anth103cagainstlangthought

This article displays the debate that we will be discussing in class tomorrow. The main point that I would like to point out is that the author says that the classic linguist who first came up with this idea some 60 years ago did not support any of the evidence for his claim and did not think very clearly about it. For instance, he claimed that if a culture doesn't have a word for something, it cannot be understood by those people. Not true!

Working off of Kerry's idea, the author also mentioned that the same goes for tenses and speaking about the future or past. He said that Native Americans for example have a very different idea of time than us because they don't have future tenses. Therefore claiming it would be hard for us to understand in conversation. I disagree with this because just because the Native Americans don't have a way of forming tenses such as those in the English language, they still have a concept of time and just represent it in a different structured way. It isn't that they lack the idea, they just communicate it differently based off of their culture.