Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Posting-Version: version B 2.10.2 9/5/84; site gloria.UUCP Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!genrad!wjh12!harvard!seismo!rochester!rocksvax!rocksanne!sunybcs!gloria!colonel 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