I'm considering this one 95% brain candy until further notice. Actually, I pretty much agree with the overall sweep of the argument (the particular structures and characters of languages influence the development of cultures), but I don't think it's really provable on an evidential, scholarly level (she herself (over)-frequently falls back on appeals to personal cross-linguistic experience in her intro. I'm reading this more to pick up the odd linguistic anecdote and the fun culutral factoid than for her argument. She takes a few fun potshots at Pinker's The Language Instinct in her introduction, basically accusing him of wanton monolinguism (the word "ethnocentrism" is fired).
Also argues that Russian as a language tends to make stronger absolute value statements vs. more circumspect English. Compares use frequency of pravda/istina vs. "truth." Not being much of a Russian scholar, I don't know how broad a semantic field pravda/istina cover, but I could certainly see it overlapping with contemporary English usage of "really" (which she doesn't mention). After lambasting one-to-one translation correspondences, she's oddly happy to use them in frequency lists.
See also:
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| The reason to study frequency lists. |
