Obese? No Retirement Savings? Perhaps It's Because of the Language You Speak

Fascinating. For discussions on similar questions do a search on HN for "Sapir Whorf":

http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=sapir+whorf

In particular, we have:

How language shapes thought (scientificamerican.com) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2594625

Sapir-Whorf with Programming Languages (nklein.com) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2374796

In what language do deaf people think? (straightdope.com) http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1505365

... and many, many more.

Sapir-Whorf has fallen out of favor, and perhaps in its original, or more correctly "more extreme" form it is not true, but there are so many studies and anecdotes that polyglots I speak with claim it's "obviously true. Sort of."

So this article is another piece of evidence in the attempt to construct a model of what's really true, and to avoid the unseemly trap of "linguistic relativism."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_hypothesis

I'm a bit skeptical. The lines between what makes a language "strong future-time-reference" and "weak future-time-reference" aren't clear cut. All languages have ways of separating future from present. Choosing a slightly different way of categorising languages makes the correlation with savings dissapear.

http://languagesoftheworld.info/language-and-mind/you-save-w...