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Seems like that language would be incompatible with a modern society and would only really work for a primitive one. As soon as you can have multiple things th

by umvi 5y ago

Seems like that language would be incompatible with a modern society and would only really work for a primitive one. As soon as you can have multiple things that flash or multiple modes of transportation your language would become too ambiguous. That's not to say the native Americans that speak it couldn't evolve the language to accommodate modern society, I'm sure they could.

katmannthree 5y ago
Although it's not quite the same, _pro_noun dropping[0] is fairly common in some languages and even happens in English under some circumstances (generally in either very informal or highly technical communications). In contexts where inference is easy there's a certain logic to dropping nonessential fillers. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-drop_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-drop_language
masklinn 5y ago
> Seems like that language would be incompatible with a modern society and would only really work for a primitive one. I don’t know, it sounds like the exact opposite to me: I rarely care about the distance itself, and disambiguating would be as simple as pairing travel time and travel mode. That is already a pretty normal thing to do e.g. “the grocery store is 5mn away”, possibly with the addendum that it’s on foot / by car / by bike if’s not obvious from context.
- fpig 5y ago
  > I don’t know, it sounds like the exact opposite to me That's a ridiculous statement. When you tell someone the grocery store is 5 mn away, you're expressing time, not distance, because you think they're interested in the time, not distance. Yet you don't convert meters to minutes when you're telling someone how high they should build a wall. And you don't say "drill a hole 1/2000000 minutes by car wide". That's the point of having a well-organized system of units, you can clearly express whatever you need to, always using the same system, and anyone who knows the system will understand it regardless of context. Not being able to express distance as a separate concept is clearly inferior, since in our system we can express time, like in your example, but we can also express distance precisely when needed.
rendall 5y ago
> like that language would be incompatible with a modern society and would only really work for a primitive one As a heads-up, contemporary thought is that no culture is "primitive". Primitive implies lesser
- umvi 5y ago
  Ok well whatever the opposite of "modern" is then. A language spoken only by Amazon tribes is not going to contain vocabulary for things related to technological advancement like computers

by umvi 5y ago

katmannthree 5y ago

Although it's not quite the same, _pro_noun dropping[0] is fairly common in some languages and even happens in English under some circumstances (generally in either very informal or highly technical communications). In contexts where inference is easy there's a certain logic to dropping nonessential fillers. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-drop_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pro-drop_language

masklinn 5y ago

> Seems like that language would be incompatible with a modern society and would only really work for a primitive one. I don’t know, it sounds like the exact opposite to me: I rarely care about the distance itself, and disambiguating would be as simple as pairing travel time and travel mode. That is already a pretty normal thing to do e.g. “the grocery store is 5mn away”, possibly with the addendum that it’s on foot / by car / by bike if’s not obvious from context.

fpig 5y ago
> I don’t know, it sounds like the exact opposite to me That's a ridiculous statement. When you tell someone the grocery store is 5 mn away, you're expressing time, not distance, because you think they're interested in the time, not distance. Yet you don't convert meters to minutes when you're telling someone how high they should build a wall. And you don't say "drill a hole 1/2000000 minutes by car wide". That's the point of having a well-organized system of units, you can clearly express whatever you need to, always using the same system, and anyone who knows the system will understand it regardless of context. Not being able to express distance as a separate concept is clearly inferior, since in our system we can express time, like in your example, but we can also express distance precisely when needed.

rendall 5y ago

> like that language would be incompatible with a modern society and would only really work for a primitive one As a heads-up, contemporary thought is that no culture is "primitive". Primitive implies lesser

umvi 5y ago
Ok well whatever the opposite of "modern" is then. A language spoken only by Amazon tribes is not going to contain vocabulary for things related to technological advancement like computers