Humor On seeing Storm 17 Oct 2010 I do not often envy my good friend PZ NamebeginningwithM. Sure, he has the associate professorship, the Trophy Wife™, the millions of readers and most of all the Minions. But I am above all that. I am humble, and devoid of unwarranted certainties. And money. I can even forgive him… Read More
Administrative So I says.. 5 May 200918 Sep 2017 I told ’em! I told ’em! So I did. Millennium hand and shrimp! Read More
Language is a tool? (If the words weren’t there, there wouldn’t be a right one that wasn’t being recollected.)
Check out this recent blog post from the same site http://www.calamitiesofnature.com/blog/?b=321 Awesome!
@enigMan, that language is a tool for manipulating interest systems, others’ and one’s own, is the idea that got me my PhD, back when
Long before I had even heard of a Worf (the Klingon one without the ‘h’) I remember reading that there was no direct English equivalent for the French word epanouissement and being struck by the possibility that it might be possible to talk and think about things in one language but not in another and wonder how that might affect a culture. Would it be true, as Chancellor Gorkon comments in Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country, that “You have not experienced Shakespeare until you have read him in the original Klingon.” Is there any support for at least the weak version of the hypothesis?
Personally, I think that any alien language which resembles the gutteral utterances of odd-toed ungulates will tend to make a culture a bit beastly. I call it the Worf-Tapir Hypothesis