🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1775@tdat.teradata.COM> swf@tools3teradata.com (Stan Friesen) writes:
>Now you are getting into some very odd prejudices about what 'primitive' people
>were like!  As Rich has said - pronouns seem to be *fundamental* to language!
>[I agree with him here - deixis is a core process - even your example includes
>it - 'this' is a deictic element in "this man"].

In his dissertation (which is soon to be published by John Benjamins),
Revere Perkins correlates "cultural sophistication" with certain
grammatical features found in languages.  He found that if anything
more primitive languages tend to have more elaborate pronominal
systems.  Primitive languages have a different set of problems to
solve than more culturally advanced languages and therefore tend to
have different characteristics, but there is no reason to believe that
primitive languages should be in any way simpler than, for example,
English.  (Of course, I use the terms "primitve" and "advanced" here
in a technical sense as defined by Perkins.  I mean to make any value
judgements about languages or societies).

>|> ... And what if the abstract concept of 'tree' came
>|> at a much later time?
>
>Get real!  The only people that would lack a general word for 'tree' would be
>those living where there *are* no trees! In fact so-called 'primitive' peoples
>often have a *better* vocabulary for describing living things than 'modern'
>languages.

Actually, there is nothing universal about the category `tree'.  We
impose our own organizational system onto the world, and there is no
reason why other languages might not organize things another way.
What I would be surprised to find was a language which had no
superordinate categories but instead view each kind of plant as a
complete unique sort of thing.

>-- 
>sarima@teradata.com			(formerly tdatirv!sarima)
>  or
>Stanley.Friesen@ElSegundoCA.ncr.com

Rob Malouf
malouf@csli.stanford.edu