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Re: Language superiority, improvement, etc.

From:Christopher Palmer <reid@...>
Date:Tuesday, October 13, 1998, 17:39
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/ "The Young Patriot Essay Contest will be discontinued due to the indolence and torpor of the modern youth." -- <www.theonion.com>