Lambda the Ultimate

The Piraha tribe was discussed here before.

Ah sorry about that. I have obviously missed it both here and on newscientist

No problem. It's better to post something that was already mentioned than the other way around. I just wanted to alert you and others to the previous discussion.

Ooops. I meant the third link.

True, I presented a different view. However, keep in mind that the two views aren't as incompatible as you might assume. The experiments that failed to show cognitive differences were designed to support a "nativist" view of cognition, which may be the reason why they failed.

Example: Many experiments dealt with color cognition (identifying and remembering colors) whereas current discussions spend alot of time on pragmatics of language use, e.g., deixis

Although I think you have a point about the Greeks as thinkers, I can't help but think that English as a language is capable of borrowing words from the Greeks: logos, agape, etc... Many of our words are stemmed from ancient greek and roman words - e.g. philosophy (philos=love and sophia=wisdom). Indeed, it is the ability to borrow words freely from other languages that gives english some of its innate expressiveness.

It is true that some of these words that are borrowed have the problem that they get a subtle and not-so-subtle shift in meaning, such that what it means to be a philosopher in modern days is not the same thing as it was in Plato's time. But then, this is also true of the modern day Greek language versus ancient Greece.

[Edit Note: I guess what I meant to say is that what you associate with the power of the Greek language probably has more to do with the collective experience (and wisdom) of the Greek culture through time. Words are just a collection of symbols and their meaning can only be given in terms of other symbols. So, to know why the Greek language holds power is not to define the words in terms of other words, but rather the relation of those words with Greek history.]

Certainly English borrowes words but this is a complex inter language process made possible by multilingual scholars who take great pains to explain the subtile differences of terms. But while this helps to explain a lot it is still difficlut to translate "logos" into english and this infulences the way English speakers think about the world without a scholarly gloss explaining the difference between "logos" and "word" for instance. I am surely no expert but perhaps there is a point here. Most of us know more than one computer language, and probably know a little about other spoken languages. When we think about language we rarely think in terms of just one language. Computer languages tend to gather concepts from other languages just as english gathers terms from Greek. Perhaps this explains the ambivalent attitude of most programmers toward computer language.

But thinking that the language doesn't matter is a dangerous attitude. Computer languages have core differences that make the job easier or a lot harder. Choosing a computer language is a bit like choosing a coordinate system in physics. The wrong choice can make an easy problem very difficult.

I think it would be helpful for the current discussion to mention Quine's indeterminacy of translation thesis.

Also, it is useful not to consider vocabulary to be an easy concept, with languages simply absorbing new words - complete with their exact meaning - from other languages. The issues this raises fall under semantic holism, another Quine contribution.

Notice that recent work on S-W doesn't concentrate on vocabulary, but rather on pragmatics.

Well, my comments above can simply be taken as examples of the three fold conundrum you refer to. I am sure that there are English terms and phrases that don't translate into ancient Greek! But isn't this the point of S-W? The language influences the way native speakers without multilingual scholarship think about the world. But they are thinking about the same world so there must be some form of overlap or morphism between languages. Perhaps a little behavioral theory and coalgebra would help?