But The Thing Is...

Sappy French sunset poster: Encore un coucher de soleil sans toi...tu me manques"Whorf was (mostly) wrong. People may think differently, but it's not because of their languages.

Behavioral differences linked to linguistic differences are extremely small , and difficult to detect. A language is not a culture and people with radically different cultures may speak the same language.

Different languages are mostly just different ways of saying the same thing.

For example: in English you say "I miss you." In French, translated literally, you say "you miss me" (tu me manques) to mean the same thing. But there is no evidence that French and English speakers think or feel differently about missing others.

Next: Universality of translation

[Here's a bit more detail about this issue: A really strong version of Sapir-Whorf suggests that any linguistic differences between languages will be reflected in differences in thought. But, accepting this leads to some fairly strange ideas. For example, compare English and Spanish. In Spanish (and other Romance languages) you can express the future tense with a single word. In English that is impossible (for example: Spanish "comeré" English "I will eat." There is no simpler form in English). Does that mean English speakers think about the future differently than Spanish speakers? If so, in what way? Or again, in Spanish, for certain verbs (those ending in ar), there is no difference in verb form in the first person plural (we) between the present and past tense. For example "caminamos" can be a complete sentence and can mean either "We walk" or "We walked." Does that mean that Spanish speakers are conceptually unable to distinguish the present and past when they talk about walking with groups of people of which they are a member? Of course, that's absurd...but it's not so different than what Whorf was claiming about Hopi verbs.

It should be added that Whorf was apparently not a competent speaker of Hopi. There have been numerous rebuttals to Whorf's claims and these include details about how time is expressed in Hopi. For example, Ekkehart Malotki wrote extensively on Hopi perceptions of time in Hopi Time: A Linguistic Analysis of the Temporal Concepts in the Hopi Language. You can find an OK 8 minute video on the subject at this link.

*Translation of the picture: Another sunset without you... I miss you.