S-W.
One would supposedly look at existing language and try to divorce the multitude of extraneous nurture/nature issues from the "supposed" influences of language. One thing we might look at is the effect of computer languages on people.
I can say that the computer community is rich with indigenous idiom that we use in everyday, non-computer settings and I am quite sure that this affects the way we deal with others. Whether of not this supports S-W or not is open to conjecture, but I would not be so hasty as to pitch this theory on the ash-heap of history.
Something about working with computers affects our every day language and vice versa. Perhaps it is time to revisit S-W?
There are echoes of S-W in 1984 where Orwell's "newspeak" was designed to remove critical thought and thereby criticism from the subject population. One can also easily see where Vance's fascination with language would attract him to this theory and also lead to the novel.