fuchs,
Would you care to substantiate YOUR claim with one example? Which native American language has a past pluperfect tense? A conditional tense? Be careful. Since white men wrote it all down, Indian languages can be standardized and brought into comparison. They do not reflect the spoken but unwritten languages of the past.
You misunderstand me. I do not claim that any language has the same grammatical contructs, or even equivalant constructs.
I do claim however, that any concept could be expressed in any language. This claim is not mine, but almost verbatim lifted from a book written by a linguist, who I asssume to be much more qualified to make such statements than you and me.
Lacking certain grammatical constructs will likely makes some things more difficult to express, and some nuances will get lost in translation, obviously.
But this is a problem of any translation, and has likely more to do with the linguistical distance between two languages than any differences in complexity/primitivness.
For the illustration of the concept that a grammatical construct can be replaced when translating into a language that do not have it, take the
evidentialYou might not be familar with it, and I wasn't either before looking into books written by linguists and anthropologists.
From the book I recommended yesterday:
In that language, you have no means of making a factual statement without using the evidential, it's some integral part of the language.
To turn the tables on you, does the fact that no European language has the evidential mean that we are unable to discern the difference between hearsay, first hand accounts and evidence regarding a specific statement, or are not able to convey the difference between those different levels of "truthfulness"?
Did they? You made that claim repeatedly, as well as the claim that East and West Germans had trouble understanding each other after 5 decades of seperation.
And as far as I have seen, all you have anchored this assumption on are some second or third hand statements, certainly not by someone who could be assumed to know what he talks about, like some historian/anthropologist/linguist specializing in the Cheyenne. Show me something to that effect written by say, Grinnell, Powell, or Moore, and I will readily concede the point.
I do however are quite certain that I didn't had problems in making conversation with the inhabitants of the GDR after the wall came down, the language differences between neighbouring East- and West-German regions were minimal.
Don't you think that there is a tiny bit of difference between a language using clicks, interjections and what might be grunts in other languagess as part of the vocabulary, and one that
primaryly consists of grunts and sentence fragments, i.e. Hollywood style Savage-/Tarzan-speak?
What makes you assume a language using clicks has to be primitive? Again, reference some linguists that have analysed such languages and come to the conclusion that those are "primitive" and I will happily concede the point.
Now lets's assume that a language were indeed "primitive" by your standards, does that mean automatically that any translaton rendering it into something less "primitive" makes the translation automatically invalid?
Again I refer to someone more qualified, Guy Deutscher:
Note that the "Caveman-speak" version is way more "primitive" than any living or historical language, with a linguisstical distance much closer to the dawn of human speech than the dawn of civilization.
The ealiest records of language accordingly look more like:
Would you think the modernized versions are so far removed from the "primitive" versions that we can only reject the "translations" entirely?
Would you dismiss a modernized version of the Illiad, because there are grammatical constructs in there that didn't exist in the original?
Note that I do not dispute that translations from Cheyenne or Lakota to English were problematic and difficult, only that this has anything to do with a "primitivess" or "sophistication" of a language.
And I completely agree that it would be foolish to put too much weight in every element and nuances of such a translation.
But how difficult would it be to translate something like "I woke up, I went to my parents willow lodge and had breakfast, and after that I went swimming"?
Is it? Certainly!
But many, many words in German have no "static meaning" either, yet I seem to be perfectly capable of having a discussion here with you.
And it is no problem whatsoever to construct compound words in German that encapsulate the meaning of a complete sentence, our language is rather infamous for it.
This is the case for many, many other languages, yet there seem to be no fundamental obstacles in translating them into languages that doesn't use such compounds.
If I remember correctly the etymology of "wolf" in Lakota went like:
Wolf = "Big Coyote"
Coyote = "Wilderness Dog" (wilderness is a bit of a misnomer)
Wilderness = "Everything outside the camp"
Resulting in something like a ten-syllable word describing a clearly defined thing "wolf", yet encapsulating a lot more in this one word.
But you wouldn't need the details of the etymological baggage to describe a wolf.
Again, some actual linguist
lakxotaiyapi.freecyberzone.com/sk1.htm#41Everything else being optionals doesn't necessarily mean every sentence would consist of only one word, on that site it looks like anything more than the most simple expressions indeed require a more complex sentence structure.