An assessment of the Unicode standard

[Robin Becker]

rurpy at yahoo.com wrote:
> 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

very nice link, thanks.
-- 
Robin Becker