From newshub.ccs.yorku.ca!ists!helios.physics.utoronto.ca!news-server.ecf!utgpu!cs.utexas.edu!usc!elroy.jpl.nasa.gov!ucla-cs!rutgers!psinntp!psinntp!norton!brian Sun May 31 19:04:25 EDT 1992
Article 5936 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: brian@norton.com (Brian Yoder)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Grounding and Symbols
Message-ID: <1992May27.055733.16286@norton.com>
Date: 27 May 92 05:57:33 GMT
References: <1992May21.193329.37003@spss.com>
Organization: Symantec / Peter Norton
Lines: 26

markrose@spss.com (Mark Rosenfelder) writes:
> In article <594@trwacs.fp.trw.com> erwin@trwacs.fp.trw.com (Harry Erwin) writes:
> >Grounding depends on your language. In Russian, bachelor is kholostyak,
> >which means "hairless one" or eunuch.
         ^^^^^
> I assume you mean "derives from"?  If kholostyak simply means eunuch, then
> it doesn't mean bachelor.

Interestingly enough, a very large number of the common words in any language 
have direct correspondence to another word in most other languages (I don't 
remember the statistics right off hand, but it's something like 90%).  For 
example, there is a word that translates one for one for "Tree", "Bowl", "Dirt",
"Mother", "Ocean" in English, Russian, Japanese, Spanish, French...

For those of you out there who think that word correspondences are just 
arbitrary and not grounded in reality, how do you explain these similarities?
Is it a grounding in reality or evidence of some ancient covert linguistic
cabal?

--Brian

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