Re: Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (was: RE: Allowing the sweet voice of reason into our lives)

From: Charles Hixson (charleshixsn@earthlink.net)
Date: Tue Aug 07 2001 - 09:32:41 MDT

Damien Broderick wrote:
> At 06:46 PM 8/6/01 -0700, Lee wrote:
>
>
>>Are you familiar with the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis?
>>
>
> It turned out to be (almost entirely) wrong.
>
> Look up Berlin and Kay, or Eleanor Rosch. This was established at least two
> decades ago.
>
> Damien Broderick
>
>

Some forms of it were found to be wrong. OTOH, some of it is definitely
right. Have you ever tried to do numerical analysis in SNOBOL? Yet
SNOBOL is a theoretically complete language (i.e., it can be proven that
anything that can be done in any other computer language, can also be
done in SNOBOL). So it is clearly correct in principle.

Even knowing Fortran (a language that makes thinking about numerical
analysis relatively easy [without being a Mathematica, where the
language itself contains the knowledge]) doesn't help much if you must
translate it into SNOBOL to create the formal expression. 

-- 
Charles Hixson

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