Re: Sapir-WhorFreakiness

Quoting "Mark P. Line" <mark@...>:

> Steg Belsky said:
> > Weird article a friend of mine showed me...
> >
> > http://www.cnn.com/2004/TECH/science/08/19/science.counting.reut/
> > index.html
>
>
> Actually, Piraha is much freakier than the article in _Science_ lets on.
> Also, there may be a reason for much of the freakiness in Piraha that has
> nothing to do with Sapir-Whorf relativity:
>
> http://lings.ln.man.ac.uk/info/staff/DE/cultgram.pdf
Freaklang, indeed.

I usually respond to claims that people X somewhere far away think and feel the
same way as you and me by denying that I think and feel the same way as you,
but perhaps I should in the future simply link to this instead.

Wonderful allophonics, BTW. [n] and [g] as allophones of the same sound is
almost too good to be true. Given that /b/ has an allophone /m/, one wonders if
there used to be an /d/ phoneme that merged with /g/.

Less freaky, but the language is also one with different phonemic inventories
for men and women. How and why do such systems arise?

                                                 Andreas

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