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To: betty boop
I thought that our dear friend Noam Chomsky proved that all languages are commensurate, and that syntax differences can be disregarded.
394 posted on 06/19/2003 8:50:36 PM PDT by js1138
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To: js1138
I thought that our dear friend Noam Chomsky proved that all languages are commensurate, and that syntax differences can be disregarded.

Yes and no. Languages don't map to our mental phase space 1:1, so the mapping of language to that phase space is incomplete. Different languages manage the lossy mapping differently, so in practice some languages are much better at mapping the phase space of our minds than others. One of the subtle powers of the English language is that it has an unusually large and complex "map" as languages go, which makes it more expressive than most other languages and also harder to learn.

Because we learn in no small part through communication, expressivity and broad mapping in language is becoming a very important factor in the language adapting to rapidly changing technologies. The rapid reduction in the number of languages for scientific and technical publications over the last 20 years is in large part because the expressive capability of some of the published languages have not been able to keep pace with the requirements of rapidly advancing technological fields, making it extremely difficult to continue to write coherent publications in those languages.

English has been the de facto language of science and engineering for many years now, but it is becoming the ONLY language very quickly. What is interesting is that most of the publishing companies in that industry are NOT English speaking companies, but they nonetheless recognize the reality of the situation. Not only does a large segment of the market speak English natively, but most of the rest learned it as a second language as a requirement of the field because their native languages were inadequate and limited access to knowledge.

That said, there is no intrinsic reason that something expressible in one language cannot be added to the map of another. What languages are mapping to is largely the same.

423 posted on 06/20/2003 9:38:20 AM PDT by tortoise (Would you like to buy some rubber nipples?)
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