[xmca] Re: NYTimes.com: Does Your Language Shape How You Think?

[Gregory Allan Thompson <gathomps@uchicago.edu>]

My two cents (as a student of John Lucy): it was unfortunate how Deutscher threw Whorf under the bus (so to speak) but maybe this was just his way of pulling in NYT readers who are fans of Steven Pinker and who hear the name Whorf and chuckle to themselves in a high and mighty manner and then move on to the next piece (and I suspect that many of the NYT reader-ship are Steven Pinker fans).

As to the substance of the article, I thought he explained Haviland and Levinson's work fairly well even if he left out a lot of other folks' work. It's a good start, I'd say.

And I certainly find John Lucy's approach of actually reading Whorf and taking him at his word to be a more thoughtful approach (nowhere in Whorf's writing do the words "prison cell of thought" appear!). But I suspect that Deutscher will probably open up the minds of more folks (esp. the Pinker-tons) by his approach.

-greg

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