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Through the Language Glass, Why the World Looks Different in Other LanguagesI for one have been looking for fifteen years and still havenБЂ™t encountered it. When it comes to the БЂњcentral findingБЂ« about the equal complexity of all languages, linguists never bother to reveal where, when, or how the discovery was made. They are saying: БЂњJust trust us, we know.БЂ« Well, donБЂ™t trust us. We have no idea! As it happens, the dogma of equal complexity is based on no evidence whatsoever. No one has ever measured the overall complexity of even one single language, not to mention all of them. No one even has an idea how to measure the overall complexity of a language. (We will return to this problem shortly, but for the moment letБЂ™s just pretend we know roughly what the complexity of language is.) The equal complexity slogan is just a myth, an urban legend that linguists repeat because they have heard other linguists repeat it before them, having in turn heard others repeat it earlier. If, unlike our shy student, you do press linguists to reveal what their authority for this tenet is, the source that is most likely to be mentioned is a passage from a book called A Course in Modern Linguistics, which was written in 1958 by Charles Hockett, one of the fathers of American structural linguistics ...» |
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