Thanks for posting this, someone sent it to me but the link was broken and I was just searching for it when I happened upon this post. I'm not able to listen to the audio right now, but the text makes it sound like Sapir-Whorf has been disproved. Is this true, or are there nuances to SW that aren't at play here?
interesting.
i first began actually thinking "shiny and red" when i saw the picture at the beginning of the article. and i am indeed a native german speaker. but then i thought, don't be silly, it's a bridge -it's tall and strong. i don't know if the reason is that there's a lot of other languages in my head (or that it is too damn early to be awake here).
surly this is another prove of the superiority of english. native english speakers must thus have all the right feelings about their environment. what do english speakers first associate with keys and bridges?
Sigh. Is there any hope for feminism at all, then?...
Really silly to illustrate the article with that particular perspective of that particular bridge, which is so obviously big, majestic and sturdy (and very red). But being a native Hebrew speaker (bridge, m.) I fall right into type here.
Sigh. Is there any hope for feminism at all, then?...
well, as exemplified by the picture, red and shiny and strong and sturdy are not contradictions at all.
feminism all the way!
As the children's author Norman Hunter pointed out in a book as I read as a child, if the rose was called Stinkwort, it would probably not be regarded in the same light. Would anyone have developed all those forms and colours with such a marketing barrier?
Clerodendrum trichotomum var. fargesii is a very beautiful small garden tree. Just the kind of thing to create some interest in small gardens. But it is very rarely found. I have not heard that it is difficult to propagate, nor indeed, when one tracks one down, is it expensive. But, originating in China, it doesn't have a common name in English, that I am aware of. One can perhaps understand the difficulties of marketing such a plant, given its name.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clerodendrum
yes, but, since human beings all have more or less the same biological make-up and perceive things in a strongly similar way, roses would have had a hard time (and indeed have had a hard time across the languages of the world) to acquire such a name as "stinkwort".
but the text makes it sound like Sapir-Whorf has been disproved. Is this true, or are there nuances to SW that aren't at play here?
I thought that Sapir-Whorf was already widely discredited these days.
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