I still have a dog-eared copy on my shelf from undergrad days; great read, very stimulating, and probably dead wrong -- but hey, that's rational enquiry for you.
A few quick thoughts (half-baked, it's been a long day) on other analogies before signing off:
The whole concept of 'a language' is a bit fuzzy, like the concept of 'species;' difficult to make a hard distinction between dialects (sub-species) because of the variations within a population of speakers, or to draw an absolute boundary between them. There are enormous differences between the speech of a man from the Hebrides and a man from Barbados (phonetically, some differences greater than between a Londoner speaking English and a Berliner speaking German)--but as long as they still communicate, we regard them as speaking the same English language. And evolution works on populations, not individuals (a point many seem to miss about biological evolution). Indeed, a principal mechanism for the creation of a new language is the isolation of a sub-population of speakers of the ancestral language.
If nothing else, maybe we should flag all this up so the hard-core Creationist crowd can go after a soft science like linguistics and leave the biologists in peace for a while. All of their dopiest but ever-recurring arguments can be raised, e.g., linguistics is contrary to a literal reading of the Bible, no one has ever observed one language suddenly becoming a different language in a laboratory, my great-great-granddaddy didn't speak no proto-Indo-European, there might be micro-evolution (changes within one language, from Chaucer to Shakespeare) but not macro-evolution (Proto-Germanic into English), something as complex as grammar had to have been 'designed' by a superior intelligence, what would be the use of half of a pluperfect tense, and of course--this is the clincher--linguistics leads inevitably to the obnoxious and dangerous politics of Noam Chomsky, quod erat demonstrandum
Jeepers, what a can of worms we may be opening here! If this catches on, I hope the biologists will thank us for gaining for them a respite!
TH: I still have a dog-eared copy on my shelf from undergrad days; great read, very stimulating, and probably dead wrong -- but hey, that's rational enquiry for you.
I think the Whorf-Sapir idea is interesting but wrong, personally. I was totally turned on by some of the citations from Indian languages, like "he's cleaning the rifle with a ramrod" coming out something like "he is causing a reciprocal motion of a dry spot in a long hollow thing, using his hand".
I've read a bunch of Amerind linguistics since, but I've never really gotten my head around polysynthesis. The Languages of Native North America (Cambridge Language Surveys) by Marianne Mithun gives the best description of it that I've seen. I highly recommend it if you're at all interested in such things. She dismisses Greenberg's Amerindian hypothesis, but I'm convinced it's right. See this example *t'ina *t'ana *t'una (meaning "son", "child", "daughter", found throughout the Americas) or any of Merritt Ruhlen's books.
The whole concept of 'a language' is a bit fuzzy, like the concept of 'species;' difficult to make a hard distinction between dialects (sub-species) because of the variations within a population of speakers, or to draw an absolute boundary between them.
There is an exact parallel with ring species, called "dialect chains". There are some in Eskimo regions, in Bantu Africa, and until a few hundred years ago, between Italy and France. I find it fascinating to be able to go from Italian, by small steps, always maintaining communication, and wind up with French.
Another parallel, which I pointed out on a thread a week or so ago, is that linguists can make very educated guesses as to what PIE's sounds, parts of speech, grammar and vocabulary were like, just like the biologists who figured out an ancestral hormone and receptor.
I tried reading Chomsky when I was in college, and it bored me stiff. Rather like pseudo science, there were a lot of assumptions and damn little empirical research (and most of that in English).
When I discovered Greenberg, on the other hand, I was floored. I predict that twenty years from now, Chomsky will be a footnote, and Greenberg will be considered a combination of Linnaeus and Darwin.