Re: Language superiority, improvement, etc.

On Tue, 13 Oct 1998, Tom Wier wrote:

> > Of course not all languages are the same in their ability to communicate
> > specific things effectively -- it depends on the community of speakers.
> > Languages are like organisms in that they evolve in reaction to their
> > environment -- their environment is the semantic demands their speakers
> > put on them. I think it's quite safe to assume that humans of all cultures
> > face problems of roughly equivalent complexity, and they need a language
> > capable of dealing with that.
>
> But I think that this explanation is wanting some, in that it's not so
> much the languages that are lacking in ability to communicate, as it is
> the people with whom the language is associated that, because they live
> in a society where a given concept might not be known or conceived of.
It's meaningless to say that people lack the ability to communicate a
certain thing. If they come to have a need to communicate that thing,
their language will evolve to allow them -- often quite quickly.

> It is the people's lack of experience, or rather lack of desire to express
> a certain experience in language, that causes a _language_ to be lacking
> in a certain word, not the language causing the people to lack an
> experience.
Welcome to the magical land of What I Said the First Time.

_____________________________________________________________________________
Christopher Reid Palmer : reid@pconline.com : www.pconline.com/~reid/

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