[!@#$%!]

Originally Posted by Glice

At the risk of not following the herd, I have to say that I think Mr !@#$% is being a little unfair to Mr 2600. The separation between Chomsky and Sapir-Whorff - who are two seperate people whose position is bolstered by their inadvertant cohesion - for me is that Chomsky is aware of, and indebted to, Wittgenstein's latter period; his is a highly politicised awareness of language; the Sapir-Whorff hypothesis is only political in so far as it's prescriptive, and is thus fascististic. For those slightly less aware, 'fascist' is not a negative term in all cases, but I'd be surprised if I had to tell that to two protagonists who've clearly read Nietzsche.

I suppose !#@$ doesn't like the miscegenation of compariring properly scientific with the anthroplogical-linguistic; I think it's entirely legitimate within the realms of simile.

I must now prepare to leave, perhaps I will write at length later? Who knows...

no yee yes no yes no no yes no yes

sort of no-- see, it works like this

it's not just the simile-- some similes work very well. but even as a simile this would not work. when you say "miscegenation", that's an applicable metaphor; could be an applicable simile with a change of words

oversimplifying things: while relativity gives us a picture of a different universe altogether than newtonian physics, newtonian physics are still a good approximation to relativity at low speeds. in other words, even in a relativistic universe, newtonian physics still serves well engineers, mechanics, artillery men, etc., working at speeds nowhere near the speed of light.

sapir-whorf and chomsky are antagnists, diametrical opposites, mutually exclusive; sapir-whorf is not a subset of chomsky, sapir-whorf doesn't "work most of the time" whereas chomsky "works all the time". that's just a load of balls.

so the simile is HRONG.

about the political implications of each theory-- political analysies make for very poor evaluations of scientific theory, donna haraway notwithstanding. still, if one is going to look at that, think of new labor's notion that you can change the world by changing words-- that's a typical application of sapir-whorf nonsense. generally speaking, foucault follows sapir-whorf, and so do all the stalinists and social engineers-- social anthropologists thinking that the human subject is infinitelly malleable by language/culture. 1984's newspeak is a sapir-whorf fantasy as well. but here's a funny thing, our genes know a lot more than our culture-- now that you could say is even more "deterministic" (whatever it is that you want to say with that), but it's also more "democratic", in the sense that everyone is born with more or less the same tools.

but this is a road i don't really wanna go down unless we switch from discussing science (linguistics) to discussing bollocks (humanities). in which case i require alcohol.

and let's please not so casually call nietzsche fascistic-- il duce was a poor sad cartoon, and marinetti was a clown. nietzsche mocked german nationalism and ridiculed obedience to the state, and saw the jews as the salvation of european culture. on the other hand, he wanted some sort of aristocracy, but that had nothing to do with the mental cabbage farts of the nazis, benito, etc.