Saturday, March 21, 2015

Lera Boroditsky

This video interview with Lera is from 2010 but I find it exciting none the less because she emphasizes that the current thinking on the Sapir Whorf hypothesis has swung back to the pro side. But a recent discussion led me to wonder if Aristotelian Categorical Statements are the Western requirement for true / false statements being identifiable as true or false (That is the A, E, I, O statement forms) and those categorical statements require the linguistic copula for their structure, but then if a language like Chinese does not have a copula, how do languages like Chinese interpret true and false? A second issue I think similar to the first concerns the human universality of music as a language. Would Beethoven being almost universally appreciated - except perhaps in countries were music is illegal - haram!, does that mean .... what regarding Sapir-Whorf?

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