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Comment by michaelneale | Hacker News Reader

I was listening to a podcast (I think) where someone who had recently studied linguistics was saying that Sapir-Whorf has been almost discredited in academic communities for some time, yet it lives on as a "myth" for people outside of the academic communities.

I just can't find any reference of this. This is pretty common thing, ideas from a long time ago tend to stay in the publics collective memory as still being current.

The one that springs to mind is the "breathing" you see pregnant-in-labour women doing in hollywood movies (yet this technique was thrown out decades ago as having no effect at all). Yet it lives on in circles of people who aren't experts and repeat it amongst themselves as if they are.

A quick search didn't yield anything like this for Sapir-Whorf though.

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http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ISBN=0060976519/portlandpa... - has a little info on it.

I'd be very interested to see some references discrediting it.

Steven Pinker's wonderful book "The Language Instinct" claims the the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is bunk. It's not the strongest part of the book, but still well worth reading.

As a taste, Pinker tracks the evolution of the myth that the eskimos have more words for snow than English-speakers. He explains how this myth was manufactured by anthropologists who wanted to give credibility to Sapir-Whorf, and eventually took on the status of a "fact", appearing in textbooks and so on.

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, in a nutshell, is "language influences thought." The classic debunking example is the urban legend, "Eskimos have over a hundred words for 'snow.'" This is often overextended to imply, "...and so Eskimos must conceive of snow on a whole 'nother level, dude!"

But our non-Eskimo language doesn't fundamentally limit our capacity to comprehend the nuances of snow. We just add modifiers (e.g., 'wet' and 'fluffy') to "snow", instead of using a different word. And, actually, it turns out the Eskimos use modifiers, too.

The Language Instinct is a great read. Pinker's got a real talent for popular science writing that's accessible but not dumbed down. Check out his first hit, How the Mind Works, if you're interested in general cognitive science.

The Eskimo example isn't a very good one because English has lots of words for snow/frozen things, like glacier, frost, sleet, slush, etc.

yeah that sounds familiar. These sorts of things become self perpetuating as facts.

A few books on amazon have criticism of it, that is all I have seen. But no "mythbusters" episode ;)

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