Hendrik van Rooyen wrote:
Yikes! If I follow you, it is a bit like having a hollow dumb-bell with a hollow handle of zero length, and wanting a word for that opening between the knobs.
That's pretty much it, yes. Although "opening" doesn't quite cut it, because there can be two of them sharing an edge with no physical substance in between, yet they are two distinct entities rather than a single opening.
I do not think that you are likely to find a word in *any* language for that
Probably not in any everyday language, no. It's a fairly abstract concept. But programming has a way of taking abstract concepts and turning them into concrete ones. I had this object in my data structure, and I needed a name for it. In any case, it doesn't affect my point, which was that I was thinking about something that I didn't have a word, or even a convenient phrase for.
That is probably true, but on the other hand, it is not totally rubbish either, as it is hard to think of stuff you have never heard of, whether you have an undefined word for it or not.
I quite agree that there is *some* interaction between the language we use and the way we think, but it's a two-way process. As a species, we're quite capable of thinking about new things and inventing words to express them when the need arises. It's possible that some individuals do this more frequently than others, e.g. mathematicians and other people who are in the habit of exploring new ideas may be less influenced by the constraints of language than the general population. -- Greg -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
