tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Sun Jan 05 10:41:39 1997
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Words of Honour
- From: Jerryl Evanee <[email protected]>
- Subject: Words of Honour
- Date: Sun, 5 Jan 1997 10:42:17 -0800 (PST)
>> ... for a "culture" that is concerned with the many forms of honour,
>> one would think that more words would be found for the various shades of
>> meaning
>Nudge all you like, but I don't agree with this kind of "linguistic
>relativity" argument (you're not one of those people who still think
>Eskimos have hundreds of words for kinds of snow, are you?).
Do I sense a personal attack here? It makes perfectly good sense for a
culture to develop words for items and concepts that are highly valued or
used extensively.
>Consider the word "love" in English.
An excellent choice...
>Think of all the vastly different
>kinds of love we can invoke with this love. I love my wife, I love my dog,
>I love the way air smells on a cold autumn morning when I'm out for a walk,
>I love deepdish pizza with sausage,
Ahem: Adore, treasure, relish, etc., are all far more appropriate, just to
scratch the surface. There are those people, statistics tell us, who use a
vocabulary of about 500 words to get by in life. Though they get by, this
does not mean that more appropriate words do not exist in the language - it
means only that those people have chosen not to learn nor use them.
The average poodle can learn to recognize about 200 spoken words. I would
like to think we can do better. As a species who love to talk, and to brag
(when in Klingon mode) I stick with my original premise: a culture that
values the ideals of honour and the various actions associated with
honourable acts would be expected to have developed a variety of words to
describe those many differences.
>cheese. I assure you I don't love these things in the same way, nor would
>any native English speaker be confused.
Not confused; bored perhaps. That would be a very limited use of the language.
> The subtlety is understood at the cultural level.
Subtletly? Sounds pretty basic to me. I am looking forward to watching the
development of this language. It is in its infant stages, I think.
- Jerryl E.
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