Robin Becker <ro...@reportlab.com> writes: > well allegedly, "the medium is the message" so we also need to take > account of language in addition to the meaning of communications. I > don't believe all languages are equivalent in the meanings that they > can encode or convey. Our mathematics is heavily biassed towards > continuous differential systems and as a result we end up with many > physical theories that have smooth equilibrium descriptions, we may > literally be unable to get at other theories of the physical world > because our languages fall short.
This is the old Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which fell out of favour among linguists half a century ago already. 1) Language does not constrain human thought, and 2) any two human languages are both capable of expressing the same things, though one may already have a convenient lexeme for the topic at hand while the other uses circumlocution. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list