An assessment of the Unicode standard

[Christopher Culver]

Robin Becker <robin at 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.