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From: steiny@scc.UUCP (Don Steiny)
Newsgroups: net.ai,net.nlang
Subject: Re: Re: Sanskrit (actually natural languages deficiencies)
Message-ID: <189@scc.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 19-Oct-84 17:59:33 EST
Article-I.D.: scc.189
Posted: Fri Oct 19 17:59:33 1984
Date-Received: Mon, 29-Oct-84 02:49:02 EST
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Organization: Personetics, Inc. - Santa Cruz, Calif.
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> >> ......................................  There do not seem to be any
> >> languages with any kind of expressive deficit.  ......................
> 
> 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.  
> This would seem to me to be a serious "expressive deficit".  

	When I was a linguistics student I took a class in "field methods"
where our professor (Dr. William Shipely) pretended he was a Maidu
Indian and we pretended we were linguists trying to preserve the language.
Bill is probably the only person alive who speaks this particular
branch of Maidu.

	We would ask "how do you say X" and from the questions we
tried to write a grammar of Maidu.   Doing this is a fascinating
experience that caused me to bump against some assumptions that I did
not even know I had.

	When we asked very indian questions, like "he runs like the wind".
We were shocked to find that you could not say anthing like that.
Bill claimed that the Maidu could not grammaticaly make a metaphor
or a syllogism.

	On the other hand, the Maidu could make many distinctions
that we could not make.  For instance, they have a quotative mood.
This means that if you are reporting something someone else
told you, you have to use a special verb inflection.  

	When anthropologists (linguists were a type of anthropologist
at this time) first started studying the Native American languages,
they were shocked to find that did not have the same grammatical
categories that Indo-European languages had.  For instance, several
months ago I posted part of an essay by Benjamin Whorf where he
pointed out that the Hopi have no tense and that they do not
conceive of time in sequence the way we do.

	From one point of view, these langauges lack expressive
power.  They cannot express things we find extremely important.
From still another point of view, our language lacks expressive
power because we have to kludge to say some things and there
are other things we cannot express at all.

	The point is not that every language can express all the things
that any other language can express, because this is not true.  The point
is that every language can express everything the speakers of that
language wish to express.  To say that some group or another
is lacking because they cannot express the same things we can
is politics.   The Madiu had a pleasant existance and they
lived in harmony with their enviornment.   Since the native
Americans lost their status as the dominate social groups on
this contenent, we tend to devalue their world-view.   If you
think about it, without syllogisms and metaphor there is no
basis for logic.  They could not have developed a technology
like ours.

	In Proto-Indo European, "weaver of words" was a metaphor
for "poet".  This shows that metaphor has existed for a long time
in Indo-European.  They way our societies developed might have
been preordained by the language we use to view the world.  What
would the society of the Maidu be like in 100 years, 1000 years?
We have no way of knowing, but it is mind candy to speculate.
Remember, the rules are: "no deduction, no induction." 

	The statement that "all languages have equal expressive power,"
is make to be neutral.  If we define the set of things that we
believe that are necessary for a language to have more or
less expressive power we are forced to make value judgements.
If we accept that people in every language express everything 
the could ever want to, we are led to trying to understand
the different worldviews of different people without making
a value judgement.

-- 
scc!steiny
Don Steiny - Personetics @ (408) 425-0382
109 Torrey Pine Terr.
Santa Cruz, Calif. 95060
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