"the usual"?
Most languages don't use grammatical devices to separate time, but
rather use separate words if it's relevant and exclude it if it's not.
Hopi does have a distinction between past and present, as do all
languages, it's just not nessecarily inherently grammatical.
Mark
On Fri, 11 Mar 2005 12:33:47 -0800, Stan Shebs <shebs(a)apple.com> wrote:
Delirium wrote:
Delirium wrote:
You seem to be arguing a cultural relativist
position, which I think
frankly is nonsense, even if it sometimes is popular in "critical
theory" academic circles.
To expand on this, I think that every language's viewpoint should
bridge *all* cultures, to the extent possible, not just all cultures
that speak that language.
I agree, but that doesn't mean cultural influence doesn't infiltrate
the articles in interesting ways. I've been reading Wolfram's History
of the Goths lately, and he uses Ulfila's Gothic version of the Bible
to acquire cultural insights, for instance by comparing words that
can be translated directly, suggesting concepts integral to the
culture, vs loan-words for "foreign" things, like palm trees.
The production of an encyclopedia is more of an un-self-conscious
effort of using the language in a normal way. I've heard that the
Hopi language doesn't have the usual concept of past and present;
if so, Hopi-language articles on physics could be much more
revealing than the traditional interviewing by academic linguists.
We can only get this kind of benefit from the participation of
multiple native speakers, so I think it's reasonable to set that
as a criterion for creation.
Stan
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