An assessment of the Unicode standard

[rurpy at yahoo.com]

On Sep 14, 6:06 am, Christopher Culver
<crcul... at christopherculver.com> wrote:
> Robin Becker <ro... 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.

Fashion changes in science as well as clothes. :-)  I wouldn't count
Sapir-Whorf out yet...
http://edge.org/3rd_culture/boroditsky09/boroditsky09_index.html