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Article 1578 of comp.ai.philosophy:
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>From: erwin@trwacs.UUCP (Harry Erwin)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: Sapir-Whorf
Message-ID: <440@trwacs.UUCP>
Date: 25 Nov 91 13:45:18 GMT
References: <1991Nov4.202823.1328@news.larc.nasa.gov> <431@trwacs.UUCP> <91309.175700MORIARTY@NDSUVM1.BITNET> <1991Nov6.163441.3770@psych.toronto.edu> <5685@skye.ed.ac.uk>
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The point is not that the lack of a grammatical form equates to an
inability to conceive of an idea, but rather that the lack of the
grammatical form makes it more difficult to learn the associated
paradigms. Russian has a large number of words in the semantic field
associated with war and battle, making local associations and distinctions
that would not occur to a monolingual English-speaker without experience
in combat. It's easier to discourse about war and battle in Russian--the
semantic network is preexisting. The lack of tense in PIE doesn't mean
that PIE speakers didn't have an awareness of causality--only that it was
of reduced importance to them, and it wouldn't occur to them to think
about cause and effect as frequently.

Cheers,
-- 
Harry Erwin
Internet: erwin@trwacs.fp.trw.com


