Re: CHAT: cultural interpretation [was Re: THEORY: language and the brain]

Quoting Stone Gordonssen <stonegordonssen@...>:

> >This does vary, though.  Southerners are more risk-averse
> >than Northerners, which is one reason the stereotype of
> >Northerners in the South is of rude boorishness, however unfair
> >that might be.
>
> Well, yes and no. My fav take on this comes from a personal experience my
> partner, I and a Danish exchange student had in 1987 at a Ben & Jerry's ice
> cream shop in Atlanta. Bjarne, our exchange student, was trying to decide
> on a flavor...
[snip anecdote]

Well, I wasn't claiming that there is a fundamental difference
in the frequency of ignorance in various regions, ignorance being
quite general throughout the human race.  I was suggesting that
the manner in which ignorance is expressed differs.  These two
instances of ignorance are qualitatively different in the following
sense:  the former (in Chicago) makes a positive claim ("Oh, that's
so boring!"), while the latter (in Atlanta) admits ignorance by asking
questions, which shocking as they may implicitly be, do not in
themselves make false claims about existence which the former might
in principle do.  (FWIW, I find ignorance to be more or less equally
frequent among non-Americans as among Americans I have met. I had
similar experiences as your exchange student in a bar in Munich and
in downtown Rome.)

 =========================================================================
Thomas Wier            "I find it useful to meet my subjects personally,
Dept. of Linguistics    because our secret police don't get it right
University of Chicago   half the time." -- octogenarian Sheikh Zayed of
1010 E. 59th Street     Abu Dhabi, to a French reporter.
Chicago, IL 60637