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From: gal2@kimbark.uchicago.edu (Jacob Galley)
Subject: Re: In defense of Whorf
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Date: Tue, 21 Mar 1995 22:51:12 GMT
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jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:
>
>In article <3jkd1c$d21@unogate.unocal.com>
>stgprao@sugarland.unocal.COM (Richard Ottolini) writes:
>>
>>Another folklore is that Chinese are timeless because their verbs
>>don't have tenses.  First, there are some minor tenses.  Second,
>>through other mechanisms it no more ambiguous than English when
>>an action has occured and its state of completion is.
>
>I haven't heard that one.  It sounds like what's sometimes said
>of Hopi.  The one I heard of Chinese is that the Chinese have trouble
>with counterfactuals.  It's mentioned in Pinker's book somewhere.

Of course this is just more hearsay---

I remember reading somewhere about how hard it was to translate Hegel
into Chinese, simply because Hegel's logical mistakes become blatantly
obvious in the translation!

Jake.

-- 
Whoever achieves understanding of the baboon will do more for metaphysics 
than Locke did, which is to say he will do more for philosophy in general,
including the problem of knowlege.
							<-- Charles Darwin
