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Small-Scale Question Sunday for December 25, 2022

Merry Christmas, everyone!

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As @Aransentin said, the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis has been pretty thoroughly debunked (at least the strong form, and most linguists don't even take the weak form seriously anymore). There's been little to no evidence that language actually shapes culture or cognition; rather, it seems to be the other way around.

Which is why Lojban has never been more than a curiosity, whereas Esperanto still has a fairly large community. Lojban is interesting but started with a premise that they built a language around; natural languages don't develop around concepts like predicate logic. Esperanto was actually developed with the intention of being easy and natural to speak (at least for European language speakers).