Have an idea I want to express.
Problem: English words aren't nearly powerful enough. To conjure up enough words to describe the thing, I have to discard some of the thing. My memory isn't big enough to contain both the idea and its description.
I suspect this happens a lot more to folk with more poverty of cognitive resources. Instead of a few ideas here and there that I almost can't explain, it's lots of pretty normal ideas, actually. It's not that they don't get it or can't do it, but they can't do it and also talk about it. The proverbial walk and chew bubble gum at the same time.
The solution is to have more powerful words, but, naturally, more powerful words are themselves cognitively expensive and frequently get dropped instead of being passed on, which is why they don't still exist.
The power of your language is a major limiter on the upper reaches of your culture and technology. The culture is defined by its richest idea, which is the richest idea that can be described in words by high-memory individuals. Highest technology requires blueprints, which must be made of elemental modules that are no more complicated than one smart engineer can teach another smart engineer.
Which is to say, once again, that Democracy is a bad idea. Anti-elitism makes you weak and sick. After it's been been built, even peasants can use high technology, but they can't use it if they've been corrupting the language and it can no longer be built.
3 comments:
The barber paradox can be trivially solved by a language that has two different words for shaving: shave-self and shave-other.
The barber paradox is a proof that recursion is grammatically invalid. Or perhaps more precisely that infinite series are not guaranteed to converge. I suspect but cannot prove that all natural-language infinite series diverge. If they don't, it's not infinite.
But in my version - the barber othershaves all those who do not selfshave. Since he cannot othershave himnself, he selfshaves himself - has no recursion.
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