>From one current thread, in which Dr. Brin defends his idiosyncratic use of "feudalism":
>>Those who want a return to pyramid-shaped hierarchical/inherited social >>orders. >> >>Yes, yes, I know that some pedants will define 'feudalism' narrowly to >>restrict it to a strictly Tenth Century European system of obligation >>exchanges between feif-holders and vassals. Snore. > >Boring to YOU. But interesting to others. >From another thread that's heading toward a discussion of the benefits of multilingual abilities: > ... learning _any_ language will result in a more comprehensive > view of the world. Syntax alone leads to associations between words, > i.e. ideas, which one could not have imagined before. Assuming one is smart enough to remember Dr. Brin's usage of "feudalism" is different from the ways economists and political historians use the word, does the awareness of both sets of usages count toward "a more comprehensive view of the world?" Is there a threshold where this happens? The degenerate case of this concept is when one uses words in ways nobody else understands at all. I don't imagine that counts toward a more comprehensive view of the world. But I do agree knowing more than one language does have the benefits mentioned above. So where does the benefit begin to kick in? Is it a function of how much the new usage serves to define the in-group as an entity apart from those outside of the group? (I'm not claiming to know -- I'm sort of at the group-of-one stage.) --- * [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://just-john.com/cn/rfe.shtml * _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
