Warning: I read a bunch of stuff about linguistics. I find it interesting.

I recently read a joke ( Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal ) that mentioned the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I don’t often see jokes about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

According to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, language limits what you can think about. That is, if a language doesn’t have a word for something, then a speaker of that language can’t think of it.

Newspeak in George Orwell’s 1984 used similar idea. Basically, if you don’t have a word for revolution, then you can’t think about it.

To me, this all sounds like a load of codswallop. Where did they think that new ideas and words came from?

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal
Linguistic relativity
Newspeak
codswallop