Deepti (दीप्ती) asked for elaboration on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis today at lunch, which brought about some interesting conversation on the subject of languages affecting the way we see the world.

Since I mentioned the article, I figured I had best read it again more carefully. Yup, it remains unchanged (and unproven) from when I learned about it in my linguistics and cognitive science class all those years ago. But what a little gem I found in the Wikipedia entry along the way: E-Prime, a subset of English that doesn’t allow forms of the verb “to be.”