Quote #5: Roger Brown (1957)

This man has said so many brilliant things in Words and things. I need to work out the connection between 1950s psycholinguistics, early generative grammar and the emergence of information theory he's alluding to somewhere in the beginning, by the way
Read the chapter on linguistic determinism the other night. Some quotes:

"Murdock [G.P, (1949). Social Structure] has studied kinship terminology in 250 societies; he notes the the English word "aunt" applies to four distinct biological relationships. We don't have separate words for these while some other languages do. The absences of words is not the same as the absence of names. Murdock calls the four relationships "father's sister," "mother's sister," "father's brother's wife," and "mother's brother's wife". In all our examples of denotational discrepancy, it is not correct to say that one language has names for distinctions which another language cannot or does not name. It is always possible to name the categories in both languages so long as the nonlinguistic experiences are familiar. Since members of both linguistic communities are able to make differential response at the same points, we must conclude that both are able to see the differences in question. This seems to leave us with the conclusion that the world views of the two linguistic communities do not differ in this regard." (p. 235)

"Doob [(1950). Goebbel's principles of Propaganda, Public Opinion Quarterly 14:419-452] has suggested that Zipf's Law bears on Whorf's thesis. Suppose we generalize the finding beyond Zipf's formulation and propose that the length of a verbal expression (codability) provides an index of its frequency in speech, and that this, in turn, is an index of the frequency with which the relevant judgements of difference and equivalence are made. [...] I will go further and propose that a perceptual category that is frequently utilized is more available than one less frequently utilized. [...] It is proposed, really, that categories with shorter names (higher codability) are nearer the top of the cognitive deck -- more likely to be used in ordinary perception, more available for expectancies and inventions" (p. 235-236)