On Sep 19, 2:12 am, greg <g...@cosc.canterbury.ac.nz> wrote: > Hendrik van Rooyen wrote: > > there would be no way for a language to change > > and grow, if it were literally true that you cannot think of something that > > you have no word for. > > From my own experience, I know that it's possible for me to > think about things that I don't have a word for. An example > occured once when I was developing a 3D game engine, and > I was trying to think of a name for the thing that exists > where two convex polyhedra share a face, except that the > face is missing (it's hard to explain even using multiple > words). > > I couldn't think of any word that fully expressed the precise > concept I had in mind. Yet I was clearly capable of thinking > about it, otherwise I wouldn't have noticed that I was missing > a word! > > So in my humble opinion, the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf > hypothesis is bunk. :-) > > -- > Greg
You have a good point here Greg! The break down in communication is a result of verbal language. What is verbal language? It *is* simply a way to reconstruct electrical signals from the "senders" brain to the "receivers" brain, that's it! One can easily grasp very complicated ideas (even abstract ideas) in ones mind in the flash of a nano second! However, reconstucting those same electrical signals and synapses in the mind of another human by means of *fancy* grunts-and-groans, is sometimes an exercise in asininity! You can think of natural language as exporting the state of "program" to file so "program2" can parse the file and re-create the state of "program1" within itself -- very inefficient and very, very ugly! All the "hailer's" of languages who make claims of natural language's beauty and elegance should give some real thought to the problems of human communication! Natural language is kludgy at best, and will NEVER be an elegant system! Hopefully i have help to successfully reconstruct this concept in your brain...? -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
