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by thechao 4023 days ago
I was immediately put off when the author trotted out Sapir-Whorf; and, not even apologetically: in its strong form! Everything in the article became suspect. S-W is not correct, end of story.
1 comments

He later mentions the argument against the strong version of S-W.

As for "S-W is not correct", that's interesting - arguments countering it are not known to me.

I'm not going to refer you to Wikipedia. Instead, I'll take the top hit off of google scholar, given the search term for "Sapir Whorf"[1]. The conclusion is in the abstract:

    """
    These findings suggest that the mastery of the English subjunctive is probably quite tangential to counterfactual reasoning in Chinese. In short, the present research yielded no support for the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.
    """
Every serious study of S-W, results in the same: no evidence.

Now, there is -minute- evidence that languages that have very short number words allows students to master the memorization of number sequences easier---the students literally have less information (in terms of phonemes) to memorize. This sort of thing is actually pretty prevalent; but it is not really what most people are thinking of when they discuss S-W.

Also, the Himba "study" about green is pretty much debunked. If you get a high-quality monitor, with good ambient lighting, go ahead and ask some colleagues to find the differently-colored green square. They'll do so, just fine, and quite quickly!

[1] http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/00100277839...