Newsgroups: sci.lang
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!oitnews.harvard.edu!canopus.hbs.edu!news-in.tiac.net!uunet!in2.uu.net!news.interactive.net!news
From: John Cowan <cowan@ccil.org>
Subject: Re: Language, Thought, and the Deaf, was Re: Sound and Meaning
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
X-Nntp-Posting-User: cowanj
Sender: news@news.interactive.net (USENET News)
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
Organization: Lojban Peripheral
Message-ID: <32922928.47C6@ccil.org>
References: <53a384$f6f@scream.auckland.ac.nz> <5508mn$89e@lastactionhero.rs.itd.umich.edu> <3274BB2F.639D@pratique.fr> <552ldn$b7c@news.sas.ab.ca> <55aae7$j6q@lastactionhero.rs.itd.umich.edu> <55sutc$39h@pelican.unf.edu> <seagoat.687.01E3DB5D@primenet.co <seagoat.698.01F3ADDE@primenet.com> <328F06C9.D25@scruznet.com> <328F39D7.475D@pratique.fr> <3291D1E4.722F@vtt.fi>
X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.0 (WinNT; I)
Mime-Version: 1.0
X-Trace: 848439604/17120
X-Nntp-Posting-Host: onyx.interactive.net
Date: Tue, 19 Nov 1996 21:39:52 GMT
Lines: 23

Mikko Levanto wrote:

>  [I]t is
> sometimes said that when an English-speaker designs a radio
> set, there will be a selector with positions "off", "FM", "SW",
> "MW", and "LW" (because in English the word "nothing" takes
> the same position in a sentence as a noun), whereas a Finnish-
> speaker would put an "on"/"off"-switch and a selector with
> positions "FM", "SW", "MW", and "LW", but not "off" (because
> no word of Finnish means "nothing"). But I don't know any
> real evidence that woud show one way or another.

Well, here's one data point.  I am an English-speaker living
in the United States, and I have *never* seen a radio that combines
the On/Off and AM/FM (consumer products in the U.S. refer to the
medium-wave band as simply "AM" here) switches
into a single switch.  Next theory?

How do you say "Nobody can jump 200 meters" in Finnish?

-- 
John Cowan						cowan@ccil.org
			e'osai ko sarji la lojban
