About a month ago, I ran across this web post. Yesterday, I ran across this article, which is excerpted from a new book I’m going to have to read. Fascinating stuff.
My personal take on Sapir-Whorf is that language doesn’t provide an absolute limit to what you can think about. Instead, it limits what you can think about easily. If the first were true, then how would any new concept make it into language in the first place?
An interesting personal sidelight is that I remember having an absolute internal compass until about the age of 11. That was about the time my family left England – I wonder if I’d internalized the subliminal clues where I lived, and coming back to the US changed the clues enough to disrupt my compass for good?