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by avmich 4030 days ago
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.

1 comments

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...