> --- Roger Mills <romilly@...> wrote:
> > Andreas Johansson wrote:
> > >While this seems to be question of education style
> > and ideology rather than
> > >of anything language-related*, I'd like to point
> > out that I know several
> > >people who now the table of elements by heart (in
> > Swedish, but from the
> > >Mandarin point of view Swedish is essentially
> > English). Also, it's very
> > >questionable whether the average person NEEDS to
> > know all the elements.
> >
> > Alas, I knew most of it during highschool
> > chemistry...and wish I could
> > remember even a bit of it now. Since I always liked
> > useless and otherwise
> > marginal things, I was quite fascinated by the "Rare
> > Earths", always printed
> > off to the side and ignorable. Even the teacher
> > couldn't say much about
> > them. What, I still wonder, are the uses of
> > ytterbium (??) and all those
> > other strange elements?
> Answer: I think the ELL give a better answer than I
> P4538 said: "S.C.Gilfillan argued that technology
> develops through gradual evolution and accretion of
> details, and that the idea of a distinct invention is
> conceptually ambiguous. Therefore, 'invention' is a
> matter of language, not physical reality. "
> "Ogburn held that the accumulation of inventions
> followed an exponential curve, because many new
> inventions are mere combinations of preexisting
> elements and the more such elements exist the greater
> the number of new ones that can be achieved by adding
> them together. But the individual human mind is
> limited, and thus there is a limit to how many
> technical ideas a person can remember." "As
> anthropologist Leslie A. White puts it, like all other
> aspects of culture, technology depends upon the human
> capacity for symbolling. Language, he says,
> transformed the nonprogressive, noncumulative tool
> process of anthropoids into a cumulative and
> progressive process in the human species." P4536 said:
> "A substantial fraction of all words used in ordinary
> speech, and perhaps a majority of all nouns in modern
> languages, are technological. That is, they name
> elements of tools, machines, chemical processes,
> agricultural techniques, transportation systems and
> electronic communications network. More than a million
> species of animals and plants have been named, but
> George Basalla noted that three times as many
> inventions have been patented in the United States
> alone." "Even under more restricted definitions,
> technological terminology constitutes a substantial
> portion of lexicon, and the processes by which these
> terms emerge present interesting challenges for
> linguistics."
> Su Cheng Zhong
>
>
http://shopping.yahoo.com.au - Yahoo! Shopping
> - Free CDs for thousands of Priority Shoppers!