--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, Duveyoung <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > Hey Card, > > Have you any opinion about the Sapir Whorf hypothesis?
I've been pondering on it for a while now. At least on *emotional level* various languages seem to have very distinct effects on me. I don't like the standard Finnish very much. Some regional dialects OTOH are quite "amusing" to listen to. And for instance when an Estonian speaks Finnish well, that seems much easier to my ear than, say, the "working class" accent of my own home town. Sometimes when I occasionally watch "Finlands Svenska Television" (Swedish TV of Finland), and after that change to a Finnish speaking channel, the negative emotional effect might be quite strong. But I guess it's quite natural that one's mother tongue has such emotional load, both pleasant and unpleasant, that is lacking in a foreign language. This might be a trivial thing, but as an example of how languges might affect one's thinking is the difference of the (what's here called) "rection" (rektio: "the case governed by a verb", I think) of many verbs in Finnish compared to English (and many other IE languages, too, I guess). In Finnish one reads *from* a book, buys *from* a store, finds something *from* some place, that is, one uses the elative [sic!] case in stead of the inessive, which corresponds for instance 'in' or 'at' in English. > > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sapir-Whorf_hypothesis > > Or, Noam Chomsky's transformational grammar? I've blissfully forgotten most of that little I once knew about TGG. But I seem to recall I kinda liked it, though. A more useful tool in interpreting e.g. suutras (especially the tricky compound words like "viraama-pratyayaabhyaasa-puurvaH") is the IC analysis of structural syntax: http://facweb.furman.edu/~wrogers/syntax/ic.htm
