← Back to context

Comment by idiotsecant

3 days ago

The idea that all non-western practices, language included, have a deep and amazing and metaphysical quality that westerners simply couldn't understand is so tiresome. No language is more expressive than another, some are more expressive for particular very specific things, like Inuit languages might be much better at describing the varieties of snow, but no language has a monopoly on describing dualism of ideas. It's just as silly to be overly dismissive of the language you're familiar with as it is to be overly dismissive of others.

13 comments

idiotsecant

Reply
rramadass  3 days ago

> The idea that all non-western practices, language included, have a deep and amazing and metaphysical quality that westerners simply couldn't understand is so tiresome.

The author did not say this; this is your unnecessarily negative take. However the author is comparing Chinese with English where this is somewhat true and well studied; eg. A Comparison of Chinese and English Language Processing - https://archive.org/details/wordandtheworldindiascontributio...

  • idiotsecant  2 days ago

    It is pretty unanimously agreed by linguists that all language is equally expressive, which makes sense considering they were all made by humans to do the same thing.

    • rramadass  2 days ago

      No; I had already refuted this in my earlier comment.

      Language is a product of Geography and Culture to express a "Philosophical Worldview". Mere study of its Phonology, Morphology, Syntax and Grammar are not enough. What is important is whether a given language has specialized technical vocabulary to express specific concepts/ideas i.e. the "complexity of semantics" involved. These are usually context/culture dependent.

      As an example, compare the language of the Xhosa people living in equatorial Africa with that of the Chukchi people living in the Arctic Circle. It should be obvious that they each have concepts expressed via language unique to their Geography/Culture and which are unknown to the other.

      As another example, consider the Sanskrit word Karma (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karma). It is impossible to understand this word in all its connotations (it actually is a stand-in for a whole lot of concepts) without having an idea of Reincarnation which is specific to Hinduism/Buddhism philosophical worldviews.

      3 replies →