Re: All languages are equally fit
- From: Hans Aberg <haberg_20080406@xxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 28 Sep 2009 14:24:08 +0200
António Marques wrote:
In another group, when someone recently opined that some languages
are more elevated and thus more fit for abstraction, I answered that
linguists agree that all languages are equally fit to express any
thought, with the qualification that some may have a pre-existing
lexicon in a field but all are equally fit to create new terms for
anything from internal resources. I was challenged to provide support
for that, and now I realize that if I've ever seen it in print in a
linguistics book I can't remember where. Any suggestions?
Well, I don't rwally think it works like that. The first question is
'more fit for what?'.
Perhaps one can get input from the situation of computer languages, which are mostly designed to fit they needs of humans (computers just use machine code, and seem perfectly happy with that). If they just have some basic logical constructs, they become Turing complete, meaning that formally, given arbitrary amounts of time and space, they can compute exactly the same set of algorithms.
But they differ vastly in what structures they are fit to describe, and features like time and space, and interfacing, are of utmost importance in practical applications. These languages are usually quite fit for what they were designed for; heated discussions about their cons and pros may be around features that were not part of the original design.
From natural languages, I recall an example of an English song expressing sadness through weather by "Ever since you left me, it has rained all day" or something, which was translated into some Indian(?) language, spoken in a region where did not have much rain, and when it came, it was one the most happy events. So the song was changed into "Ever since you left me, the sun has been shining all day along".
So here, both languages have the equal capacity of expressing basic human emotions such as sadness, but the differ (perhaps) in their capabilities of doing it via weather. This is not really due to limitations of the human language, but that human experience did not find need to add it. It would be easy to add it, as illustrated by the following case:
The codetalkers of World War II:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codetalkers
The native languages did not have capability to express such military operations, but a code was added as to provide it (for example "turtle" might mean "tank"). At the time this was much faster than encode and decode English by some encryption method. The Japanese caught a Navajo, but though he recognized the language in the intercepted military communication, he could not understand the dialog.
Hans
.
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