language

>I have to say I'm totally agreeing with Daniel Wolf on this one, but
>let's flesh this out. Do you mean language imposes constraints on
>perceptual cognition, or on other types of cognition?

Either way, sounds like Sapir-Whorf to me. I just don't buy it. I will
allow that one language may excercise something more than another. I've
heard that Arabic is supposed to be good for math. I once met a guy
claimed Russian was good for chess. I disagreed, but he always beat me at
chess. I met another guy claimed English was the first of a new generation
of languages that was "competitive" -- that would destroy or absorb other
languages. I disagreed, but only in English.

I agree with Daniel that the stuff of real interest happens inside a given
language. On the level of the individual user (as Daniel says), on the
level of the dialect, and even with weird stuff like jive. The kind of
fine-tuning done by a good prose stylist (i.e. Bellow). In the fall of
1995, a group of friends and I managed to communicate almost entirely with
a small set (less than 50) of phrases, most of them taken from the movie
Braveheart. Counting available nouns means nothing.

Carl