Sapir-Whorf

Anna Wierzbicka has updated and systematized the sapir-whorf thesis while also identifying a small number (~60) of "semantic primes" that are found in all languages.

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Imprisoned in English, then Experience, Evidence and Sense. Those are most closely related to Anglo politics, but also very good examples of her whole approach.

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Yes, very eye-opening.

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Every language is like that, but what irritates her is, I think, the presumption of universality on the part of Anglos--it's one thing to assume your way of thinking is right, it's another to be unable to imagine there can be another way of thinking. She's a Polish immigrant to Australia, and occasionally she discloses little autobiographical details which illustrate the devastation of Anglo concepts on other ways of life, along with Anglo obliviousness. (E.g., a little anecdote, I forget in which book, of one of her children saying her (Wierzbicka's) decision was not "fair"--"fair" being one of those Anglo words that doesn't translate to any other language but is nevertheless assumed to be universal.) Ultimately she's a multiculturalist liberal herself, because she thinks undermining the hegemony of English opens up the possibilities for new cultural dialogues--which may be true, but those dialogues don't need to take place in liberal terms. You'll see that in Experience, Evidence and Sense, she pretty much shows that english speakers are really speaking "Lockean." (And elsewhere that German speakers are really speaking "Lutheran.")