social engineering/soziale Manipulation

The so called Sapir-Whorf-Hypothesis, stating that language shapes thinking, has been in the curricula of many frehsmen studying linguistics a long time. It may be considered a paradigm for hypotheses that never have been formulated positively by their inventors (let me coin the notion „non-positive hypothesis“ for this) and constantly have been victimized in attempts to substantiate it. I won´t go into details for Sapir-Whorf here as some basic aspects can be found in Ekkehard Malotki´s book „Hopi Time: A Linguistic Analysis of the Temporal Concepts in the Hopi Language.“ 1983.
Neither do I tend to scandalize the history of linguistics at this point. (mehr …)