Language may shape human thought

Language may shape human thought
newscientist.com

You don't think the same way after learning LISP, Erlang, or...

I've studied multiple different human languages over the years, and have also studied the methods of linguistics fieldwork used when scientists encounter previously unknown languages. I find it interesting that the article says Gordon's work is the "first convincing evidence" for strong linguistic relativity, as the strong linguistic relativity claim is a claim that has been made over and over again, so I guess the previous claims are mostly doubted. I doubt the claim here, as I doubt the previous claims. Peter Gordon has spent most of his career attempting to produce publications from his field work with this tiny tribe, but he hasn't even convinced other colleagues who do field work there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pirah%C3%A3_people#Language

"Some researchers, such as Prof. Peter Gordon of Columbia University, claim that the Pirahã are incapable of learning numeracy. His colleague, Prof. Daniel L. Everett, on the other hand, argues that the Pirahã are cognitively capable of counting; they simply choose not to do so. They believe that their culture is complete and does not need anything from outside cultures."

If the scientists and the subjects start out communicating using mostly gestures, and perhaps a language that one side or the other had acquired only poorly as a second language, how does either side know the full range of communication available in the language of the other? (This is one of the defects of much cross-cultural research in linguistics--something is declared to be "impossible" for speakers of one language by investigators who didn't grow up in a community of native speakers of that language.) Here's a link to a PowerPoint describing the study:

http://ling.umd.edu/~zukowski/courses/Spring2005/hon218L/Cha...

People do learn from engaging in new activities--including speaking new languages--and also from entering new environments while continuing to use their native languages. As always in such studies, the difficult task is disentangling what people learn from a new language and what people learn from the environment that surrounds them, whatever the language. Some forms of learning produce "imprinting," which then prevents highly malleable learning on the same issue, but it's not clear that any human language does much to constrain thinking about truly universal concepts of human experience.

The submitted article was submitted here with the (tentative) original title. An even more cautious title might be "Researcher who has devoted his career to obscure tribe thinks that the tribe is proof of a controversial concept, but his colleague disagrees."

* http://brandonbyars.com/2008/05/13/beating-sapir-whorf/

* The creator of ruby on the "The power and philosophy of ruby: or how to create Babel-17" [1][2][3]

However these usually imply the weak version of Sapir Whorf, not the strong one.

[1] http://www.rubyist.net/~matz/slides/oscon2003/mgp00001.html

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity#cite_note...

[3]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity#cite_ref-...