Tuesday, June 16, 2009

Another take on diversity

from Seed Magazine Scientists offer new insight into what to protect of the world's rapidly vanishing languages, cultures, and species.
See also ... a global effort is underway to collect and cache the genetic resources contained in seeds.
Lera Boroditsky on HOW DOES OUR LANGUAGE SHAPE THE WAY WE THINK?.

Max Liberman's comments on Lera Boroditsky's earlier work Sapir/Whorf: sex (pro) and space (anti):
"However, there are a few recent pieces of (pro- and anti-) Whorfian work that I can wholeheartedly recommend. On the pro side, Lera Boroditsky has been doing some neat stuff. Try her paper on Sex, Syntax and Semantics, for example. On the anti side, Peggy Li and Lila Gleitman have a great paper Turning the tables: language and spatial reasoning, debunking the theory (due to the MPI Language and Cognition group) that Mayan speakers have different customary spatial-coordinate systems from Dutch or English speakers."

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