Hendrik van Rooyen wrote:
there would be no way for a language to change and grow, if it were literally true that you cannot think of something that you have no word for.
From my own experience, I know that it's possible for me to think about things that I don't have a word for. An example occured once when I was developing a 3D game engine, and I was trying to think of a name for the thing that exists where two convex polyhedra share a face, except that the face is missing (it's hard to explain even using multiple words). I couldn't think of any word that fully expressed the precise concept I had in mind. Yet I was clearly capable of thinking about it, otherwise I wouldn't have noticed that I was missing a word! So in my humble opinion, the strong form of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is bunk. :-) -- Greg -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
