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From: colonel@gloria.UUCP (George Sicherman)
Newsgroups: net.ai,net.nlang
Subject: natural language deficiencies?
Message-ID: <619@gloria.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 20-Oct-84 22:03:52 EDT
Article-I.D.: gloria.619
Posted: Sat Oct 20 22:03:52 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 23-Oct-84 05:56:41 EDT
References: <12582@sri-arpa.UUCP> <12300003@uicsl.UUCP> <194@oliveb.UUCP>
Organization: SUNY-Buffalo Confuser Science
Lines: 28

[This is not a sentence.]

> This struck a choard.  I remember a PBS TV show about the Australian
> aborigines and the difficulties studying them.  There is apparently no
> way to phrase "what if" types of questions.  The anthropologists had to
> tell them a thing was so, get their response, and then tell them it was
> not so.
> 
> This would seem to me to be a serious "expressive deficit".  Any
> aborigines on the net care to verify this?

	A general semanticist named Harrington whose first name
	I have forgotten said that he knew an Indian who was
	fluent in his tribal language and also in ours.  Harring-
	ton asked the Indian if there were such words (meanings)
	as "could" and "should" in his Indian language.  The
	Indian was quiet for a while, then shook his head.  "No,"
	he said.  "Things just are."

			Barry Stevens, _Don't Push the River_ (1970)

Expressive deficiency?  Or a more accurate modeling of reality?

See also the "Counterfactuals" dialogue in Hofstadter's _Godel, Escher,
Bach._
-- 
Col. G. L. Sicherman
...seismo!rochester!rocksanne!rocksvax!sunybcs!gloria!colonel