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From: dts@gitpyr.UUCP (Danny Sharpe)
Newsgroups: net.ai,net.nlang
Subject: Re: natural language deficiencies?
Message-ID: <329@gitpyr.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 9-Nov-84 17:49:13 EST
Article-I.D.: gitpyr.329
Posted: Fri Nov  9 17:49:13 1984
Date-Received: Sat, 10-Nov-84 10:20:20 EST
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Organization: Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA
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...

> The lack of a syntactic feature does not necessarily mean a communicative
> deficiency. And in any case it is not clear that if a language cannot
> communicate some certain meaning it is deficient - maybe the native speakers
> of that language have no need to express that meaning.

I don't take it as given that there exist any concepts that some language
can't express, because I'm not sure what it means to say that a language
"can't express" an idea. One thing that most people in this discussion
seem to have overlooked is the fact that the words don't carry all the
meaning.

The words you are reading now are arousing ideas in your mind. I have no
direct control over those ideas. All I can do is try to chose my words
so that they will evoke the ideas I want them to in the minds of the
majority of those people who bother to read this. If you fail to properly
understand what I am trying to say, whose fault is it? Mine for choosing
the wrong words? Yours for having the wrong ideas? English's for not
having a single word which encompasses everything I'm trying to say?

I've had discussions on this topic before with friends, in which I took
the position that there are things that can't be expressed in English.
But now I think that's a naive viewpoint because so much depends on
mutual understanding between the persons involved. I asked a Dutch
person about "gezellig" and she explained it so that I think I
understand. The closest single-word synonym I could think of in English
is "homey" but that's not really anywhere near being an exact equivalent.

But now, if someone said to me, "Homey. You know, in the Dutch sense,"
I would have a good idea of what they meant. English will have
communicated an idea that many people on the net have been saying it
can't.

-- Either Argle-Bargle IV or someone else. --

Danny Sharpe
School of ICS
Georgia Insitute of Technology, Atlanta Georgia, 30332
...!{akgua,allegra,amd,hplabs,ihnp4,seismo,ut-ngp}!gatech!gitpyr!dts