Your personality changes when you speak another language, but that’s not always a bad thing / The Conversation

Un bell'aticolo sul Principio di Relatività Linguistica, formulato da Whorf negli anni '30.

Languages don’t just allow us to communicate – they also shape our perception of what surrounds us, and ourselves.

https://theconversation.com/your-personality-changes-when-you-speak-another-language-but-thats-not-always-a-bad-thing-245079

#Whorf #Sapir
#languages #linguistics #sociolinguistics #pragmatics #languageLearning

2/ Mein Lieblingslinguist Geoffrey Pullum hat schon in den 80ern darüber geschrieben, wo dieser Mythos herkommt. Die Kolumne ist auch in einem Buch mit dem gleichnamigen Titel erschienen: The great Eskimo vocabulary hoax.

Für alle, die sich irgendwie für Sprachwissenschaften oder auch Wissenschaft allgemein interessieren: #MustRead. Pullum ist der lustigste Linguist, den ich kenne.

https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/G/bo3684610.html

Und verantwortlich für die Katastrophe ist ein gewisser Benjamin Lee #Whorf, Amateurlinguist: „What happened was that Benjamin Lee Whorf, Connecticut fire prevention inspector and weekend language-fancier, picked up Boas' example and used it, vaguely, in his 1940 amateur linguistics article 'Science and linguistics,' which was published in MIT's promotional magazine Technology Review (Whorf was an alumnus; he had done his B.S. in chemical engineering at MIT). Our word snow would seem too inclusive to an Eskimo, our man from the Hartford Fire Insurance Company confidently asserts.“

Hier kann man den Aufsatz einzeln runterladen:

http://ling.ed.ac.uk/~gpullum/EskimoHoax.pdf